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Beginning more than 65 miles from Boston, at the Quabbin Reservoir in Belchertown, the remarkable Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) water system consists of over 100 miles of tunnels and aqueducts, and ultimately supplies safe drinking water to over 2.2 million customers of local water departments in 51 communities. On average, the MWRA supplies approximately 200 million gallons per day to its water system customers.
Within this water transmission system, there are three hydroelectric facilities. Two harness the energy of the water as it enters and leaves the Wachusett Reservoir in Clinton. The newest, an innovative turbine at the Loring Road storage facility in Weston, was recently delivered.
This is a very cool project in many ways, using novel engineering, saving money, and avoiding environmental impacts:
• Because most of the water system uses gravity, the MWRA has to decrease the water pressure before it gets delivered to some of the lower-lying communities in the Boston area. In the past, this has been done via pressure-reducing control valves between two storage systems. From the tanks, water is then distributed to member communities. So, the MWRA came up with a bright idea – since they were shooting water from one tank to another, why not use all that energy to generate power while they were at it? The MWRA asked local engineering firm Camp Dresser & McKee to design an innovative combination control-valve-plus-hydroelectric-power system to put between the tanks.
• MWRA estimates that the new hydroelectric turbine will have an average annual generation of 1,207,000 kilowatt hours. The power that’s generated will save the MWRA (and all of its customers) a lot of money on its electric bill. MassCEC gave the MWRA a little over $400,000 toward engineering costs, and most of the balance of the funding came from federal stimulus money.
• On the environmental side, the turbine hasn’t generated the environmental concerns about fish and wildlife impacts that often accompany hydroelectric projects. In fact, the project got a unanimous thumbs up from the Low Impact Hydro Institute.
This new hydroelectric project is part of the exciting and comprehensive renewable energy initiatives at MWRA that include energy conservation, wind, solar, and anaerobic digestion at the Deer Island Wastewater Treatment Plant. Click here to see the other renewable energy projects at Deer Island.
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Japan’s crisis ditneifely has changed my opinion of nuclear energy. Whereas I was a stiff opponent of nuclear energy before, I now realize that we need it in some form.Stunned? Let me explain.Both my parents were nuclear physicists. My dad worked at the world’s first nuclear power plant. Both of them eventually realized that nuclear energy came at an extraordinary cost – the requirement that all our radioactive materials be contained for far longer than recorded history.The nuclear age is, by practical definition about 25,000 years long. Regardless of when (or if) we deplete nuclear resouces, we have to maintain a level of technology, civilization and political stability for around 25,000 years before we can safely say we got through it. I am deeply concerned that we cannot do it. History does not support that possibility and I have no reason to believe that technology will change the same basic human conditions that created our past. Only 40 years after the moonshot, we’ve already lost that particular technology. If we wanted to put a man on the moon again, we would have to re-invent much of what we knew back then. So for 25,000 years, we cannot afford an interruption in our technology due to climate change, disease, war, collapse of empires or what have you because there is an extraordinary amount of radioactive material on this planet and we have to live with all of it or be killed off by it.While the physics of it is fascinating, I wish we never had nuclear power or nuclear bombs because the stakes are too high regardless of the risks. Yet, as I watched the magnitude of the problem in Japan and realized how under-reported it was, it dawned on me: Here we are, about 65 years into the nuclear age (1/4 of a percent of the way through) and we’ve had at least three major nuclear disasters already (and I know for sure there have been more). I don’t think we can make it the other 99.75% of the way without disasterous worldwide results. I think the odds are greater that we could develop a technology that can neutralize radioactive materials than survive going the way we are, even if we stopped all nuclear power tomorrow.So, while I am an opponent of the use of nuclear energy for environmental reasons, I think that maintaining and developing the technology is by far our best hope.Talk about mixed feelings!