Electricity generation accounts for 40% of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion in the United States. Section 111 of the Clean Air Act (CAA) allows for greenhouse gas emission regulation by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In June, 2014, EPA issued the Clean Power Plan that proposes regulation of existing power plants via a “best system of emission reduction” or BSER. Reducing...

The optimization is one of the challenging problems in power system. The optimization sometimes is mainly restricted to the minimization of the operating cost. However, the operation of power plants, mostly thermal units, results into various types of emissions like SOx, NOx and COx etc. The environmental concern dictates the minimization of the emissions by the thermal plant. Individually, if ...

Building “disaster-resilient” rather than “disaster-resistant” cities/communities requires the development of response capabilities to natural disasters and subsequent recovery. This study devises a new method to measure resilience via recovery capability to validate indicators from social, economic, infrastructural, and environmental domains. The pollutant discharge data (waste-water and waste...

reliability investigation has always been one of the most important issues in power systems planning. the outages rate in power system reflects the fact that more attentions should be paid on reliability indices to supply consumers with uninterrupted power. using reliability indices in economic dispatch problem may lead to the system load demand with high reliability and low probability of powe...

Policymakers have often backed alternative energy technologies, e.g., nuclear power, due to their relatively low operating costs and emissions. However, they have also been quick to respond to public perceptions about the safety of such plants by suspending construction or even decommissioning existing facilities. We address public concerns about physical plant risks along with stochastic marke...

Spycher et al., in their nationwide cohort study, found ‘little evidence’ of an association between residence near nuclear power plants (NPPs) and the risk of leukaemia or any childhood cancer. In their discussion about potential causes of this small evidence the authors state that the exposure to radioactivity set free by the nuclear facilities is unlikely to explain an excess in cancer risk i...

Photovoltaics (PVs) consists of the harvesting of energy from sunlight and its conversion into electrical power. This technology is being increasingly recognized as one of the key components in our future global energy scenario. Limited fossil fuel resources and steadily increasing costs of supplying fossil fuels to the market induce a natural limit where renewable energies will begin to kick i...

We measured the 14( content of atmospheric methane at a 200-m-high sampling station in The Netherlands. Combined with trajectories and a transport model, it is possible to estimate the 14CH4 emissions from nuclear power plants in northwestern Europe. We demonstrate here two different methods of analyzing the data: forward modeling and an inverse method. Our data suggest that the emissions from ...

The events of March 2011 at the nuclear power complex in Fukushima, Japan, raised questions about the safe operation of nuclear power plants, with early retirement of existing nuclear power plants being debated in the policy arena and considered by regulators. Also, the future of building new nuclear power plants is highly uncertain. Should nuclear power policies become more restrictive, one po...

Due to its high short-term variability, solar-photovoltaic power in isolated industrial grids faces a challenge of grid reliability. Storage systems can provide support but come at cost that requires carefully evaluating capacity needs. Battery sizing methodologies are now the focus many studies, with global upward trend detailed modelling and complex optimization. However, although solar varia...