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...nowhere close to allaying the world's burgeoning production of garbage. Now Britain's Isle of Wight is presenting what proponents hope will be a parade example of how to deal with the megatons of waste that can't be reclaimed. This summer, a $16 million, 2.3MW gasification plant - the first in Britain and one of only a few in the world - will fire into action, turning 30,000 tons of rubbish a year into electricity for 2,000 homes...
...costly scrubbing technologies in place, critics say incinerator smokestacks still release too many pollutants. Moreover, because only very large operations are economical, incinerators are ever-hungry for massive amounts of waste, which can discourage recycling. The Isle of Wight impressively recycles 50% of its household waste, so the gasification plant will subsist on the other half, the so-called residual waste. One of gasification's selling points is that the plants can be scaled up or down, according to need, and still be efficient...
...Environmental groups tend to be wary of many waste-to-energy schemes, and say the best remedy for bulging landfills is more recycling. But Tony Grimshaw, project director for Energos, the Norwegian energy company building the plant, says, "There are practical and economic limits to how much you can recycle." He claims the Isle of Wight project, which is partly funded with $5.4 million in government aid, will prove both an economic and environmental success...
More nuclear subsidies, which many on Capitol Hill are pushing for, won't do the trick either. Lovins notes that the U.S. nuclear industry has received $100 billion in government subsidies over the past half-century, and that federal subsidies now worth up to $13 billion a plant - roughly how much it now costs to build one - still haven't encouraged private industry to back the atomic revival. At the same time, the price of building a plant - all that concrete and steel - has risen dramatically in recent years, while the nuclear workforce has aged and shrunk. Nuclear supporters like...
...post-climate change future? Lovins favors a diverse mix of renewables, integrated to compensate for individual faults - solar for when the wind doesn't blow, and vice versa. He also wants to focus on energy efficiency and micropower, shifting away from the old model of the massive central plant sending out electricity - i.e., your local nuke - in favor of smaller plants, even residence-scale ones, built close to population centers. Reducing carbon emissions, he argues, will be cheaper and safer if we turn away from nuclear in favor of alternatives. "The bottom line is that nuclear buys...