Alcoa Warrick Power Plant (Indiana) Named Nation's Dirtiest

[hatrack]

Alcoa Warrick Operations has been named as the top polluting power plant in the nation by a recent environmental report. A total of six Indiana power plants were named among the 50 "dirtiest" in the country by the report.

"The report by the Environmental Integrity Project is intended to point out the health threat posed by power company emissions, and takes into account the raw amount of pollution released into the air as well as the total of energy generated. The report -- "Dirty Kilowatts: America's Most Polluting Power Plants" -- was compiled using data from the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration for sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, mercury and carbon dioxide. Most of the study was done using 2004 data, though Mercury ratings were based on 2002 information.

Alcoa's Warrick plant is ranked as the dirtiest plant in the country as measured by the rate of sulfur dioxide emissions, generating just over 46 pounds of sulfur dioxide per megawatt-hour of electricity (compared to an 8.3 pound average among the top 359 plants).

That ranking, however, may be misleading according to Alcoa officials. Alcoa spokesperson Sally Rideout Lambert said Alcoa does not report all of the energy produced at the plant near Yankeetown because the largest of the four generators at the site is co-owned by Vectren.

EDIT

Adding in the additional energy production into the equation would take Alcoa from the worst sulfur dioxide (SO2) polluter in the nation to the third-worst. In terms of sheer volume, the Warrick plant ranks as the 11th-worst SO2 polluter. Lambert says that since Alcoa uses most of the energy used at the plant, any new environmental upgrades on the plant's emission controls would be a cost entirely absorbed by the company. That has delayed any additional measures from being taken."

EDIT

http://www.tristate-media.com/articles/2005/05/18/warricknews/news/01dirtyalcoa.txt

Oh, THIRD-worst. That's MUCH better . . .

[phantom power]

1. I'm sure they will clean themselves up "voluntarily"

at the very earliest possible opportunity. If we'd just get out of their way, quit bogging them down with tree-hugging regulations, and give them the tax-breaks they deserve.

[hunter]

2. No, they will redefine the problem and stop keeping records.

That's always been the prefered Bush Administration method.

[phantom power]

3. Ah, yes.

If a coal plant releases mercury, but nobody measures it, did it really happen?

Very Zen, this administration.

[NNadir]

4. Three percent of the nation's electricity, as I recall, goes to aluminum.

I was informed not so long ago by an anti-environmentalist that my complaints about the steel required for solar cells was bullshit. Solar cells are framed with aluminum structures he told me. So much for the ridiculous idea that solar energy involves no risk.

No form of energy is without risk, but if we continue to use coal, our planet will be destroyed completely. You can take that to the bank.

Actually Iceland, which has huge geothermal and hydropower resources, has considered becoming a major aluminum manufacturer. This is, in my view, a good idea. It's a perfect use for this type of power. Moreover, the energy from aluminum is recoverable. Treatment of aluminum with hydroxides generates hydrogen. Of course, Iceland's hydropower resources are time limited, as the glaciers driving it will probably be gone within a few decades.

[jpak]

5. Most US aluminum smelters use electricity from hydroelectric dams -

not coal-fired power plants...

http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/of01-197/html/app2.htm

Aluminum smelters do emit perfluorcarbons (PFC's) - which are powerful greenhouse gases.

PFC emissions from aluminum smelters, however, have declined dramatically (>50%) in recent years...with 70% reductions to be achieved in the near future....

http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:c9-jy0gNetsJ:www.epa.gov/highgwp/aluminum-pfc/pdf/pfcemis.pdf+US+perfluorocarbon+emissions+aluminum+smelting+decline&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

www.world-aluminium.org/iai/ publications/documents/pfc2000.pdf

In contrast, nuclear power plants require large quantities of steel (containment vessel rebar, reactor vessels, steam generators, etc) that require coal (coke) for the primary production of iron and coal-fired electricity for electric-arc steel furnaces...

http://www.accesstoenergy.com/view/atearchive/s76a5397.htm

(note: US electric furnaces have a combined demand capacity ~7200 MW - and most of these are located in the Coal Belt).

Nuclear power plants also consume vast quantities of cement. Cement manufacture is one of the largest non-electrical industrial sources of carbon dioxide on the planet (note: cement industry CO2 emissions are derived from fossil-fuels used to heat lime kilns and CO2 released from the calcination of limestone to lime).

Unlike the aluminum used to produce PV modules, the vast majority of the steel and concrete used to build nuclear power plants is not recycled or recyclable.

Uranium enrichment plants are prodigious consumers of electricity. US uranium enrichment plants were historically located in Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee as these locations had an abundant supply of cheap coal-fired electricity. Many of the coal-fired power plants supplying electricity to US uranium enrichment plants are currently grandfathered under the Clean Air Act.

Finally, US uranium enrichment plants (historically and currently) are the single largest emitters of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons on the planet - these substances are also powerful greenhouse gases with radiative forcing potentials up to 9000 times greater than CO2.

When one cast stones, one must not live in glass houses....

(on edit: glad to know that glaciers are rersponsible geothermal energy - LOL!!!!)

[NNadir]

6. Sigh...

It is probably not worthwhile to discuss chemistry on the circumstances, but when one calcines calcium carbonate to make cement, how does it harden?

You don't know?

I didn't think so.

I love these posts.

Let me tell you how concrete works. You drive off the CO2 from calcium carbonate, and then you wet the calcium oxide thus formed, after mixing it with sand. The calcium oxide takes up a molecule of CO2. In simple stoichiometry the net carbon dioxide is zero. You drive one off, and later you take it back. The net quantity of CO2 produced is solely a function of the amount of coal or other energy consumed to make the heat to drive the CO2 off. I don't know that this amount of energy required to calcine calcium carbonate is particularly more than is required to melt the aluminum to manufacture a few million metric tons of solar cells, to schlep them out to deserts, to manufacture a few billion tons of batteries, etc, etc. Of course, in some religions, the energy costs of making and transporting solar equipment anywhere is zero, because God says so.

I had no idea though, that Greenpeace was adding to its stupidity campaigns a program of banning concrete. This is fun to know. They love to propose banning things at Greenpeace. They just don't know how to produce things. Apparently they plan to kill and/or starve or impoverish anyone who doesn't buy their silly religion. How medieval of them. How illuminatingly middle class.

Now lets read what the thread is about, if in fact, we can read. This is a thread about the dirtiest coal plant in the United States. It is owned by Alcoa. Alcoa makes aluminum.

Now I know in the solar hype religion, we do not discuss what is, we only discuss what will happen some day if every thing goes like promised in the pyschic predictions made in a pile depressingly redundant Greenpeace flyers for which people have been chopping down trees to print since the 1970's.

(I kind of like these flyers actually. They're fun, like old issues of the Watchtower in which it is explained by Jehovah's Witnesses that Hitler is the Antichrist and that Jesus will come by 1945 to restore the holy Kingdom of God.)

By the way, I would expect even a Greenpeace type, with their very poor understanding of thermodynamics, energy, chemistry, physics and arithmetic to understand that Iceland is not 100% geothermal. It is about 16-17% geothermal. 82% of the electricity generated in Iceland is hydroelectric.

http://www.nationmaster.com/country/ic/Energy&b_define=1

Thus the melting of glaciers might have some bearing on the energy situation in Iceland, not that Greenpeace types give a rat's ass about global climate change. They'd rather recite mantras about how 25% of the world's energy will come from solar cells by 2040.

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/climate-change/solutions

The other 75% of electricity in 2040 apparently will be coming directly from God. Maybe I have that wrong, though. Maybe the claim is 100%-25% = 0. Neither explanation is of much use to people who actually give a shit and know what they are talking about.

Of course, some of us who actually live on this planet know that global climate change will not start in 2040. It is happening now.

In fact, the Alcoa company, who are now manufacturing aluminum, proposed by hyped by illiterate solar hype types as a structural material to make solar cells, is talking about building a 500 MW hydroelectric plant in Iceland. It was covered in the NY Times quite some time ago. It is still discussed on line:

http://www.aluminum.org/Template.cfm?Section=Home&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=3190

Even though this dam will involve - gasp - concrete, I would think it would appeal to a solar hype type. They would fuck any river, any piece of land, the entire atmosphere in fact in service to their Watchtower type daydreams. (Do Greenpeacers do door to door canvasing yet?)

As for the energy required to enrich uranium, I am not about to discuss this here. A discussion of this issue requires a knowledge of arithmetic and would thus hardly represent a fruitful discussion under current conditions.