By VERNON ROBISON
Moapa Valley Progress
Though power production at Reid Gardner station in Moapa has been reduced to the use of just one unit, the plant has still been a hive of activity over the past year. Through 2015, crews at the coal burning plant were busy with cleaning up and reclaiming the area, decommissioning units 1, 2 and 3 which were shut down late in 2014, and preparing for the final shutdown of Unit 4 which is scheduled to take place in two years.
One of the major accomplishments for 2015 was the reclamation of four more settling ponds which were located along the Muddy River channel in the flood plain.
“It has been our long-term goal to take those ponds out of service, get the solids removed from them and have them remediated,” said Reid Gardner Interim Plant Director Jason Hammons. “This has been an ongoing process since 2010. Originally we had 11 ponds along the Muddy River. As of December, all but 4 have been closed out and remediated.”
Many of the ponds that were reclaimed last year were located on the northwest of the plant parcel, across the railroad tracks from the plant and adjacent to the Moapa Band of Paiutes tribal village.
The remediation process begins with the ponds being closed with no material being added to them. They then are allowed to sit for a time to allow the liquids to evaporate leaving the solid waste byproducts of the coal generation process dry in the pond bed. Once fully dry, crews come in with heavy equipment and remove all of the solids.
“We have removed 1.25 million cubic yards of solids from the ponds that were previously closed,” Hammons said.
Once removed, the materials are relocated to a lined landfill which is located up on the mesa just south of the plant, well outside of the flood plain.
“When we put the material in the landfill, we are required to put a cap over it using a clean Type 2 material,” said Hammonds. “That has to be done repeatedly. If we are not actively placing material in the landfill, it is capped and contained.”
Once all of the materials are removed from the ponds, a palliative dust control material is sprayed over the former pond to control the dust, Hammond said. Then the areas are re-seeded so that native desert plants will begin growing again there.
“In similar pond areas that we reclaimed back in 2010 we are starting to see the same type of plants that you’d see out across the desert,” Hammons said. “It takes some time, but eventually there are small plants that start to take hold.”
Much of the work of reclaiming the ponds has been done by local contractor Eagle View Construction. “We have been pleased to work with a local contractor on that work,” Hammons said. “There have been quite a few locals that have been kept busy at work on that, even though they don’t work directly for the plant.”
As of the end of 2015, there are only four ponds remaining in the flood plain. Each of these have already been closed and are being allowed to dry out. Hammons said he expects that those ponds will be completely remediated by 2017, when Unit 4 is decommissioned.
The plant has maintained two settling ponds to service Unit 4 until it is decommissioned. But those ponds are also located up on the mesa, outside of the river channel and farther away from the tribal neighbors.
Hammons said that work has continued throughout 2015 on the demolition of Units 1, 2 and 3. Crews have removed three large cooling towers on the decommissioned units. They have also continued to work through the many details of disconnecting the various electrical systems of the old units.
“We have done quite a bit of work,” Hammons said. “But for the average commuter looking down from I-15, you probably wouldn’t recognize that any change has happened at all.”
The real visible change will happen when demolition starts on the smoke stacks and other more visible plant structures. But NV Energy has decided to wait on that larger demolition work until after 2017 when Unit 4 is also decommissioned.
All this, and continuing to run the plant has kept the staff busy, Hammons said. The plant personnel is down to about 50 people including administrative staff. And that is about where it will stay until the final decommissioning date, Hammons said.
“We are running now at about the minimum number of employees that we need,” Hammons said. “This is about as low as we can comfortably go to safely and efficiently operate Reid Gardner.”
Hammons is proud to say that throughout the gradual downsizing at the plant, there have been no layoffs or firings of NV Energy personnel. Most of the former employees from Reid Gardner have gone on to become operators and maintenance people at natural gas plants in the southern Nevada region, he said.
“As that shift has taken place, there are a lot of other facilities in the area that have been able to benefit from the excellent Reid Gardner employees who have relocated to work there,” Hammons said.
