John Cronin

The Water It Takes 2: Alternative Energy

A Very Inconvenient Truth

Copyright 2009, John Cronin

Producing energy without causing negative impacts to water has been a thorny environmental issue for decades.  In the 1970s, fish killed by the cooling water intakes of power plants, and heated water from the plants' discharge pipes were icons of American environmental degradation. 

The effects of cooling water use by conventional and nuclear plants are not due to the consumption of water but the cycling of water through the plants and its heated return to the originating water body.  But the impacts of this very large water flow though a power plant's machinery can be devastating.  In a paper for the Harvard Environmental Law Review in 1992, Karl Rabago made a conservative estimate that the number of fish that die in these "once-through" cooling systems nationally is a half-trillion per year, based on government and industry data.

Recent stories on the growing controversy over the proposed use of water by alternative energy developers, reminds us that the laws of physics and thermodynamics don't take a rest just because harnessing the sun is a good idea. 

The Water It Takes . . .

 

Image: IBM Smarter Planet

A Passionate Advocate for Truth

A Conversation with Andy Revkin, NY Times Environment Reporter

From INSIDEOUT, Jan-Feb '09. Copyright 2008, John Cronin

The Hudson River Valley has yielded some of the great voices of American environmentalism.  Andy Revkin is one.  I speak of American environmentalism not as an ecological ideology, but as a school of critical thought and expression that includes writers, philosophers, artists, advocates, and policy wonks.  Andy fits all of these categories. 

Andy is the environment reporter for the New York Times and the author of the Times blog, Dot Earth, located at http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com.  He has covered climate for 20 years and is expert at presenting, in an understandable fashion, the most vexing environmental, social and economic issue in human history.  He brings a deep thinking to his subject, with influences ranging from microbiologist Rene Dubos to Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.  He is a sought after speaker and, among his many honors and distinctions, a Guggenheim Fellow.  Regular readers of his stories and blog are treated to a continuing conversation with the world’s foremost thinkers on energy, environment and climate change.