Hacker News Reader

Comment by nck4222 | Hacker News Reader

>But as pipeline projects in New England face legal delays and public opposition

They're talking about the northern pass, a proposed 200 mile pipeline from Canada, through the White mountain national forest in to New England.

I know the region has energy and cost issues, but there has to be a better way than to put protected national land at risk.

We also recently had a "catastrophic failure", that caused a dozen explosions in homes, killed one, and caused 40 house fires.

It didn't rally a lot of support for natural gas expansion.

View on HN

> there has to be a better way than to put protected national land at risk.

Please explain where the high risk is ... explosions in the middle of nowhere aren't going to hurt much, and if their are leaks, the gas will simply vent into the atmosphere rather than cause the kind of damage that oil spills do.

Seems like firing up coal plants in heavily populated regions (the current alternative) is worse. In terms of heat and power generation in cloudy regions, natural gas is vastly superior to everything except nuclear for cleanliness and co2/gigawatt-hour... and if cost is considered, it beats out nuclear too.

Natural gas leaks kill trees. It's a big problem around Boston. E.g.: https://arlington.wickedlocal.com/news/20180726/guest-column... and https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2015/11/27/gas-leak...

This is not a problem for a gas transmission pipeline. Gas leaks are a problem for low-pressure (a few psi) distribution pipes. There is simply too much pipe to find and repair every leak, and low pressure means low leak flow rate.

A gas transmission pipeline is hundreds of times higher pressure, they will shut down a pipeline as soon as a leak is detected.

And based on my brief research on this specific pipeline (which appears to have been scrapped), the gas was to be used for power generation. There was also a proposal for a 320KV transmission line to import power instead, which appears to be going ahead. Personally, I would 1000x rather have a gas pipeline transit my land than a 320kv transmission line. Residential proximity to HV transmission lines increases risk of leukaemia ... at least gas lines can be monitored for leaks & repaired. The people who scuttled this seem to ignore that the dense urban development that they love requires importation of energy in some form from far-flung places.

>Residential proximity to HV transmission lines increases risk of leukaemia

"Everything is correlated." The land next to HV lines is cheaper, poorer people have higher mutational load, therefore a higher cancer rate. You get a real, authentic correlation between power lines and cancer, without power lines actually directly causing cancer.

This is not a problem for a gas transmission pipeline

Actually, it is.

I used to live very near a major natural gas pipeline in New England and each year the operators would send us a leaflet in the mail reminding us not to be alarmed by the helicopters that would fly up and down the route because they were just looking for dead or yellowing trees, which were the first signs of a pipeline leak.

They should fix the leaking broken pipes under cities before adding new ones. I realize they're different things but there are plenty of reasons not to trust energy companies to maintain infrastructure adequately.

Any public company has an incentive to cut costs, so I'd imagine that a federal company would have higher standards.

The high risk is destroying forest land without fully realizing the extent of the impact it will cause.

Building and maintaining it is part of the equation too, and that will be destructive. Glad it’s not up to me to decide on.

Ironically said Catastrophic Failure was caused by refusal to make regular steady improvements to ancient infrastructure.

The northern pass is an electrical project

wasn't that like wooden pipelines from the 18th century or something?

True, but what really moves people is price (and better cooking experience, not that electrics aren’t much better than before). People write off those gas explosions to old infra problems.

You say that as if old infra problems are little more thsn a minor inconvenience, and not a ticking time bomb...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com