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U.S. Greenhouse Emissions Fell in 2017 as Coal Plants Shut

posted by chromas on Thursday October 18 2018, @04:16PM   
from the what-do-I-do-with-all-these-burner-inserters? dept.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

U.S. greenhouse emissions fell in 2017 as coal plants shut

Greenhouse gases emissions from the largest U.S. industrial plants fell 2.7 percent in 2017, the Trump administration said, as coal plants shut and as that industry competes with cheap natural gas and solar and wind power that emit less pollution.

The drop was steeper than in 2016 when emissions fell 2 percent, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said.

EPA acting administrator Andrew Wheeler said the data proves that federal regulations are not necessary to drive carbon dioxide reductions.

[...] While Wheeler gave the administration credit for the reductions, which mainly came from the power sector, the numbers also underscore that the administration has not been able to stop the rapid pace of coal plant shutdowns.

[...] Natural gas releases far less carbon dioxide when burned than coal and a domestic abundance of gas has driven a wave of closures of coal plants. In 2017 utilities shut or converted from coal-to-gas nearly 9,000 megawatts (MW) of coal plants.

[...] The trend of U.S. coal plant shutdowns is expected to pick up this year, with power companies expecting to shut 14,000 MW of coal plants in calendar year 2018.

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Original Submission

• Re:1/3 of US Emissions are from coal (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 18 2018, @08:00PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 18 2018, @08:00PM (#750625)

  there are zero good solutions for disposing of the waste.

  That is not true [wikipedia.org]:

  The high fuel-efficiency of breeder reactors could greatly reduce concerns about fuel supply or energy used in mining. Adherents claim that with seawater uranium extraction, there would be enough fuel for breeder reactors to satisfy our energy needs for 5 billion years at 1983's total energy consumption rate, thus making nuclear energy effectively a renewable energy

  Since breeder reactors on a closed fuel cycle would use nearly all of the actinides fed into them as fuel, their fuel requirements would be reduced by a factor of about 100. The volume of waste they generate would be reduced by a factor of about 100 as well [..] In addition, the waste from a breeder reactor has a different decay behavior, because it is made up of different materials. Breeder reactor waste is mostly fission products [..] no fission products have a half-life longer than 91 years and shorter than two hundred thousand years

  Parent