NIMBY

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Are You a NIMBY?


First of all, NIMBY is the acronym for “not in my back yard.”  It generally refers to people who like the idea of something so long as it does not exist in their back yard, or in close proximity to it.

Recently, in a Cape Cod community, a group of people managed to get a wind turbine shut down because they claimed it made too much noise.  I am trying to imagine that but it escapes me how something that is not burning fossil fuel makes much noise at all.   But I’ll come back to this issue.

A number of years ago the Massachusetts Port Authority pushed the idea of getting a commercial airline to serve out of Hanscom Field, the civil portion of Hanscom Air Force Base.  There was an almost immediate uproar from the good citizens of Bedford, Lincoln, and Concord, all of whom declared unequivocally that such a move would create an unnecessary noisy nuisance.  They claimed the increased air traffic would be responsible.  MassPort was making the move in an attempt to alleviate Boston’s Logan Airport of some of its congestion.  No one with any knowledge of air travel expected anything more than small commuter aircraft to serve Hanscom Field.  The true noise makers were, and are, the corporate jets that frequent the airport.  To date, not a single commercial jet as availed itself of Hanscom.  Commercial propeller aircraft have served.  To quote the bard, “Much ado about nothing.”

More recently, the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition, along with other groups, has been pushing to convert an abandoned railbed into a bicycle trail under the auspices of the RailTrail Act.  The idea is to have a bike path extending from Waltham MA to Chicopee MA.  One community, Weston, has stood in the way of this happening.  They claim it would bring an undesirable element into their fair town.  For those of you not familiar with Weston MA, it is a Boston bedroom community of considerable wealth.  It is somewhere between difficult and impossible to find a house selling for under $500,000 there.  The people of Weston fear that a bicycle path will increase the crime rate in their town.  And there it is, NIMBY!  The people of Lexington MA, another upscale Boston bedroom community, did not have the same concerns when the railtrail was developed in their fair town.  Today it brings in hundreds of bicyclists, pedestrians, and tourists into the town.  Even more, it provides a resource for the townspeople who want to go out for a stroll on the tree-lined and beautiful path.  But somehow this fact is lost on the NIMBYs of Weston.

Most recently, a group proposed that a rather substantial wind farm be built-in the waters off the coast of Massachusetts adjacent to Cape Cod.  Well don’t you know, out came the NIMBYs claiming first that it was unsightly.  And then when that got laughed at they claimed it would irreparably harm the fishing grounds on which it would be built.  That too was proven false but they persist.  Now they claim that it will generate electricity that is too expensive.  Of course these are the same sort of arguments used when the automobile was first introduced.  Many said it would never amount to more than a novelty.  It was expensive, at first, but then a guy named Ford figured out how to drastically reduce the cost of production.  I expect the same is going to happen with wind generated power.

Another group of people howled when the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority decided to reopen a long abandoned rail line to help alleviate traffic congestion on the Massachusetts south shore.  Once again out came the NIMBYs.  One small group claimed that some colonial structures would be ruined by the passing of trains.  Of course they failed to realize that heavy freight trains had once toiled over the same location without incident.  Others were trying to protect illegal structures they had built on the old railroad right-of-way.  To its credit, the MBTA pushed the line through and now nary a complaint can be heard.  The line is doing what it was intended.

Americans are spoiled.  They want things like cheap power which translates to oil forever.  Of course oil will run out by the end of the century.  That is a given.  In the mean time Americans have to accept that things like wind farms are going to have to go up in their back yards if they really want to continue to enjoy cheap electricity.  The price of wind generated electricity will go down and the price of fossil fuel generated electricity will go up, and rather quickly in the not too distant future.  The same is true of other emerging technologies.  They will take time, and space, to develop.  If Americans want to continue to enjoy the fruits of our society there is a price to pay.

 

 

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America: Home of the Free, Land of the NIMBY


America has the ability to meet 100% of its power needs without using a drop of oil or single chunk of coal.  But for reasons that defy common sense, and just a bit of intelligence, Americans seem horribly averse to the idea of building nuclear power plants.   Worse, some Americans are trying to close down the ones we have!

At some time in the future I feel certain science will come up with a cheap way to convert sunlight into electric power.  But for the forseeable future, that is not going to happen.  The technology we have right now simply does not allow for such a conversion to a level that will make a dent in our power demands.  The closest we come is a giant photo-voltaic site in New Mexico that is attempting to meet some west coast demands, but it falls far short of supplying enough power to one city let alone a region.  Even more, of course, it is only effective during daylight hours.

America has done a good job creating hydro-electric power but we are about maxed out in that area.  Wind farms a popping up but again, the limiting factor is the number of wind turbines needed and how much power they can actually supply.  Sadly, that too is a very small number.

The power we can obtain from the atom is virtually limitless.  It is the most efficient and environmentally friendly power source we have today.  People somehow seem to equate the way power is generated from the atom to the atomic bomb.  They are only remotely alike, and that is only in the sense that they both using fissionable material.  But the similarity ends there.

Almost since its inception, atomic power has been the safest source of energy on earth.  Considering the many thousands of nuclear plants that exist around the globe today, there has been only one event where a nuclear meltdown created a danger to the health of local inhabitants, Chernobyl.  The incident in Japan last year was not a meltdown.  It was the result of a confluence of events that are so rare the associated risk seemed manageable.  I can assure you, future nuclear planning will take into account what happened in Japan.  In the U.S. we had Three Mile Island.  For those of you who do not remember, that was a case where there was an actual reactor meltdown.  But American safety standards were, and are, so stringent that during and immediately following that meltdown the ambient radiation in the Three Mile Island area did not change one iota.  That is, there was no measurable radiation coming from the plant itself which left only that radiation generated by the sun.  To put this in perspective, a person sun bathing next to Three Mile Island at the time of the meltdown would definitely have suffered from radiation sickness with a day long exposure.  That sickness would have come entirely from the sun, just as it does from lack of protection from a day at any beach in the world.

The other big objection to nuclear power seems to be that of what to do with the nuclear waste.  Right now all such waste is kept at the nuclear plant that produces it.  Why?  Because no one wants the trains going through their back yards that would carry such waste to the Utah mountains where it would be disposed of.  Have you ever seen the rail car specifically designed from the transportation of such material?  I have.  You could explode a rather large bomb beneath one of these cars and the integrity of the container would not  be compromised!  Why then, do people think a rail accident in their back yard would put them in danger?  Fear, which is simply a euphemism for ignorance.

The last objection to such facilities is that they have a very specific lifetime, after which the container become too brittle to allow for continued safe energy production.  That happens because the radiation emitted by all nuclear plants within their containment facilities reacts with the metals surrounding them.  This reaction slowly degrades, and of course contaminates, the containers.    But like the spent nuclear rods themselves, these materials can be safely transported to a permanent storage facility.

What people do not seem to realize is that every day millions of gallons of highly toxic material passes by their houses every day in both rail cars and trucks.  The amount of care in such transportation, while substantial, is still far less than that for nuclear materials.  And the hell of it is, people do not seem bothered much at all when accidents involving one of these materials happens.

If Americans want to enjoy the good life, as they have in the past, they are going to have to allow for things to happen In Their Back Yard and stop saying, Not In My Back Yard!