Word: plant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...California. Peabody Energy, the nation's largest coal company, with 2005 sales of $4.6 billion, up 28%, and earnings of $423 million, up 140%, is in acquisition mode worldwide. The Bush Administration has put down its own $2 billion bet, largely by pursuing FutureGen, a next-generation coal- fired plant promising near zero pollution emissions--all in the hope of making the nation less oil dependent...
...granddaddy of coal plants, Big Brown, built in the early 1970s in the rolling hills of east Texas, the sky is a pristine blue above two big smokestacks. That's illusory, since the plant pumps out a steady stream of can't-see-'em pollutants like nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and mercury. Inside, giant HEPA filters (which look just like a nest of vacuum bags) grab most of the solids from the coal fire. You wouldn't want to eat off the floor, but the place is clean. Even the open-pit-mining operation nearby--which has scoured...
...popped open a canister of coal, she says, to shrieks of "No, it's filthy!" from the TXU staff. "They don't see the irony," she says. "'Why would you want to touch the coal?' they asked. My response? 'Why would I want to breathe it?'" TXU estimates the plant emits 82,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, 6,700 tons of nitrogen oxide and 1,180 lbs. of mercury a year--not to mention 10 million tons of unregulated carbon dioxide. Now it wants to add a third smokestack...
...this investment to begin with," says COO Gary Smith. "We wanted a way to capitalize." Today Modern provides the region with 12 megawatts, enough to power about 20,000 homes, and plans to expand to a 35-megawatt facility. In the meantime, Modern has found a market for the plant's by-products. Since 2002 it has channeled the heat produced through insulated pipes toward greenhouses where tomatoes are grown commercially on 42 acres...
...McCarthy, who delivers a much more comprehensive apocalypse in The Road (Knopf; 241 pages), which is about half the length of Thirteen Moons but 20 times as ruthless. The scenario: a man and his son push a shopping cart with a wiggly wheel through a landscape from which all plant and animal life has been scoured by some undefined but definitive calamity--we know only of "a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions" that left survivors "sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes." Game over, and no more...