Just a mile and a half west of our house is the "Nipsco" Bailly coal fired generating station. The photo above is Google satellite map showing distance from our house. Nipsco ("Northern Indiana Public Service Corporation"), our local electric and gas utility company, just retired the plant at the end of May 2018. It seems like things may be just a bit quieter now, but it always has been a very quiet place anyway. Never saw or smelled anything from it, but it seems good to know it has closed.
Here is a Northwest Indiana Times article about the plant closing: NWI Times article
Nipsco still has two other coal fired plants: one in Michigan City (Indiana), about 8 miles east of us, with its distinctive parabolic cooling tower sticking out on the eastern boundary of the National Park. We cruised around the Michigan City plant on the evening harbor cruise on our anniversary last summer. Romantic, no? The other Nipsco coal plant is inland to the south near the tiny town of Wheatfield, just south of Kouts, where we used to go to church. We would see the stacks as we drove down highway 49 to Kouts.
The Bailly plant was 604 MW, including two units: A 190 MW opened in 1962, and a 413 MW unit opened in 1968, when I was a freshman in engineering school.
Around the time the second unit was starting up, Nipsco proposed building a 644 MW nuclear generating plant at Bailly, a Boiling Water Reactor, which apparently started construction in 1974, but met opposition and got cancelled.
Here's the wikipedia article on the nuke plant: Bailly Wik
Now, the Bailly plant site has only a backup gas turbine peaking plant, a peaceful neighbor down the beach.
If they had gone ahead with the nuclear plant, we could have it for our neighbor. I think I'd rather have a nuclear plant there, than a coal plant. A few, small, rare releases of a little radiation would be preferable to continuously emitting tons of carbon and other junk.
Lyn and I went to a presentation on the Nike missile program at the National Park visitor center last year. The National Park HQ was a Nike missile base back in the 1960s.. On the map above, it's just south of us, across hwy 12 (the clearing south of of 12, west of the road that goes from Dune Acres).
Nike missiles were intended to defend against Soviet bombers. Some Nikes even had nuclear warheads, so they only had to get close to a bomber to destroy it. Now that's a scary thought: Nuclear tipped missiles launching out over Lake Michigan.
Just south of that is the preserved Bailly Homestead farm of a pioneer local family. The Bailly generating plant was named for Joseph Bailly, a trapper and early settler.
And that's some local history from these parts. From an early trapper, settler, farmer, to nuclear missiles.
Seems like I lived through the coal age, the nuclear age, and the natural gas age. I start to feel like a relic, looking back on past, obsolete technology.
When I began my engineering career in 1972, I worked for the engineering/construction firm Bechtel, designing nuclear power plants. I worked on a plant in Georgia called Vogtle until the client ran out of funds and the plant was shelved for a few years, then on the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, units 2 & 3 (which we musically referred to as "SONGS"). Those units got completed, and operated for 30 years or so, but were recently decommissioned after a failed repair.
Then I worked on Korea Nuclear Units 5 & 6. Technology export was a big part of the project. We were training Korean engineers while we were designing the plant. I think those units are still running. South Korea is mostly nuclear powered, and in turn is now exporting nuclear technology.
My father in law also worked for Bechtel, as a project manager. He had completed some big coal fired generating plants, like Four Corners and Mojave. The coal age was ending, though. His generation, of coal fired generation, was ending. Nuclear was taking over. I thought nuclear was the coming thing. Seemed like a good thing at the time. We thought we were doing a good thing for the planet. Still think so.
But then the "Three Mile Island" nuclear plant accident happened in Pennsylvania.
I saw that nuclear power had a rough future in the US, and left Bechtel for the City of Burbank, where, among other projects, we "repowered" an old retired oil fired steam turbine using waste heat from an existing gas turbine, getting 10MW for "free" from heat that was otherwise just gas turbine exhaust. Unfortunately, after I left Burbank, they didn't much run it, but it did provide backup local generating capacity that facilitated negotiating for good deals on purchased power. Using that strategy, they could buy excess coal fired power from those distant plants in Arizona, Colorado, and Utah (some of them built by my father in law) cheaper than they could generate locally, even with the highly efficient plant I built for them.
When I left Burbank, I went to UCLA, where they had ambitions of building a similar "combined cycle cogeneration" plant, to also produce steam and chilled water from waste heat. We did build that plant: a 49MW cogeneration central chiller plant, that today is central to UCLA's operation. UCLA now generates most of its own power, replacing power formerly purchased from LADWP.
When I began my engineering career in 1972, I worked for the engineering/construction firm Bechtel, designing nuclear power plants. I worked on a plant in Georgia called Vogtle until the client ran out of funds and the plant was shelved for a few years, then on the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, units 2 & 3 (which we musically referred to as "SONGS"). Those units got completed, and operated for 30 years or so, but were recently decommissioned after a failed repair.
Then I worked on Korea Nuclear Units 5 & 6. Technology export was a big part of the project. We were training Korean engineers while we were designing the plant. I think those units are still running. South Korea is mostly nuclear powered, and in turn is now exporting nuclear technology.
My father in law also worked for Bechtel, as a project manager. He had completed some big coal fired generating plants, like Four Corners and Mojave. The coal age was ending, though. His generation, of coal fired generation, was ending. Nuclear was taking over. I thought nuclear was the coming thing. Seemed like a good thing at the time. We thought we were doing a good thing for the planet. Still think so.
But then the "Three Mile Island" nuclear plant accident happened in Pennsylvania.
I saw that nuclear power had a rough future in the US, and left Bechtel for the City of Burbank, where, among other projects, we "repowered" an old retired oil fired steam turbine using waste heat from an existing gas turbine, getting 10MW for "free" from heat that was otherwise just gas turbine exhaust. Unfortunately, after I left Burbank, they didn't much run it, but it did provide backup local generating capacity that facilitated negotiating for good deals on purchased power. Using that strategy, they could buy excess coal fired power from those distant plants in Arizona, Colorado, and Utah (some of them built by my father in law) cheaper than they could generate locally, even with the highly efficient plant I built for them.
When I left Burbank, I went to UCLA, where they had ambitions of building a similar "combined cycle cogeneration" plant, to also produce steam and chilled water from waste heat. We did build that plant: a 49MW cogeneration central chiller plant, that today is central to UCLA's operation. UCLA now generates most of its own power, replacing power formerly purchased from LADWP.
So, I spent much of my career building alternatives to coal-fired electric generation, with limited success.
Could nuclear come back, to save the planet from climate change? https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-nuclear-power-climate-change_us_5bbe08b0e4b01470d057b4c0
I don't think I will live to see that.
The sad missed opportunity, is that the one way Trump really could "Make America Great Again" is by convincing his loyal throngs that climate change is real, that the regulatory shackles should be released from America's nuclear industry, and America should lead rebuilding a nuclear world . A few of his tweets, and some key appointees, is all it would take. Trump's supporters would lap it up, and some of his opposition would agree..
He could find common ground between industrialists and environmentalists. And he alone possibly could find that common ground. Think of that: Trump could save the planet. I don't think any other president will be in the position to do that. But I think his window is closing, and he shows no sign of that sort of leadership. Instead, he's tilting at windmills, fighting a losing battle to save coal, and winning the battle to kill the planet.
Nipsco's stated plan is to turn to wind and solar to replace coal. They plan to phase out the other two coal plants by 2028. I hope they succeed. My guess is, they will end up with a lot of natural gas firing, or end up delaying the coal phase-out, but we can hope. There are a lot of wind turbines south of here. Gonna need way more. Might work. But this old nuclear engineer feels a bit like a fossil.
Could nuclear come back, to save the planet from climate change? https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-nuclear-power-climate-change_us_5bbe08b0e4b01470d057b4c0
I don't think I will live to see that.
The sad missed opportunity, is that the one way Trump really could "Make America Great Again" is by convincing his loyal throngs that climate change is real, that the regulatory shackles should be released from America's nuclear industry, and America should lead rebuilding a nuclear world . A few of his tweets, and some key appointees, is all it would take. Trump's supporters would lap it up, and some of his opposition would agree..
He could find common ground between industrialists and environmentalists. And he alone possibly could find that common ground. Think of that: Trump could save the planet. I don't think any other president will be in the position to do that. But I think his window is closing, and he shows no sign of that sort of leadership. Instead, he's tilting at windmills, fighting a losing battle to save coal, and winning the battle to kill the planet.
Nipsco's stated plan is to turn to wind and solar to replace coal. They plan to phase out the other two coal plants by 2028. I hope they succeed. My guess is, they will end up with a lot of natural gas firing, or end up delaying the coal phase-out, but we can hope. There are a lot of wind turbines south of here. Gonna need way more. Might work. But this old nuclear engineer feels a bit like a fossil.
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