1 yr, 10 issues

March 15, 2008

* Alaska gas pipeline needs govt guarantee

January 20, 2008

* Natural gas - Alaska Highway pipeline proposal not ready for prime time

March 10, 2007

*
Alaska's Megaproject Mentality
Brian Yanity, AlaskaReport

Alaska is a big place, and has inspired some big ideas over the years. This article is about some huge projects which never came to fruition, despite some big backing by powerful interests. Here's one:

In the late 1950s, the famed physicist Edward Teller, most famous for helping the U.S. develop the hydrogen (nuclear fusion) or thermonuclear bomb, came up with a plan to detonate some of the biggest nuclear bombs of the U.S. arsenal on the Chukchi Sea coast of northwestern Alaska. Originally scheduled for the summer of 1959, the Project Chariot nuclear excavation proposal was part of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)'s Operation Plowshare, and was never carried out. Five separate thermonuclear fusion bombs (two 200-kiloton and three 20-kiloton explosives) were to be set off on a coastal site 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle, to blast out a new deepwater harbor in between the communities of Kivalina and Point Hope. Despite the fact that no one at the time could demonstrate the need of a deep-water port in this area, the AEC had the audacity to justify an expensive adventure in "geographical engineering". Although the explosions were expected to hurl radioactive fallout as high as 30,000 feet, Teller and other AEC scientists claimed that there would no human or environmental impacts whatsoever. Teller, during his commencement speech at the 1959 graduation of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said that "anything new that is big needs big people in order to get going... and big people are found in big states"... [H]e even promised that he could blast a harbor shaped like a polar bear. Around the same time, the editor of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, George Sundborg, wrote "we think the holding of a huge nuclear blast in Alaska would be a fitting overture to the new era which is opening for our state, " and that "Alaskans are being given the opportunity to 'vote' on the matter though their Chambers of Commerce." The state Chamber of Commerce soon endorsed the project, and Robert Atwood, the editor-publisher of the Anchorage Daily Times, was also a strong supporter. The Alaska House of Representatives passed a resolution in support of the project on March 9, 1959. Opposition to Project Chariot soon involved national environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society. In the beginning, relatively little opposition came from within Alaska itself, though several political leaders and local Native communities started voicing concerns as early as 1959. A handful of concerned Alaskans formed the advocacy group the Committee for the Study of Atomic Testing in Alaska in January of that year. This group sent the AEC a list of detailed questions in mid-February 1959. State and national opposition to Chariot picked up in 1961. Several University of Alaska scientists were even fired for speaking out against Project Chariot, as described in the 1994 book The Firecracker Boys by Dan O'Neill. In August 1962, nuclear debris from Nevada bomb tests was buried on the site as part of a "drinking water contamination experiment". The Project Chariot site was finally given up in 1963, by which time the AEC had spent $3 million on it. After the project's cancellation, the Anchorage Daily Times had a racist editorial about how the frontiers of atomic science had been overrun by Eskimos.

* [2006-03-12] Alaska hit by 'massive' oil spill
BBC News

March 18, 2004

Alaskan village offered prototype "nuclear battery" by Toshiba

The village of Galena, Alaska, is considering switching from its 28 cents/kWh diesel generator electricity to a Toshiba 4S micronuclear power plant. On paper, the Toshiba proposal to build a prototype plant could lower the cost of energy by more than 75 percent with little capital cost to the city. The 4S is a sodium-cooled fast spectrum reactor -- a low-pressure, self-cooling reactor. Toshiba representatives say the system is nothing like the infamous sodium-cooled nuclear power plants of the past. Rather, they characterize it as a "nuclear battery" -- self-contained and automated without any moving parts. At the heart of the 4S system is a log-sized uranium core, which would generate power for 30 years before needing to be disposed of and replaced. The company hopes to have a 4S system operational by the end of the decade.