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Typically, as California goes, so goes the nation. But the same often holds true with New York. Here is one news item rapidly making the rounds on the clean tech sites that I hope will demonstrate New York’s influence.
On Tuesday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced at a clean energy summit in Las Vegas that he wants New York to make a major shift into renewable energy, and urged businesses to submit proposals by September 19th. No holds barred on the sources of energy – he wants to float everything from urban turbines, skyscraper solar panels, tidal energy, geothermal energy and….ahem, nuclear. I wish we could pretend he didn’t say that last one, but yes, he wants “clean nuclear” power.
New Yorkers are already among the greenest people in the nation, based mainly on the tight set-up of the city. But millions and millions of people require a whole lot of power. While Bloomberg wants the current usage levels to stay the same even as the city grows, he pointed out that the infrastructure, and power sources, are out of date and strained. So, he wants to see energy being drawn from the Hudson and East rivers, from the Atlantic ocean, from the skyscrapers in terms of wind and solar, and any other place possible.
New York is already taking some great steps to green up, from the new WTC towers, to its participation in the Carbon Disclosure Project, to their pilot East River power generation project.
It seems like there are hundreds of ideas discussed on EcoGeek alone that could be streaming in to his office as we speak. I’m looking forward to finding out if some of the renewable energy ideas he called for will actually be considered and adopted in the near future.
Via Physorg; photo via aturkus
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written by Aragorn, August 22, 2008
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written by Geoff Livingston, August 22, 2008
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written by Stefan Hayden, August 22, 2008
While nuclear power produces waste our ability to reprocess the waste and use it again will only get better. So we will not need to store the waste for thousands of years and only on the hundred year time frame until we can reuse it.
nuclear is a great stepping stone to oil independence.
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written by Goink, August 22, 2008
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written by dialtone, August 22, 2008
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written by Nalamo, September 06, 2008
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I obviously would prefer renewables (and I think we've already reached the threshold where the 10-year lead time of nuclear plants makes them essentially obsolete), but I'm not opposed to nuclear.
Radiation is feared because people don't understand it...the radiation levels at the perimeter of a nuke plant are not significantly above background levels. Ramsar, Iran has a background dose 100 times higher than average, and people born there don't glow. Most of the artificial (human produced) radiation comes from coal-burning plants, so displacing that with nuclear is a good call in my mind. You also get plenty of cosmic radiation on high-flying transcontinental flights, or every time you have an X-ray.