Abrahm Lustgarten reports that football-field-length conveyors constantly feed it piles of coal, hauled 78 miles by train from where huge shovels and mining equipment scraped it out of the ground shortly before. Then, like a medieval mortar and pestle machine, wheels crush the stone against a large bowl into a smooth powder that is sprayed into tremendous furnaces some of the largest ever built. Those furnaces are stoked to 2,000 degrees, heating tubes of steam to produce enough pressure to drive an 80-ton rod of steel to spin faster than the speed of sound, converting the heat of the fires into electricity.
Every hour the Navajo generators spin, the plant spews more climate-warming gases into the atmosphere than almost any other single facility in the U.S. Alone, it accounts for 29 percent of Arizona emissions from energy generation. The Navajo station burns 15 tons of coal each minute, 24 hours each day, every day. The burned coal sends out plumes of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury, lead and other metals. The plume produces some 16 million tons of carbon dioxide every year. Its builders knew that the Navajo Generating Station, which began being constructed in 1969, would cause significant air pollution. An early government analysis warned that burning so much coal would degrade the regional air quality and federal scientists suggested that the Navajo plant and other coal plants in the region could turn the general area into a national sacrifice area. But for more than a decade, the pollution went largely unchecked.
Climate change had not been identified yet, and the other option for getting water into central Arizona by damming the Grand Canyon seemed worse. Most simply put, the Navajo plant and all the pollution it caused became a form of subsidy for cheap water for the region. So, why not build a nuclear power plant to supply the electricity and water for the area, and likely at less cost to the taxpayers and to the environment.
Original working URL: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/navajo-generating-station-powers-and-paralyzes-the-western-u-s/?WT.mc_id=SA_SP_20150622
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