Where to store 17,000 tons of mercury?

The U.S. government is trying to find a location to store the country's excess mercury deposits, with seven states being considered. But the government is quickly finding out that very few people want the stuff.

The United States still exports surplus elemental mercury, the purest form, often to developing countries with less restrictive environmental regulations. Then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama sponsored a bill last year to bar mercury exports beginning in 2013, and President George W. Bush signed it.

The bill also requires the Department of Energy to identify a safe, long-term storage site for up to 17,000 tons of mercury, which is so dense that it would fill less than half of an Olympic-size swimming pool. That includes stockpiles held by the federal government, as well as commercial supplies.

Officials are considering sites in seven states:

• Grand Junction, Colo.: Department of Energy's Grand Junction Disposal Site;
• Richland, Wash.: Department of Energy's Hanford Site;
• Idaho Falls, Idaho: Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory;
• Kansas City, Mo.: Department of Energy's Kansas City Plant;
• Aiken, S.C.: Department of Energy's Savannah River Site;
• Hawthorne, Nev.: Hawthorne Army Depot;
• Andrews, Texas: Waste Control Specialists.

Residents are swiftly voicing opposition because mercury is such a toxic substance.

Sometimes called "quicksilver," mercury is a dense, metallic element that occurs naturally in the environment and has been used in gold mining, manufacturing chlorine and caustic soda, batteries, thermometers and other uses. Its use has been in decline in this country since it was linked to health issues, including pulmonary and neural disorders.

Colo., Idaho governors oppose
In Colorado, the Energy Department is considering a site near Grand Junction where uranium tailings are stored. Residents fear mercury could contaminate tributaries that flow into the Colorado River, a water source for millions of people in the West.

Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter came out against the plan Thursday, saying he will convey his opposition about the proposal to the Department of Energy.

Idaho Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter told a radio station that mercury storage there is "not gonna happen" and expressed dismay that he hadn't been notified Idaho National Laboratory was even being considered.

Officials in South Carolina say waste at the Savannah River site from the production of atomic weapons during World War II and the Cold War should be dealt with before more is added.

Nevada officials expressed "grave concerns" about storing the waste at the Hawthorne Army Depot, a 150,000-acre depot in a small, struggling desert town 130 miles south of Reno.

The Bannister Federal Complex near Kansas City is also being considered, but the Kansas City Council unanimously approved a resolution this month protesting the plan.

Best option in Texas?
Officials in Texas, the only site where a private, commercial landfill expressed interest in storing the waste, have taken no position on the proposal. Waste Control Specialists, based in Dallas, already stores PCBs and radioactive waste at its landfill near Andrews in West Texas.

The company has permits to receive mercury at the site, as long as they don't exceed their capacity, said Andrea Morrow, spokeswoman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

The federal government wants to work cooperatively with states to find a safe site, said Frank Marcinowski, the Energy Department's deputy assistant secretary for regulatory compliance.

A draft environmental impact statement is expected to be released for public comment in the fall.

"We are ordered to come up with a site," Marcinowski said. "We see this as an opportunity to help reduce the export and transportation of mercury."

The poison lurking in your plastic water bottle

A Potentially deadly toxin is being absorbed into bottled mineral water from their plastic containers. And the longer the water is stored, the levels of poison increase, research reveals. As the sell-by date on many bottled waters is up to two years, scientists have now called for extensive further studies.
The research by world expert Dr William Shotyk - who has vowed never to drink bottled water again - will be published in the Royal Society of Chemistry's journal next month. It is sure to revive concerns about the safety of bottled water, the world's fastest-growing drinks industry, worth £1.2billion a year.
The tests found traces of antimony, a chemical used in the making of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, used by most mineral-water sellers.
Small doses of antimony can make you feel ill and depressed. Larger quantities can cause violent vomiting and even death. The study stressed that amounts of antimony were well below official recommended levels. But it also discovered that the levels almost doubled when the bottles were stored for three months.
Professor Shotyk, of Heidelberg University in Germany, said: "I don't want to shock people but here's what I know: Antimony is being continuously released into bottled drinking water. The water in PET bottles is contaminated."
He tested ground water and 15 types of bottled mineral water in his native Canada. The ground water contained two parts per trillion (ppt) of antimony. Bottled water had an average 160 ppt of antimony when opened immediately after bottling. But ground water stored in a PET plastic bottle had 630 ppt of antimony when opened six months later.
Professor Shotyk then tried the experiment in Europe, collecting 48 brands of water in PET bottles and water from its source in the ground at a German bottling plant. The water had four ppt of antimony before being bottled, the contents of a new bottle had 360 ppt and one opened three months later had a staggering 700 ppt.
Antimony finds its way into water by 'leaching' from the plastic in the same way that water absorbs flavour from a teabag. Health authorities said even the higher levels of antimony found are way below official safety guidelines, set at around six parts per billion by international environment agencies.
Elizabeth Griswold, director of the Canadian Bottled Water Association, added: "The levels do not pose a risk to humans. They are simply trace elements."
But David Coggan, a Southampton University-based epidemiologist who works with the Medical Research Council, called for further research into the findings.
He said not enough was known about the effects of antimony and how much had to be consumed before it became dangerous. Last year naphthalene, which can cause liver damage in high doses, was found in two bottles of Volvic mineral water. Bacteria which could leach into bottled water has been cited as a possible reason for rising levels of food poisoning.

Hydroelectric Power

Taking the broadest view, the United States Department of Energy describes the derivation of power from water this way: "Water constantly moves through a vast global cycle, evaporating from lakes and oceans, forming clouds, precipitating as rain or snow, then flowing back down to the ocean. The energy of this water cycle, which is driven by the sun, can be tapped to produce electricity or for mechanical tasks like grinding grain."
In more conventional terms -- or at least those that relate to plugging in your toaster -- the process involves driving water, using a variety of methods, through turbines in order to generate electricity.
This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, from diversion to pumped storage. But by far the most common method for achieving hydropower is through building an impoundment facility, or dam, where water is backed up into a reservoir and then released through turbines as needed to meet energy demands

Natural Gas

Natural gas, the first-cousin to crude oil, is a combustible, gaseous fossil fuel often found in underground reservoirs and comprised of methane and other hydrocarbon compounds. It rarely attracts as much interest or headlines as petroleum, but in the last year or so, many have predicted that a new natural gas era may be dawning.
Natural gas is primarily a source for electrical generation that has become increasingly popular because it burns cleaner than oil and coal and produces less greenhouse gases. Many environmentalists and energy analysts view natural gas as a natural bridge fuel between the dominant fossil fuels of today and the renewable fuels of tomorrow. Once merely a regionally based fuel, frequently flared off in oil fields because it was of little use, natural gas is now fast becoming a major international commodity.
Once "stranded" gas is now being piped and shipped around the world. When recent droughts hit Spain, natural gas came to the rescue as a backup source of electricity. When a nuclear plant was closed in Japan, the Japanese also turned to natural gas. Meanwhile natural gas has become a geopolitical weapon for Russia, which flexes its muscles by turning on and then off a pipeline to Ukraine and Western Europe.

Dark Days for Green Energy

Wind and solar power have been growing at a blistering pace in recent years, and that growth seemed likely to accelerate under the green-minded Obama administration. But because of the credit crisis and the broader economic downturn, the opposite is happening: installation of wind and solar power is plummeting.Factories building parts for these industries have announced a wave of layoffs in recent weeks, and trade groups are projecting 30 to 50 percent declines this year in installation of new equipment, barring more help from the government.
Prices for turbines and solar panels, which soared when the boom began a few years ago, are falling. Communities that were patting themselves on the back just last year for attracting a wind or solar plant are now coping with cutbacks.
“I thought if there was any industry that was bulletproof, it was that industry,” said Rich Mattern, the mayor of West Fargo, N.D., where DMI Industries of Fargo operates a plant that makes towers for wind turbines. Though the flat Dakotas are among the best places in the world for wind farms, DMI recently announced a cut of about 20 percent of its work force because of falling sales.
Much of the problem stems from the credit crisis that has left Wall Street banks reeling. Once, as many as 18 big banks and financial institutions were willing to help finance installation of wind turbines and solar arrays, taking advantage of generous federal tax incentives. But with the banks in so much trouble, that number has dropped to four, according to Keith Martin, a tax and project finance specialist with the law firm Chadbourne & Parke.
Wind and solar developers have been left starved for capital. “It’s absolutely frozen,” said Craig Mataczynski, president of Renewable Energy Systems Americas, a wind developer. He projected his company would build just under half as much this year as it did last year.
The two industries are hopeful that President Obama’s economic stimulus package will help. But it will take time, and in the interim they are making plans for a dry spell.
Solar energy companies like OptiSolar, Ausra, Heliovolt and SunPower, once darlings of investors, have all had to lay off workers. So have a handful of companies that make wind turbine blades or towers in the Midwest, including Clipper Windpower, LM Glasfiber and DMI.
Some big wind developers, like NextEra Energy Resources and even the Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens, a promoter of wind power, have cut back or delayed their wind farm plans.
Renewable energy sources like biomass, which involves making electricity from wood chips, and geothermal, which harnesses underground heat for power, have also been slowed by the financial crisis, but the effects have been more pronounced on once fast-growing wind and solar.
Because of their need for space to accommodate giant wind turbines, wind farms are especially reliant on bank financing for as much as 50 percent of a project’s costs. For example, JPMorgan Chase, which analysts say is the most active bank remaining in the renewable energy sector, has invested in 54 wind farms and one solar plant since 2003, according to John Eber, the firm’s managing director for energy investments.
In the solar industry, the ripple effects of the crisis extend all the way to the panels that homeowners put on their roofs. The price of solar panels has fallen by 25 percent in six months, according to Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, who said he expected a further drop of 10 percent by midsummer.
(For homeowners, however, the savings will not be as substantial, partly because panels account for only about 60 percent of total installation costs.)
After years when installers had to badger manufacturers to ensure they would receive enough panels, the situation has reversed. Bill Stewart, president of SolarCraft, a California installer, said that manufacturers were now calling to say, “Hey, do you need any product this month? Can I sell you a bit more?”
The turnaround reflects reduced demand for solar panels, and also an increase in supply of panels and of polysilicon, a crucial material in many panels.
On the wind side, turbines that once had to be ordered far in advance are suddenly becoming available.
“At least one vendor has said that they have equipment for delivery in 2009, where nine months ago they wouldn’t have been able to take new orders until 2011,” Mr. Mataczynski of Renewable Energy wrote in an e-mail message. As he has scaled back his company’s plans, he has been forced to cancel some orders for wind turbines, forfeiting the deposit.
Banks have invested in renewable energy, lured by the tax credits. But with banks tightly controlling their money and profits, the main task for the companies is to find new sources of investment capital.
Wind and solar companies have urged Congress to adopt measures that could help revive the market. But even if a favorable stimulus bill passes, nobody is predicting a swift recovery.
“Nothing Congress does in the stimulus bill can put the market back where it was in 2007 and 2008, before it was broken,” said Mr. Martin, the tax lawyer with Chadbourne & Parke. “But it can help at the margins.”
The solar and wind tax credits are structured slightly differently, but the House version of the stimulus bill would help both industries by providing more immediate tax incentives, alleviating some of their dependency on banks.
Both House and Senate would also extend an important tax credit for wind energy, called the production tax credit, for three years; previously the industry had complained of boom-and-bust cycles with the credit having to be renewed nearly every year.
Over the long term, with Mr. Obama focused on a concerted push toward greener energy, the industry remains optimistic.
“You drive across the countryside and there’s more and more wind farms going up,” said Mr. Mattern of West Fargo. “I still have big hopes.”

Here Comes the Sun. Right?

BEHIND a giant solar factory here, backhoes are digging away, preparing for a new wing that will quintuple production. Inside, an outspoken German executive named Boris Klebensberger is fretting about the color of the new carpet. Samples perch on his window sill alongside floor plans.
Expanding a factory? Picking out carpeting?
Did anyone tell him that there’s a recession?
Buoyed by the potential promise of a green economy, Mr. Klebensberger, who heads the American branch of SolarWorld AG, a company based in Bonn, Germany, is ramping up production of solar cells in a retrofitted factory that had its grand opening last October — in the teeth of the financial crisis.
“Was I worried about our position? No!” says Mr. Klebensberger, dismissing any hint that he was nervous at the opening. And he remains just as bullish today. SolarWorld’s plant here, which makes enough cells to fit 1,700 solar panels a day, is the biggest of its kind in the United States.
For the residents of Hillsboro, and for the Oregon economy, SolarWorld’s presence is a welcome boon. Its employees enjoy being in start-up mode, while others like the cachet of working for a renewable-energy company — which goes down well in outdoorsy Oregon.
“Green is the way to go,” says Michelle Zillig, who worked at Intel for 18 years before joining SolarWorld as a technician. “People can only have so many computers.”
At first glance, the timing of SolarWorld’s decision to invest $500 million in the new site during a recession, in a state with an unemployment rate second only to Michigan’s, couldn’t have been worse. Prices for the company’s solar panels have slid about 15 percent since the factory opened, a result of growing competition and slowing demand, especially in Europe. Two manufacturers, GE Energy’s solar branch and BP Solar, have cut production in East Coast plants.
But new federal incentives to encourage renewable energy in the United States will give the industry a boost, analysts say.
The recent stimulus package included grants for businesses and utilities that install solar energy systems, and the bank bailout package last year removed the dollar cap on a 30 percent tax credit for home installations. Makers of renewable energy equipment also received help in the stimulus package, signed by President Obama.
“I think the writing on the wall is the U.S. is going to be the big market,” says Jesse Pichel, a solar analyst at Piper Jaffray.
The message for solar companies, Mr. Pichel says, is “get your butt over to the U.S. if you want to participate and get some of that stimulus package money.”
THE United States lost its status as the world’s leading solar manufacturer in the 1990s as interest surged elsewhere. Now it makes little more than 5 percent of solar panels worldwide.
Even with federal support and positive buzz, only a fraction of 1 percent of the electricity in the United States comes from solar panels, leaving ample room for the market to grow.
Germany, SolarWorld’s home, is at the same latitude as southern Alaska, often has cloudy skies and is a much smaller country than the United States. Yet the number of installed solar panels in Germany is more than three times the amount in America. Spain and Japan are also ahead.
“Germany is not a natural for solar, but they’ve had vision, and policy followed the vision, and industry growth followed the policy,” says Raju Yenamandra, the vice president for sales at SolarWorld in California.
For manufacturers, the low penetration rate of solar in the United States spells opportunity. Companies lucky enough to still have financing are building or expanding operations in a range of states, including Oregon, Ohio and New Mexico.
As the German flag fluttering outside the SolarWorld factory in Oregon attests, foreign companies are largely driving the new American manufacturing push.
Mr. Klebensberger and his rivals are especially eager for solar to take off in the desert Southwest, where the sun beats down through often-cloudless skies. California has made a strong solar push, with the amount of solar power installed roughly doubling in 2008 from the previous year.
Recently, new installations of the type of rooftop-ready panels that SolarWorld makes have been growing strongly, with 70 percent more installed in the United States in 2008 than in 2007. In Europe, new installations roughly tripled last year, according to Emerging Energy Research, an independent research firm. But the European number is expected to fall sharply this year, in the wake of a decision by the Spanish government to cut its solar subsidy.
For its part, SolarWorld made its bet on manufacturing in the United States long before the stimulus package arrived. In 2006, it bought the solar division of the Shell Group, which operated factories in California and Washington. Mr. Klebensberger revamped the California factory, throttled back the existing facility in Washington and began scouting other sites in those states, as well as Alabama, Georgia and New Mexico.
“I don’t know how many brochures we got from states that offered us incentives and upfront money,” Mr. Klebensberger says.


The company ultimately settled on a semiconductor factory here that was built in the 1990s and swiftly abandoned after a downturn in the chip industry. Semiconductors are made from the same crystal material as solar panels, and having water and exhaust systems in place helped SolarWorld ramp up faster.


State incentives also helped: Oregon, which has been heavily recruiting wind and solar companies, provided SolarWorld with $40 million in business tax credits.
SolarWorld also gained access to a big pool of potential employees because it is situated in the heart of the Oregon “Silicon Forest,” surrounded by semiconductor plants and a short drive from a much larger Intel factory. SolarWorld’s employment has swelled to more than 500, some of them temporary, which gets the company about halfway to its goal of 1,000 permanent workers by 2011; the company holds new-employee orientations each Monday.
Inside the plant, the factory floor combines the mild chaos and urgency of a start-up with the scale of a public company. In one room, orderly rows of cylindrical furnaces stand like so many trees; they are used to grow crystals weighing several hundred pounds. The crystals are made from polysilicon, a derivative of sand, and form the core ingredient of the solar panels.
In other rooms, the cooked and cooled crystal ingots — looking like spent artillery shells — are sliced by machines into what are called wafers. Then they are made chemically suitable for generating electricity and are overlaid with electric wires, and a slim, dark cell emerges. (The cells, which resemble drink coasters, are sent to SolarWorld’s California plant to be strung together into the finished product that goes onto roofs.)
Many of the processes are still being automated, and the plant is also testing and expanding new systems in mid-production.
“I’ve got this radio here in case things go south,” says Willie Owens, an equipment engineer in goggles and jeans. He was testing new furnaces and water cooling equipment. If there were a big problem, he explains, he would have to hit a button within one minute to activate emergency systems.
The job, he says with relish, provides “an adrenaline rush sometimes.”
Like a number of other SolarWorld employees at all levels, Mr. Owens is a transplant from the semiconductor industry, whose big West Coast factories have suffered badly in the latest downturn. Hynix, for example, closed a plant in Eugene, Ore., last year, resulting in the loss of about 1,100 jobs.
Mr. Owens heard on National Public Radio that SolarWorld was coming to Oregon and decided to jump after seven years at a wafer manufacturer in Portland. “I saw this as an opportunity to get into something that was growing,” he recalls. “Glad I did.”
Even as SolarWorld charges ahead, adding new equipment and breaking ground for its factory expansion, there are daily reminders of the challenges ahead. The company’s share price has declined more than 30 percent in two years, to 21.05 euros ($27.80), largely because of slowing demand and a growing number of manufacturers.
Asia has also become a manufacturing hub for solar power, and many panels from China have entered the market, although the recession has forced some companies to cut back. Suntech Power, a leading Chinese manufacturer, is now using just 55 percent of its factories’ capacity, though it, too, is looking for factory space in the United States for the long term.
Like the rest of the industry, SolarWorld is also trying to adjust to the decline in panel prices, which are likely to keep falling into the summer, given the oversupply and the continuing credit crisis.
Mr. Klebensberger tries to put a positive spin on this, noting that the first quarter — whose results are due in a few weeks — is always relatively weak because Europeans avoid installing panels during the winter.
For all of last year, the company’s sales grew at a heady 31 percent. But the pace of growth in the fourth quarter slowed considerably.
Industrywide installations in the first quarter in California, the largest market in the United States, remain robust. Installers there are wary, however. They say demand dried up in the last six months because companies lack financing and homeowners are more worried about their mortgages than sinking $25,000 or more into making electricity on their roof.
Analysts say the first-quarter figures in California may have had a boost from projects that were already in the pipeline and that future numbers may be less robust. A year ago, installers say, they were calling manufacturers to ask for panels; now the situation is reversed, with manufacturers making sales calls.
In the meantime, the competition among manufacturers is likely to intensify. Even as some of the weaker solar companies resort to layoffs, a number of big names — including Schott, First Solar, SunPower and Sharp — are building, expanding or looking to build manufacturing plants in the United States. Sanyo, the Japanese electronics company, is building a solar wafer factory in Salem, Oregon’s capital, that is to begin production this fall.
Mr. Klebensberger relishes the competition and the potential boost it can give the American economy. Solar energy can provide jobs and energy security, he says, “so it’s a way out of the crisis.”

solar energy

From magnifying glasses to steam engines, scientists through the centuries have found innovative ways to harness the power of the sun. Converting more solar power into electricity is high on the political agenda in many countries, amid the push to find domestic energy sources that are less polluting than fossil fuels.
Despite rapid growth in recent years, solar power accounts for less than 1 percent of United States electricity use. Solar power is more entrenched in European countries such as Spain and Germany, which have promoted its development with strong incentives called feed-in tariffs,which require electric utilities to buy solar power at a high, fixed price. In the United States, California is by far the leading solar state.
There are several ways to use the sun’s power to generate electricity. One of the most promising is called concentrating solar power. This involves using mirrors to reflect and focus the sun’s rays, providing heat, which in turn helps power a generator. Another is photovoltaic panels, such as the displays on the rooftops of homes and office buildings (some of these displays, especially in California, have recently experienced problems with theft).