Word: plant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Most people don’t think about what happens when they throw a light switch on,” Vautin says. “At the end of a long series of wires there’s a power plant consuming fossil fuel. They don’t recognize they’re having a small impact on air emissions. On the scale of Harvard all that impact really does...
Some people are scared of nuclear power, the resulting nuclear waste, and the possibility of both meltdowns and terrorist attacks on a plant. These concerns are legitimate but less terrifying and less likely than inevitable environmental pollution and health problems from fossil fuels...
There is, and always has been, a potential for terrorist attacks against the nuclear industry. While hefty reactor shielding mitigates the danger of an attack, a breech could release deadly levels of radioactivity to plant employees and those nearby. But the problem is the existence of terrorism, not of nuclear power. Equal or greater dangers are posed by attacks on large dams, poisoning open-air watersheds or attacking our society’s vulnerable dependence on computer, electricity, and phone networks. To be free from terrorism, we would have to sacrifice modernity itself...
...even curtail it but to remake it in fundamental ways. Bush is preternaturally opposed to anything regulatory--and existing clean-air law, he believes, saddles energy producers with too many rules and too little incentive to be clean. So in February Bush proposed new legislation to curtail power-plant pollution. His plan, which he dubs Clear Skies, ditches regulations that govern the major power-plant pollutants--mercury, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides--in favor of a "cap and trade" system. The market-oriented idea is to set nationwide targets for emissions reductions that are mandatory, but let industry decide...
...ones included in Bush's Clear Skies plan. That's because any trading system that does away with existing regulations, as Clear Skies would, has potentially deadly side effects. It could undermine the EPA's long fight to bring many of the nation's oldest, dirtiest power plants into compliance with current law. And since the caps would be nationwide--letting a polluter in one state trade credits with a clean plant in another--localities that suffer from the dirtiest air could be left with no recourse. Environmentalists say the caps in Bush's plan are so weak that...