Our World

Power Plants & Air Pollution-Thoughts

We are actually driving home right now and we’re passing through Big Lake and from this city I can see a large power plant that it is emitting huge amounts of gray smoke into the air. The amount of smoke that’s being emitted from this power plant is far beyond what we see coming from Sartell at International Paper. This is a large, thick cloud that just blankets the sky. Interestingly though at a certain point the smoke trails off and the sky returns. Out of sight out of mind right? Far from the truth. Imagine the contamination in the air even though we can’t the trail of smoke anymore. To help illustrate my point, I was able to grab my mom’s camera as we drove by the XCEL power plant and snap a picture of what I’m talking about. Now, power plants are a large scale source of pollution, but just imagine what happens when we combine all our smaller sources of air pollution such as car emissions. Also, we drove by the nuclear plant in Monticello on our way down to the twin cities on Saturday. The amount of contamination that was coming from that plant was far beyond the XCEL power plant. Larger, thicker, and whiter clouds of smoke took over a large area of the sky there as well, but remember that nuclear energy is cleaner than a power plant that runs by coal. Knowing the danger of nuclear power however, would this really be a safe alternative to the coal burning as pictured above?

posted by Kevin Hurd @ 2/19/2006 07:17:00 PM