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Court Kills Trump Rule on Power Plant Emissions

January 21, 2021

The post Court Kills Trump Rule on Power Plant Emissions appeared first on POWER Magazine.

A federal appeals court has vacated the Trump administration’s rollback of Obama-era greenhouse gas emission standards for power plants. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Jan. 19 said the measure intended to replace those standards, the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule, “rested critically on a mistaken reading of the Clean Air Act,” or CAA.

The panel in its ruling said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) recission of the 2015 Clean Power Plan (CPP), and subsequent adoption of the 2019 ACE rule, failed to comply with the CAA. The decision is another blow to the Trump administration’s bid to leave a legacy of deregulation, particularly at the EPA, as it rebukes one of the administration’s highest-profile replacements of Obama-era environmental rules.

The judges among other things found that the ACE rule failed to provide adequate environmental and public health protections.…

Arrests Made After Scaffold Collapse Kills 74 Workers at Chinese Power Plant

November 30, 2016

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Nine people, including the chairman and chief engineer of the Fengcheng power plant, have been arrested following a scaffold collapse that killed 74 construction workers on November 24.

The scaffold platform had been erected to facilitate work on a cooling tower that was being constructed at the plant located in Yichun City, Jiangxi Province. According to a CCTV newscast, more than 60 people were working on the platform, and more than a dozen were on the ground waiting for their 7 a.m. shift to start, when the scaffold collapsed.

China orders safety overhaul after power plant accident in Jiangxi killed 74 https://t.co/G3KfkVluIx https://t.co/D6K8nFAEZB pic.twitter.com/Jzdu1Jv2pw

— China Xinhua News (@XHNews) November 28, 2016

China’s state news agency Xinhua reported that the victims ranged in age from 23 to 53 years old, with most under the age of 36. More than 300 rescuers, two drones, four sniffer dogs, and seven cranes were said to have been involved in the search and rescue effort.…

Japan Kills Monju but Not Breeders

September 26, 2016

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In a widely expected move, the Japanese government finally killed the ill-fated Monju breeder reactor project on September 21, but reasserted its faith in breeder reactor technology as a component of the nation’s future power mix.

The Monju plant was an ambitious project that never came close to meeting its backers’ expectations. Launched in 1980, the sodium-cooled fast-breeder plant managed only 250 days of operation over its lifetime. A sodium coolant fire in 1995 and subsequent cover-up by operator Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) gave the plant a black eye from which it never recovered. An abortive attempt at a restart in 2010 led to revelations that JAEA had skipped required safety inspections on as many as 10,000 of the plant’s components.

In a scathing indictment last year, Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority ruled that JAEA was not qualified to safely operate the plant and ordered the federal government to find a replacement or shut the facility down. The Japanese cabinet on Wednesday took the latter option, drawing to a close a project that burned through an estimated ¥1 trillion ($ 10 billion in 2016 dollars) with little to show for it.…

Explosion at Chinese Coal Power Plant Reportedly Kills 21

August 15, 2016

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News agencies are reporting that an explosion at a coal-fired power plant in Dangyang, a city in central China, has killed at least 21 people and injured five others, three seriously.

The event is said to have occurred around 3:20 p.m. local time on August 11. The facility—designed to generate thermal power and sell slag, ash, and petroleum products—is owned by Madian Gangue Power Generation Co. Some sources suggested that the plant is in the process of being commissioned and was undergoing testing at the time of the incident.

Steam pipe explosion at central #Hubei , #China power station kills 21, injures 5
pic.twitter.com/syqbBlhKCa

— Mete Sohtaoğlu (@metesohtaoglu) August 11, 2016

It has been difficult to establish specifics about the blast. An investigation is said to still be in progress. Initial reports identified the plant as a chemical facility, but it was later determined to be the coal power plant site. Although several sources have suggested that the event was triggered when “a high-pressure steam pipe exploded,” the number of casualties, ensuing fire, and volume of black smoke shown in pictures posted on Twitter that are said to be of the event, suggest that something much more explosive initiated the incident.…