Free Republic

Natural gas may be plentiful, cheap and inviting at the moment. But the fracking process to get it still fans the flames of environmental policy clashes.At the Wall Street Journal’s ECO:nomics conference outside Santa Barbara, Calif., drillers and environmentalists debated over whether fracking posed a danger to the communities they serve. Drillers said that the amount of natural gas available –4,000 trillion cubic feet — can’t be ignored.“There is so much there, which is shown by what prices are,” said Edward Cohen, chief executive of Atlas Energy .But Paul Gallay, president of the environmental group Riverkeeper, challenged Cohen and Aubrey...

A decision rendered by Obama Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, fortunately reversed by the Supreme Court on April 1, 2009, could have been extravagantly costly to American consumers, according to the Steve Milloy's authoritative Junkscience.Com. Charging that her nomination represents a potential threat to U.S. Consumers and to the economy in terms of energy and the environment, Milloy reported on her 2007 Second Circuit decision in Riverkeeper, Inc. V. EPA 475 F. 3d 83' Milloy wrote that in her ruling Judge Sotomayor sided with "extreme green groups" who had sued the Environmental Protection Agency because the agency permitted cost-benefit analysis...

...The reactor type used at Chernobyl was inherently unsafe — it has never been used in this country and never will. Above all else, it lacked a containment structure, designed to contain radiation should everything else fail. The only other meltdown in history came at Three Mile Island — whose containment dome completely contained all the radiation released by the meltdown. Radioactive gases were then control-released into the atmosphere over the course of a week. Sounds scary? Had you been standing at the perimeter fence at TMI during this period, you would have received about the same radiological dose as...

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, visited Westchester County today to speak on behalf of one of his new clients, Entergy Nuclear Northeast, as it prepares for an antiterrorism drill at its Indian Point nuclear power complex. The visit was part of an elaborate presentation by Entergy that blended the thrills of a summer action picture — an M-16 semiautomatic rifle firing blanks at an Indian Point security officer — and Mr. Giuliani's star power. It seemed designed to take back some of the attention that has lately focused on Entergy's critics, who have attacked the nuclear...