Any of you guys plan on attending this? Last I heard the estimated cost of the clean up is at 3 billion.

https://www.mobilebaykeeper.org/coalash

It’s absolutely sickening what the State of Alabama lets large corporations do to the environment. Huge coal ash pond in the Delta and let’s don’t forget about the Superfund site we have as well.

I’m not a fan of al com but here’s a good article about what is coal ash and it’s benefits for construction products before the wetting process. The plant Barry has been the main topic of discussion on talk radio the past few days.


https://www.al.com/news/2020/12/ala...-grows-to-33-billion.html?outputType=amp

Y’all want to see what happens when coal ash goes wrong? Google the TVA ash release up in East Tennessee.

They had a bunch it buried in some kind of membrane off the end of the runway in Asheville. Had an area marked off where I couldn’t drive ground rods. Had to use big square copper plates. Suited me cause we having to drive the rods 80-90 feet.

Coal ash destroyed some beautiful areas Tennessee.

Link

Everyone needs to understand that at that time all these plants were built, ash ponds were considered the best way to store the residual ash.

Southern Company has and already is spending Billions and Billions of $$$$$ cleaning up ash left over from many years of providing cheap, reliable power to the Southeast.

Let's face it, everyone wants clean, reliable power, but not everyone wants to deal with the dirty side of it. Basically you have:

1. Coal, where you have to deal with emissions and ash. We have been working our asses off for about 40+ years dealing with all the emissions and now we are working on dealing with the ash. For instance at just one plant in Georgia near the Coosa river, we are about to demolish the plant and put in solar panels in its place. We are going to move 4 million cubic yards of ash to a land fill that we purchased. That works out to about 275,000 dump truck loads. Wrap your head around that... And that's just one small plant. The saving grace of coal plants is that coal is cheap and has stable prices. The carbon emissions will kill all the remaining coal plants. So you won't have to worry about cheap, reliable power for long...

2. Natural Gas, where you have to deal with some emissions, and volatile gas prices. So if natural gas goes through the roof, then the customer ultimately pays the price. We have designed these plants to burn extremely clean and run extremely efficiently, but we still have to deal with the carbon emissions, and to that end we are currently working on major projects to sequester the carbon back into the ground at these plants. It's a major endeavor, but it's the only hope to save the natural gas plants. You may not have to worry about them for very long either.

3. Nuclear, where the fuel is cheap, but you have astronomical capital costs involved in building one. We are in the process of building the first two new nuclear plants since the 3 Mile Island incident over 40 years ago, and it has been a tough go of it. These are really our country's only hope so we need them all to work. All the other power utilities are watching us to see if we can make a go of it. Failure is not an option. There is no way that I see where we can power our industry using just solar, hydro and wind. Yet with Nuclear plants you still have to deal with the waste and nobody and I mean NOBODY want's that in their backyard.

4. Renewables, of course the Liberal know nothings would have you believe that these are some kind of panacea for all our energy problems, but that is simply not the case. As we have recently witnessed in Texas, everyone want's cheap, clean and reliable power and unless you use every arrow in your quiver you are going to have a difficult time getting there. There are energy storage and performance issues with wind and solar, that are going to be difficult to overcome if, like the Greenies would have you believe, solar and wind will eventually be our primary energy source for homes, businesses and industry.

All that is to say that, it's not the power utilities that created the ash problem, it's human beings that created the ash problem. Thousands of utility company engineers are working very hard to solve the problem with a minimal impact to the customers.

I have been working for 40 years... Not on new power plants, but on designing and building equipment that cleans up existing ones. In that time that all these power plants have been making upgrades to clean themselves up, how much as your power bill gone up relative to other bills that you have?

Take a look at cell phone service, cable service and internet service. None of those "utilities" has to deal with nearly the infrastructure that the power company has to deal with, yet I would dare say that they charge as much, if not more for their services than the power company does. Where is the value there? If your TV, Cell phone and internet was cut off, you would probably end up being happier, but if your power was cut off, you would be back to living in the stone age.

I can’t see why we can’t just have Elon Musk fire the nuclear waste off into the cosmos.

This isn’t a anti coal or power company thread. We all love electricity and everything that it provides. I posted this to let the area folks know about the meeting seeing how it’s been an on going topic of conversation.

I guess I inferred some of the posts tone to imply that the ash ponds are something that the power companies did on purpose to damage the environment, and that is the furthest thing from the truth. The truth is that ash ponds were the best technology of the day to dispose of/store the ash.

And also contrary to popular belief we (The power utilities) are working harder than anyone to solve the problem, and it's costing us billions of dollars to solve it. We have been working on it for years already, ever since TVA screwed it all up, by improper maintenance of their sites. You haven't heard of an instance at one of Southern Company's plants.

I'm not sure about no instances...I didn't have to look to find one from last year

Alabama power coal ash violation

The coal ash in the delta is oil spill 2.0 waiting to happen. Would kill everything in mobile bay and make many resource toxic or unusable.

I do know that there is/was an experimental regassification plant below Childersburg. Many, many millions of dollars went into it, joint effort with SC, Babcock and DOE. Not sure how much was actually implemented to the fossil fuel plants existing. I do know that the OEM company that I worked for, the compressor had the largest revision file in history of the company.

I know I’m glad I don’t own property near a coal ash pond.

Me too...

I know there is a ton of research money going into putting the coal ash to work somehow so it no longer has to just accumulate.

There are chemical processes that can be developed to use it as ingredient for something else.

I'm oversimplifying this, but that's the best way I know to explain it.

It was built for testing and has been successful at doing that, but we have still yet to scale up the process.

It has been used in drywall and cement for a long time.

Hasn’t France and a few other European countries gone to nuclear and are kind of transitioning from green.

I know TVA spent a ton of money on their ash pond at Colbert.

France has been primarily nuclear for a long time if I remember correctly.