Letter to Editor: Response to Letter on Pinelands Gas Pipeline

Dear Editor,

I read Georgina Shanley’s letter with great interest. I have never responded to a letter, but I felt a response was appropriate. It is unfortunate that Ms. Shanley is constantly portrayed as the bastion of environmentalism and her comments are usually sensational and indefensible. For starters, I don’t believe she’s in the position to make the claim “that we don’t need this power plant.” It is not a secret that Oyster Creek Nuclear Generation Station is set to close in 2019, reducing regional output. Salem Nuclear Power Plant has licenses for their two reactors at 23 years and 27 years, respectively. While far off, power plants are not conceived and built overnight and our infrastructure needs to be planned decades in advance. Ridding the region of B.L. England doesn't reduce the region’s energy demand, it will come from somewhere else, in someone else’s backyard (see N.I.M.B.Y.).

Her comments on it being (paraphrasing) “easily replaced by wind and solar energy” is laughable and shows she’s never been around large scale operations. Having worked on large wind turbine fields in the Midwest, I have some idea of the scale at which these things operate. To meet the projected energy demands, you will need over 48 x 9mw wind turbines — each with a ground to hub (center of the turbine propeller) at over 300ft-400ft high, or about what a banner plane flies at. Further to complicate things, you don’t just plop a turbine wherever. It takes over a year of wind studies to determine best wind patterns at what is already considered a windy site. Per my experience in the Midwest, a project of that magnitude could encompass over 50sq-miles and be smack dab in the middle of one of the busiest bird migration corridors in the North America. Offshore sites are great locations for them.  Solar fields of that magnitude will require all of Beesley’s Point and some to be clear cut and solar panels installed. Solar panels make sense on top of already impervious areas such as rooftops and parking lots, but they do adversely affect plant and animal diversity beneath them from shielding the sun when placed on open undeveloped land.

As for “fracking” vs. coal, it’s the lesser of two evils at the moment. Try comparing a drilling operation to an open pit coal mine. Furthermore, coal is processed before being sent to power plants by washing with water and formed into slurry that is dried. Coal also produces refuse called slag that is laden with heavy metals and creates challenges for disposal. There are power plants in this country that are doing nothing more than letting it pile up on their property with water washing through it with every rain. Additionally, per research by the Oak Ridge National Labratory in the late 1970s, fly ash releases 100x more radiation than nuclear energy for the same amount of power production. All this also ignores acid rain.

While natural gas’s true costs aren't reflected due to the ‘Haliburton Loophole’, it’s our best option at the moment, especially with the reduction in nuclear and hydropower over the next decade and beyond.  Wind energy will become increasingly costly as the ‘easy’ and cheap sites are being filled up, and future development sites are being blocked by, of all things, “environmentalists” and other unrelated N.I.M.B.Y. groups.

As for the pipeline, it’s being constructed in existing disturbed r.o.w.’s (both road and power lines) and has gone through the permitting process. Furthermore, natural gas rises, not sinks, so it’s virtually impossible for it to contaminate drinking supplies. I fail to see how it can cause anymore disturbance than the train that already runs through the land to deliver the coal (and probably, much less).

Per usual, Georgina (and her husband, Steve Fenichel) jump onto another cause and lambaste us with their failure to see the big picture. Like every other issue they have fought against, it appears to be less about the issue and more about them being seen making a scene. It's as if she's treating this like her own personal Keystone XL Pipeline, when it's a totally different situation. Her comments do more harm to environmental policy makers by making the public feel spiteful and group the rest of us in with misguided activists like her.

Sincerely,

Bob Adams