As rain, wind and thunder raged outside of the Moapa Recreation Center on Monday evening, October 4, there was a tempest roiling inside as well. The Southern Nevada Health District (SNHD) was holding a public workshop regarding new proposals for the Reid Gardner Power Station. The large gymnasium was packed with members of the Moapa Paiute Band, residents of Moapa and Virgin Valleys, environmental activists and their lawyers, NV Energy employees and SNHD board members. For the better part of three hours, while the elements pounded the metal building outside, a discussion about an NV Energy application to modify and expand an existing waste facility at Reid Gardner raged on. Unfortunately, very little of the discussion stayed focused on the real world or, for that matter, even the true topic at hand.
First of all, it is not disputed that the subject of public health was, and rightly should have been, of prime importance in the discussion. The health concerns raised by Moapa tribal leaders deserve a very careful hearing. These folks, who must live immediately adjacent to the plant, should be given proper heed and their needs and concerns should be fully accommodated. If ash and other waste from Reid Gardner are indeed being blown by the frequent desert winds into nearby reservation homes causing health problems, it is a serious matter that must be investigated and addressed. NV Energy owes the Paiutes that at least.
But NV Energy officials say they have been working with the tribe to remedy these issues. At least in part, that is what this application before the SNHD board will do. After all, granting the requested permits can only help with the Paiute concerns. If the permit is granted, the ash dump will be moved much further away from the Reservation and hazardous solid wastes, now being stored in ponds located just a few hundred yards from Paiute homes, would be removed to the new landfill a couple of miles away. In that respect, it would seem that this is a good step for the Paiutes.
Likewise, it should also be good news to the environmentalist crowd that showed up to the meeting. Moving waste up out of the porous Muddy Rver bed and out onto the rocky desert mesa seems like a sensible, environmentally sound step. Unfortunately, this was not how it was perceived. Rather, these folks took the SNHD board and its audience captive, droned on for hours in an endless stream of off-topic technical prattle, doubled the length of the meeting and ground all productive conversation to a halt.
The fact that granting the application proposes yet another step to a cleaner, safer and healthier Reid Gardner was entirely beside the point to these folks. They made it quite clear that nothing would make them happy short of shutting down the plant entirely. But wait! Even that wouldn’t be enough. The true over-arching agenda clearly is the elimination of every coal burning plant in the country as quickly as possible. Nothing less will do. All of the legal threats and arguments; all the twisted knots of esoteric data presented by their hydro-geologists and other expert witnesses; all of it boiled down to the dreamland goal of a “coal free” America.
Of course, this goal shoots far beyond the target of last Monday’s meeting in Moapa. Even if the aim had been limited to just the closure of Reid Gardner itself, such a notion would still be well outside of the scope of SNHD authority in this matter. But still the environmentalist smokescreen continued on and on into the night.
It was perhaps curious that one of the few voices of reason that evening came from our own County Commissioner Tom Collins. He briefly pointed to the reality that the region, and by extension the nation, is nowhere near prepared to be free of fossil fuel-generated power. He is right. We have not successfully developed an adequate infrastructure for renewable energy to replace fossil fuels. We don’t yet even have a clear and undisputed model that it can be done. Given the current reality, the day when the nation will be ready to wean itself from fossil fuels is still far in the distant future. For certain, it is far beyond the currently anticipated decommissioning of Reid Gardner which is expected at around 15 years hence.
Going around closing down coal plants like putting routine check marks on a Sierra Club to-do list, without a clear plan for replacing those resources, would just create shortages, rate spikes and would likely plunge us into a dark age. In the case of closing Reid Gardner, the full pain of such a dark age would be immediately felt locally as the greater Moapa Valley would lose one of its largest employers and a vital economic engine to the community.
The advent of such a dark age seems to be the over-arching environmentalist agenda. But the successful realization of such a nightmare on a nation-wide scale would surely spell suicide for a country which, for two years now, has seemed to teeter on the edge of economic ruin. The self-righteous hypocrisy inherent in this dream world of thought is outrageous and, quite frankly, dangerous.
Perhaps the wonderful day will come when we can harvest all the power we need to prosper our society from clean renewable sources like wind and sun. Perhaps in that day innovations will also be made that will reduce the cost of these resources to the point that they don’t leave the average American household out in the cold (or in the heat as the case may be). That would indeed be a dream come true. But the fact is that this pleasant dream still has some significant obstacles to hurdle before it is realized. For now it is still just a dream for the distant future; and, to be sure, a worthy dream at that.
In the meantime, though, let’s not be so hasty that we turn the dream for the future into a current nighmare. We should continue producing the reliable energy that is required to maintain and grow our economy: national, regional and local. The coal plants should be kept running until there is a viable replacement for them. But these plants should be required to run as cleanly, as safely and as efficiently as possible.
In this regard, Reid Gardner has actually been a success story. NV Energy has spent millions in updating operations at the plant to fully comply with strict federal standards. As a result, the plant has never run cleaner than it does today.
Down here in the real world, it would be unwise, and unfair to NV Energy ratepayers, after all of that investment, to just shut the plant down on some quixotic whim.
Laying the dream world aside and waking up to current reality, the landfill modification request now before the SNHD is just one more down-to-earth step in the right direction for Reid Gardner Station, and for all of us its neighbors.
