New Year's Resolution
New Year's Resolution
As we enter the first days of a New Year it is common that we make resolutions – promises to ourselves to improve things in the year ahead. Looking back over the past year we see where we had trouble, where things went wrong, and what we want to change. The same applies to our work.
What Went Wrong
Fifteen homes like this one in Harriman, Tenn., were flooded with fly ash sludge after a storage pond wall broke. Click image for full article. Photo: The New York Times
Tragically, on Christmas Eve, a retaining dam broke at a coal fired power plant in Tennessee and released one of the nation’s largest spills of coal ash sludge over hundreds of acres of land and waterways. The spill took place at the Kingston Fossil Plant, about 40 miles west of Knoxville on the banks of the Emory River, which feeds into the Clinch River, and then the Tennessee River just downstream. The spill released a torrent of 300 million gallons of sludge and water engulfing 15 homes in its path – quite a Christmas present for those terrified families!!
Federal studies have long shown coal ash to contain significant quantities of heavy metals like arsenic, lead and selenium, which can cause cancer and neurological problems. One of our donors working with the Sierra Club in Michigan informed us that they are fighting to prevent the construction of eight new coal fired plants on the shores of the Great Lakes. Imagine such a spill into the Great Lakes system which contains 84% of our nation’s surface fresh water. Truly it would be a national disaster.
Let Us Resolve
Demonstration prototype now under development.
As human populations grow and develop, the demand for power across the globe continues to expand at a dramatic rate. Our response as a nation, sadly, seems to be to do more of what we’ve always done – more coal fired plants, burn more fossil fuel...faster. It is time to dedicate ourselves to finding a new way; one free of the risk of toxic pollution and environmental damage. Imagine... rather than a mammoth central power plant generating tons of hazardous fly ash per day, a smaller unit. Imagine a device the size of a suitcase, sitting silently outside your house or in your basement utility room. This device safely produces all the electricity your home will ever need, without pollution, without connection to a central utility, for generations to come.
This is our vision at The Orion Project. We currently have two independent inventor groups working to deliver prototype units that demonstrate this vision is within our reach, not by 2050, but next year!! Please help us to bring this better way into reality. Let us resolve to leave the dangerous and antiquated methods of power production in the past. Let this be the year that a new possibility unfolds - of sustainable, non-polluting, affordable, locally generated power for all. Please donate today to help bring this vision to life in 2009.
“To get what we’ve never had, we must do what we’ve never done.”
-Anonymous