Environmental Impact of Power Generation: Issues in Environmental Science and Technology: Volume 11 - Brossura

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0854042504 ISBN 13: 9780854042500

Casa editrice: Royal Society of Chemistry, 1999

Riassunto

In today's automated world, the need for economic generation of power is of vital importance. However, the industry is commonly perceived as being responsible for pollution of the atmosphere and contamination of land and water. The wide-ranging subjects addressed in this book will contribute to the public understanding of science in this important area. Encompassing areas as diverse as current performance standards and the use of nuclear fuel, Environmental Impact of Power Generation also includes an historical overview of electricity supply. The emotive issues of air pollution and the ecological effects of overhead power lines are tackled, along with energy efficiency and conservation. This book will be essential reading for students and practitioners in environmental science and engineering.

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Informazioni sull?autore

The series has been edited by Professors Hester and Harrison since it began in 1994.

Professor Roy Harrison OBE is listed by ISI Thomson Scientific (on ISI Web of Knowledge) as a Highly Cited Researcher in the Environmental Science/Ecology category. He has an h-index of 54 (i.e. 54 of his papers have received 54 or more citations in the literature). In 2004 he was appointed OBE for services to environmental science in the New Year Honours List. He was profiled by the Journal of Environmental Monitoring (Vol 5, pp 39N-41N, 2003). Professor Harrison’s research interests lie in the field of environment and human health. His main specialism is in air pollution, from emissions through atmospheric chemical and physical transformations to exposure and effects on human health. Much of this work is designed to inform the development of policy.

Now an emeritus professor, Professor Ron Hester's current activities in chemistry are mainly as an editor and as an external examiner and assessor. He also retains appointments as external examiner and assessor / adviser on courses, individual promotions, and departmental / subject area evaluations both in the UK and abroad.

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Environmental Impact of Power Generation

By The Royal Society of Chemistry, R.E. Hester, R. M. Harrison

The Royal Society of Chemistry

Copyright © 1999 The Royal Society of Chemistry
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-85404-250-0

Contents

Historical Overview Gordon MacKerron, 1, 
Impact of Power Generation on Air Quality Bernard E.A. Fisher, 21, 
Environmental Performance of the Liberalized UK Power Industry Stephen Adrain and Ian Housley, 43, 
BPEO Approaches to the Design and Siting of Power Stations Colin Powlesland, 61, 
Environmental Impact of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Malcolm J. Joyce and Simon N. Port, 73, 
Electric and Magnetic Fields and Ecology David Jeffers, 97, 
Energy Efficiency and Conservation Andrew Warren, 113, 
Subject Index, 131, 

CHAPTER 1

Historical Overview

GORDON MacKERRON

1 Introduction

Around the turn of the last century, a great wave of technological innovations transformed industrial and domestic life in the industrialized countries. These innovations included the motor car and the modern chemical industry, but an essential ingredient in the transformation was the provision of electricity supply, with the steam turbine playing a vital role. The advantages of electricity at the point of use have always been that it is clean, precise, and efficient. However, as the 20th century progressed, it became clear that to generate electricity cheaply it was necessary to move to larger and larger scales, and often to sites that were remote from the main centres of electricity demand. This, in turn, brought a need for long-distance transmission links which changed the physical appearance of parts of the countryside. As concern with various aspects of air quality grew strongly in the second half of the century, so power generation became increasingly implicated in the major issues: particulates, sulfur, nitrogen, and most recently carbon, besides the emotive issues surrounding nuclear power.

By the late 20th century, the electricity industry had thereby become deeply enmeshed in most of the leading environmental problems of concern to both Governments and citizens. Almost all major forms of electricity generation — fossil fuel-based, nuclear, large hydro, newer renewables, as well as transmission — have raised serious environmental concerns. This chapter, in keeping with the rest of the book, concentrates on the issues that are specific to the UK, and therefore gives little consideration to environmental concerns surrounding large hydro schemes. However, for virtually all countries, the impacts of electricity generation are high on the list of active environmental issues, and many of these issues are now subject to international and even global negotiation and control.

2 History

Electricity supply in the form of public lighting stretches back to the early 1880s, with Godalming in Surrey and Brighton having the earliest public supply systems. However, gas remained a powerful lighting competitor for many decades and the electric lighting schemes remained mostly very small. The development of trams and railway electrification represented a major growth in the use of electricity, and by the first decade of the 20th century, electricity had begun to be an important source of motive power for industry. By the time of the First World War, factory power had overtaken traction and lighting in terms of kilowatt hours used. Most of the 19th century uses of electricity depended on small, on-site forms of generation, often using reciprocating engines. As the steam turbine — with its potential for efficiency on a larger scale — became more widely used, so 'central' power stations with local distribution networks became more common. Newcastle was a leader in this, and the Newcastle Electricity Supply Company operated the largest integrated power system in Europe before 1914. However, the industry remained small and localized before 1914, and its environmental impact was small.

The First World War accelerated the development of interconnected and larger systems, and the potential for household electricity use began to be exploited in the post-war period. The potential benefits of large scale interconnection were beginning to be clear, but a major problem was the huge variety of systems, both municipal and private, that were developed on a local scale. Standardization and rationalization were both necessary and difficult, but the watershed was the setting up of a Central Electricity Board under the Electricity Supply Act of 1926. Its main task was the establishment of a national grid system. This was the first time that electricity impinged on rural environments, and great dispute surrounded the intrusion of overhead pylons and wires into areas of natural beauty. The first 'amenity' based pressure groups began to be set up in the 1920s — for example, the still-active Council for the Protection of Rural England — and electricity transmission was one of the issues that engaged this amenity movement. By the mid-1930s, the grid was virtually complete and the efficiency and cost-reducing benefits were large, not least because the need to keep large reserve margins of generating capacity fell sharply.

In the early days of grid operation, the main purpose was to connect the main industrial areas and provide back-up, and siting of power stations remained essentially urban and close to main load centres. This meant that, in emission terms, it was urban areas which suffered most, and the principal problem was smoke or particulates emerging from the chimneys of the almost exclusively coal-fired urban stations. However, there were so many other sources of local air pollution — urban factories and, in the winter, private homes — that the contribution of power generation was not especially large or noticeable in the period up to the Second World War.

It was not until the Second World War and afterwards that the grid began to operate as a truly national, rather than a regionally based, system. In 1947, the UK industry was nationalized, and much rationalization remained to be done. Nationalization brought together 200 companies, 369 local authority undertakings, nearly 300 power stations, and the Central Electricity Board under the new British Electricity Authority (BEA). Within this new structure, 14 Area Boards were to be responsible for regional distribution, and a new Central Authority (later to split into the CEGB for England and Wales, and two integrated Boards for Scotland) took over power stations and high voltage transmission.

Under the new order, standardization was completed, and from the 1950s onwards the size of generating sets increased rapidly from 30 and 60 megawatts (MW) to 660 MW in the 1970s, by which time 2000 MW stations were normal. This vast increase in scale was accompanied by a radical shift in siting policy. Urban sites, except for a few gas turbines in the 1960s and 1970s, were no longer used for new investment. Coal was the dominant fuel, especially in the 1950s, and here the practice was to locate power stations on the coal-fields. As oil became important in the 1960s, oil-fired stations were built at coastal sites, usually near oil refineries, and at the same time nuclear stations began to be sited in remote areas, nearly always at a coastal location. This all involved larger flows of power over longer distances, but the development of the super-grid at 275 kilovolts (kV) and later 400 kV meant that transport costs fell sharply. Because of the accidents of coal-field locations, the dominant direction of power flow in England was from the north and north-west to the south and south-west.

Electricity demand grew rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s, commonly at around 7% annually. Despite increases in thermal efficiency, this inevitably meant large increases in power station emissions, though the policy of tall stacks and the fitting of electrostatic precipitators meant that the power sector was not heavily involved in the growing air pollution issues of this period, notably the very poor urban air quality that led to the passing of the 1956 Clean Air Act. Ironically, just as electricity demand growth faltered in the wake of the oil crises and economic recessions of the 1970s, so environmental pressures on the industry began to build up. These pressures — which are the main subject of the rest of the chapter — were mainly to do with different forms of emissions and air pollution, as well as the particular problems of nuclear power.

3 The Nature and Importance of Environmental Impacts

Environmental impacts are wide-ranging and various in many dimensions. Physically, both the medium (air, land, water) and extent of geographical area vary widely. Politically, environmental issues excite controversy to variable and changing extents, and are dealt with at all political levels, from parish council to global inter-Governmental negotiation.

Because of the diversity of issues, it is impossible to find any satisfactory way of dealing with all environmental issues using a common measuring device, despite major attempts by economists to use money in this role in recent years. There are two reasons for the difficulty of expressing environmental harm along one dimension:

• First, there is the physical science problem: our knowledge of the extent of physical damage created by different forms of environmental impact is incomplete and uncertain (especially as we move to the larger and global questions like climate change)

• Second, there is no obvious way of directly comparing the damage caused by, say, visual intrusion, sulfur dioxide emissions, and radioactive waste. This is partly because the kinds of harm created are so different in these cases, and more importantly because the attempt by economists to provide monetary values for many kinds of damage have been controversial and unsatisfactory. The underlying problem is that there is nothing remotely resembling a market in which many forms of environmental damage could be valued. The attempts by economists to infer market values from other markets (hedonic valuation) and by asking people directly what would be their willingness to pay to avoid damage (contingent valuation) produce results that are often inconsistent and somewhat forced. Despite very large and sophisticated projects which have attempted to find consistent and useful valuations of environmental damage, these techniques do not provide satisfactory answers. There is, therefore, no escape from the need for Governments and citizens to make their own judgements about the relative importance of different environmental issues in framing policy responses

Despite these difficulties in comparing different forms of environmental impact, it is useful, in looking at the impacts made by the electricity supply industry (and more widely), to think in terms of a broad three-fold classification. This has geographical, historical, physical, and scientific dimensions:

• The earliest form of modern environmental concern, dating from the 1920s, concentrated on local and highly tangible or visible impacts. The classic inter-war issues were about siting of industrial facilities in rural environments and, as mentioned earlier, the major issue for electricity was the overhead transmission lines that so rapidly spread across the country in the decade after 1925. This was a concern about aesthetics and amenity. The impact itself was visible and generally did not need the mediation of science to be apparent, but the geographical scope of impact was limited to a few miles of the source of damage. Local concerns of this sort remain prominent and the 'pylons' disputes of 70 years ago have recent echoes in the disputes about the siting of wind turbines

• In the period between the 1950s and the early 1980s there emerged a set of concerns about environmental damage with increasingly wider geographical impacts and needing more sophisticated scientific mediation. For electricity these issues were almost entirely about 'air pollution' of various sorts. In the 1950s this was mainly a matter of local air quality (smoke and smogs) in which electricity played a relatively small part, but the scope of perceived problems grew substantially in the 1960s and 1970s, and the classic issue became acidification — long-distance transport of sulfur and nitrogen and their impact on lakes, forests and land. Here, scientific work became crucial to the definition of causes and, while the impacts were still tangible, the connections between cause and effect were becoming less clear-cut. The geographical scope became national and even international. In the UK, sulfur became a serious issue only in the 1980s, but in the USA and Japan it had emerged as a serious problem by the 1970s

• From the 1970s to the present, the new issues have become even wider. The classic issues are now potentially continental and global in scope. For electricity, the two major issues in this category are the impact of radioactive releases from nuclear power stations or waste facilities, and the issue of climate change. In the nuclear case the potential was clear from the 1950s, but it was not until the Chernobyl accident of 1986 that the geographical extent of the resulting problems became fully apparent. For these widest of all issues, the potential impacts are very large indeed, but are entirely obscure to public perception without the mediation of sophisticated science. The role of science in the definition of damage to human health from radiation, and in predicting the extent and nature of climate change, are critical to the debates. A substance like carbon dioxide is only definable as a 'pollutant' under particular scientific assumptions about the effects of concentrations of gases in the atmosphere. Solutions to this kind of environmental issue depend on very complex inter-Governmental negotiation.

In the second half of the 20th century, environmental issues have become continuously more important at a political level and this is reflected in ever-increasing stringency in environmental regulation. There seem to be three types of explanation for this well-recognized phenomenon of growing stringency:

• As industrial activity has expanded further, there have been large increases in the production of well-known pollutants like sulfur dioxide, and correspondingly greater physical damage

• New work in the environmentally related sciences has often led to the discovery of new forms of damage not previously understood (for example, damage to human health from exposure to lead in petrol)

• Changes in culture and society seem to lead to more concern about avoiding or mitigating given levels of damage. In more economic language, increased wealth in the industrialized countries has been associated with a sharply increasing demand for better environmental quality, expressed both politically and, to some extent, in the market place. There are probably other elements involved here. Some newer kinds of potential environmental harm — classically, ionizing radiation and, increasingly, genetic modification — involve new and powerful interventions by science into the natural world, with less immediately tangible but potentially apparently catastrophic impacts. It seems likely that these new technology developments have added an extra twist to this demand for better environmental quality, as well as providing a fresh dimension of political controversy.

The simultaneous effect of these three connected but in some ways distinct phenomena has proved a very powerful force in raising environmental issues high up the political agenda of the industrialized world. The apparently inexorable increases in industrial output and consequent environmental damage, added to scientific confirmation that given levels of emission or pollution are more harmful than previously thought, combined with new and potentially devastating risks like releases of radioactivity, seem to have brought a powerful change in personal and political attitudes to environmental harm.

4 Environmental Regulation: the Framework

Early History

Environmental regulation in the UK stretches further back than the origins of the electricity supply industry. In the air pollution domain, the Alkali Inspectorate was set up in 1863 to deal with large-scale emissions, largely of hydrochloric acid from the chemicals industry, that were ruining large areas of agricultural land. The Inspectorate was intended to be separate from local authorities, on which factory owners were often influential, but from the earliest days the preferred method of working of the Inspectorate was co-operative rather than confrontational, a tradition that has persisted to the present day. The first Alkali Inspector, Robert Smith, coined the term 'acid rain'.

Emission limits were prescribed for the first time in 1874, and the 1906 Alkali &c Works Regulation Act set the pattern of environmental regulation for much of the 20th century. The Act specified lists of 'noxious and offensive gases' and a similar list of industrial processes. It also introduced the notion of 'best practicable means' (BPM) as a guiding principle for regulating emissions where there were no statutory limits. At a different and more local environmental level, the Electricity Act of 1909 began the process of controlling the siting of power stations as a land use issue.

The next major developments in environmental control followed the great smogs of the early 1950s in London with the passage of the Clean Air Act of 1956. This, as mentioned earlier, had little direct impact on the electricity supply industry. While electricity generation was still principally an urban activity, policies to encourage 'tall stacks' and fitting of electrostatic precipitators to remove particulates meant that the contribution of power stations to urban smogs was relatively small. The Clean Air Act, in addition, did not require the fitting of FGD or other sulfur-removal systems to existing or new power stations. However, the tall stacks policy, while reducing local emission problems, also did much to help deposit emissions much further afield, including internationally.

In the following year, 1957, the Electricity Act bound generators to a wide range of environmental responsibilities at the site level and its immediate surroundings. Provisions in the Act are in the broad area of aesthetics and amenity and require all parties to protect the beauty, flora, fauna, buildings, and other objects on which power stations might have an impact. Following this Act, the newly established CEGB set up a Station Environment Group to help integrate environmental issues into station planning.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Environmental Impact of Power Generation by The Royal Society of Chemistry, R.E. Hester, R. M. Harrison. Copyright © 1999 The Royal Society of Chemistry. Excerpted by permission of The Royal Society of Chemistry.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Royal Society of Chemistry
• Data di pubblicazione: 1999
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0854042504
• ISBN 13: 9780854042500
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 150
• Redattore: Hester R. E., Harrison Roy M.
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile