Pursuing the Gulf of Mexico oil spill case will be the leading 2011 enforcement priority for the Dept. of Justice's environmental division, says Assistant Attorney General Ignacia S. Moreno, the unit's chief. Photo: U.S. Dept. of Justice Moreno, shown here with Attorney General Eric Holder, will focus heavily on Gulf oil spill Moreno, who heads the environment and natural resources division, said in a Jan. 13 speech that other construction-related areas of emphasis will include cases involving municipal sewage-treatment problems and defending against challenges to the Environmental Protection Agency's new greenhouse-gas regulations. Moreno told a District of Columbia Bar Association
It’s a structure built to precise construction standards, in some cases to a tolerance of 1/16 in.—no small feat in a structure with 80 miles of piping, 170,000 cu yd of concrete and 35,000 tons of reinforcing steel. It’s also a building that could provide a use for spent nuclear-powerplant waste, help lower energy bills and even end nuclear proliferation. Photo: Courtesy of SHAW AREVA MOX SERVICES MOX complex includes 170,000 cu yd of concrete and 35,000 tons of reinforcing steel. Photo: Courtesy of SHAW AREVA MOX SERVICES Building walls are 10-ft-thick concrete, each with four rows of reinforcing steel.
Providing a financial incentive to Houston’s commercial building owners may help the city comply with the Environmental Protection Agency’s newest ozone requirements. Houston Mayor Annise Parker last week announced a new citywide program that offers up to $200,000 to commercial building owners to retrofit their buildings to make them more energy efficient. Supported with funds from the Dept. of Energy’s Conservation Block Grant, which is part of the federal stimulus, the Energy Efficiency Incentive Program is Houston’s first such program for commercial buildings. An emissions inventory, conducted by several public agencies and published in 2010, showed that residential, commercial and
A new agency in the Dept. of Interior should be created to oversee and ensure the safety offshore oil and gas operations, according to the report released on Jan. 11 by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. The call for the new agency—which would be completely separate from a Dept. of the Interior division that would oversee the leasing of offshore tracts for the U.S. government—was one of about 15 recommendations that the presidential appointed commission made in a comprehensive 398-page document examining causes of the April 20 spill, which left 11 workers
The Macondo well blowout on April 20 was avoidable, and occurred largely because of a series of bad decisions by the companies and personnel involved that did not take into account the proper risks, according to a partial report released Wednesday by the presidential oil spill commission. Related Links: Uncalculated Risks: Engineering License Exemptions and the Gulf Oil Spill “The well blew out because a number of separate risk factors, oversights, and outright mistakes combined to overwhelm the safeguards meant to prevent just such an event from happening.” “But most of the mistakes and oversights at Macondo can be traced
Colombian crews have closed two-thirds of a large levee-canal breach that opened on Nov. 30 and spilled millions of gallons of Magdalena River water across vast sections of the country’s coastal plain. The disastrous flooding, worsened by persistent rainfall, has killed several hundred people, left millions homeless and resulted in billions of dollars in property damage to the South American nation. Photo: Vali Cooper International, LLC/BAR The site of Colombian towns flooded to the rafters recalls visions of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans in 2005 and, at least in the case of the Dique Canal breach, the silent risk levees
A 55-in.-dia cut into a rebar-reinforced underground concrete tank with hardened nuclear waste, the largest slice ever into such a U.S. Energy Dept. storage structure, went “perfectly” on Dec. 19, says a site cleanup official. Photo: Courtesy of U.S. Energy Dept. Crew lifts an underground concrete waste tank’s plug—wrapped in protective plastic to avoid contamination spread during operation—to install a robotic waste removal arm. In what may become the norm at DOE’s Hanford site in eastern Washington state and possibly at other U.S. waste sites, crews from Boston-based AK Services used a pressurized mix of garnet and water to methodically
Texas could become the nation’s leader in clean-coal technology, with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality recently giving its approval to three such projects. The powerplants, though, face some opposition from neighbors opposed to the new coal plants—clean or not. Map: Sue Pearsall for ENR Three clean-coal projects are estimated at nearly $8 billion in construction costs. On Dec. 14, the TCEQ gave an air-quality permit to Omaha, Neb.-based Tenaska Trailblazer Energy Center, allowing it to build a 600-MW, $3.5-billion clean-coal powerplant in Penwell. On Dec. 29, the state agency granted an air-quality permit to the Summit Power Group of
Colombian crews have closed two-thirds of a large levee canal breach that opened Nov. 30 and spilled millions of gallons of Magdalena River water across vast sections of the country's coastal plain. The disastrous flooding, worsened by persistent rainfall, has killed several hundred people, left millions homeless and resulted in billions of dollars in property damage to the South American nation. Relief crews on Dec. 27 reported success in closing 178 meters of the the 258-m-wide breach in the Dique Canal, although they warn that the remaining 80 m is the most technically difficult part of the closure operation. Water
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