Over the years, cruise ships have been under fire for sometimes sketchy environmental practices.  But it’s looking like the green movement is even moving to the aqua-blue waterways. 

Celebrity Cruises’ new ship, Solstice.

I just got off the inaugural sailing of the new Celebrity Solstice cruise ship.  This boat is big pimpin’ — stylishly appointed with all the bells and whistles. But what may be more impressive than all the onboard comforts are the advances Celebrity has made to help protect the ocean.

Save the Waves is a comprehensive environmental protection program Celebrity established 20 years ago.  You might say its just PR greenwashing, but some steps they take to be green are pretty dramatic.  For instance, recycling bins for aluminum, plastic, and glass containers are a breeding ground for bacteria. The only way to prevent the bacteria from growing is to cool the containers, so they store recyclables in a massive refrigerator.

On the alternative energy front the Solstice is the first cruise ship to utilize the sun with solar panels spread out around the ship.  They don’t generate a ton of juice but every little bit helps, as do the 25,000 LED light bulbs used onboard. 

What I found most cool was what they did with the hull of the ship.  The hull is coated with a non-toxic silicone to create less friction with the water.  The coating also reduces the growth of barnacles and algae on the ship, which helps reduce the chances of transporting an invasive species into a habitat it shouldn’t be in.  (Like the Zebra Mussels that are creating havoc throughout the Great Lakes.)  

As for physical design, they moved the longitudinal center of buoyancy forward to create smaller angles in the aft of the ship, resulting in smoother flow of water to the propeller.   They also put a kind of reverse spoiler on the stern to help reduce drag.  More than 90 wind tunnel and water tank tests were done to help design a hull that is 30 percent more fuel efficient than older ships.  That’s a huge reduction on greenhouse gases AND a huge cost savings to the bottom line.  (Though like just about any large oceangoing vessel, Celebrity Solstice still runs on diesel.   A lot of it.) 

Oh, and the ship also has a seaworthy lawn with real grass.  Its more of a novelty than an environmental initiative, but it does bring a literal accent to a ship that’s trying — and succeeding — to be a little greener.

–Rob Marciano, CNN

From the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual conference in Roanoke, Virginia:

Is nuclear power making a comeback?

After being battered by its own missteps, near-calamities, strong opposition and financial overruns, the nuclear power industry is showing increased signs of emerging from a three-decade coma in the U.S.

Many are giving a second look to the U.S.. nuke industry, including longtime skeptics on the lookout for alternatives to fossil fuels.  Here at SEJ’s annual conference, there’s a livelier-than-usual discussion about nuclear power as a part of the solution to America’s energy woes.  One of the most prominent voices here calling for a nuclear power revival was R.K. Pachauri, who as Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore last year.

Right now, the U.S. gets just under 20% of its electricity from nukes, and about half from coal.  Natural gas is good for nearly another 20% of energy generation, with oil, hydro, wind, and solar contributing most of the last 10%.  To listen to the rosy projections a half century ago, nuclear would have provided power “too cheap to meter” from over 400 reactors by the year 2000.

We topped out at just beyond 100 reactors total when Wall Street got cold feet from the risk, the opposition, and the above-average costs of boiling water by splitting atoms.  The 1979 near-meltdown at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania put the chill on the industry, and the disaster at the Soviet reactor in Chernobyl, Ukraine seven years later brought on the deep freeze.  Nuclear advocates didn’t help their cause by acting like the shark-denying mayor of Amity Island in the movie “Jaws.”  No new reactor orders were placed in the U.S. for three decades.

But the permit requests are trickling in, and in this election season, the candidates are hopping aboard the nukewagon:   Obamas cautiously supports new licensing (his home state of Illinois hosts eleven reactors, more than any other state).  McCain gets more specific, targeting 45 new reactors by the year 2030 — a goal many say is unrealistic.   With the industry in cold shutdown and steel manufacturing pulling up stakes in the U.S., we don’t make reactors any more, and would have to wait in a long, long line to order reactor vessels from the steelworks in Japan.

The nuke industry’s arguments are piling up: Thirty years of relatively safe operation with no major incidents; improving technology; and a measure of liberation from fossil fuels, imports, and greenhouse-gas emissions.  Its public front is now a lot more polished than back in the Mayor-from-“Jaws” days, and they’re much better positioned to argue against nuclear opponents, some of whom are falling back on hidebound, reactionary, dubious arguments. 

But the questions haven’t gone away:

The industry still has no answers to ensure safe storage of nuclear waste, potentially dangerous for thousands of years.  Britain and France reprocess spent fuel and re-use the recoverable material, but the reprocessing facilities at Sellafield, UK and La Hague, France have left a messy environmental legacy.  For the U.S., the designated site is Yucca Mountain, Nevada.   Overruns at the Yucca Mountain site are measured in the billions, and the delays are into the decades, with commercial nukes continuing to store their own waste on site across the country.   And the desert site north of Las Vegas has a powerful home-state foe in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, so there’s little chance of action there soon.

The world is a more dangerous place than it was 30 years ago.  Spreading nuclear fuel always leaves the risk of spreading nuclear weapons to those who would be eager to use them.

Also, many nuclear arguments overlook the continuing, shameful legacy of uranium mining.  Los Angeles Times reporter Judy Pasternak did a remarkable series of stories last year on the widespread damage to human health and the environment in the US Southwest last year.

So what’s your take?   Is it a fair trade to swap the risks for a weapon against global warming and an increase in electrical capacity?  Or are nukes still too hot and costly to revive?

–Peter Dykstra Executive Producer, CNN Science, Tech, & Weather

My part of the country is recovering from re-living the gas lines of the 1970s.

Thanks to Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, refinery shutdowns brought gas lines back to much of the Southeast U.S. Here in the Atlanta area, most stations were shut down for the past few weeks, and when one got a rare delivery, the tanker truck driver attracted petroleum paparazzis — drivers who follow a delivery truck to its destination. Long story short: Although the gas crisis has eased, it’s changed people’s behavior, and really gotten inside everyone’s head.

Along comes a book that recounts four decades of good intentions and failures in US energy policy. A Declaration of Energy Independence, by former Energy Department official Jay Hakes, is in equal parts a prescription for U.S. energy self-sufficiency, and a pageant of recounting the errors of the past seven Presidential administrations. The book does a good job of staying readable, with Hakes navigating between the dense economics and policy-wonk detail that are a part of our ongoing energy drama. He points out the sins of Republicans and Democrats alike, with each President back to Richard Nixon promising energy independence and then dropping the ball.

Hakes is most charitable to Jimmy Carter, whose earnest and early embrace of conservation and alternative energy was lost in the Reagan Revolution. (Note that Hakes’s day job is running the Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta). But he also gives a nod to Ronald Reagan, whose early policies won a short-lived drop in US oil imports. The Reagan Era also saw abrupt reversals in alternative and conservation programs spawned under Nixon, Ford, and Carter.

The author also connects the indisputable dots between oil imports and U.S. foreign policy adventures, from support for the Shah of Iran, the Iranian revolution and hostage-taking that helped bring down Carter, and the subsequent support of Saddam Hussein. Back when Iraq and Iran were at war, we were for Saddam before we were against him. Most telling and prophetic is a quote from President Eisenhower, who said half a century ago that “should a crisis arise (in) Mid East oil, we would have to use force.”

The back half of the book focuses not on the sins of the past but on the path to the future. Both liberals and conservatives need to get over their reflexive impulses, says Hakes: The left has to stop demonizing corporations that hold many of the keys to solutions, and recognize that the free market just might have a role in fixing this; the right has to stop viewing any effort to challenge fossil fuels as a sinister conspiracy from Al Gore’s Secret Mountain Laboratory, and keep an open mind to energy taxes as another path to solution.

Hakes calls for making energy conservation a “patriotic duty” (I think I recall that from many past good intentions), increasing energy storage capacity, and starting over on how we deal with our cars.

–Peter Dykstra, Executive Producer CNN Science, Tech & Weather