Big Stone Lake Plant
The original Big Stone Lake Power Plant was constructed in the mid-1980s. The site is located near the South Dakota-Minnesota state line; currently, a new facility known as Big Stone II is in the planning stages. This coal-fired plant is expected to provide an additional generative capacity of between 500 and 580 megawatts.
Coal is notorious for being one of the most polluting energy sources in existence. On the other hand, importing natural gas into the region poses its own environmental issues. By taking advantage of locally-produced fuel sources and using a combination of filtration and sequestering technology with the purchase of carbon offsets, the management of Big Stone II hopes to commit to an overall net reduction in carbon and sulfuric acid emissions.
The new facility is expected to come online in 2013.
Because the Big Stone facility is a relatively new one, it is probably that asbestos is less of an issue that it would have been for a plant constructed ten to thirty years earlier, when the hazards of asbestos were not generally known.
Before the 1970s, the health hazards of industrial asbestos were kept secret by the large corporations that manufactured and marketed asbestos products. To be fair, the use of asbestos has saved thousands of people from painful and disabling burn injuries. More importantly, it has prevented millions, if not billions of dollars worth of property damage. Nonetheless, the ability to breathe is fundamental, and although relatively rare, asbestos diseases are nearly as painful as burn injuries – and invariably fatal. In light of the fact that asbestos manufacturing corporations had been aware of the health dangers of asbestos since the 1930s and that there have always been safer (if more expensive) alternatives to asbestos, litigation against such corporations is justified.
Because fire, heat and electrical current are all dangerous elements at power plants, such facilities made extensive use of asbestos-containing materials (ACMs).
Such materials were used in the insulation of internal heating and cooling mechanisms as well as around steam pipes and electrical conduits, fire doors and even electrical cloth. Over the years, asbestos insulation became brittle and would begin to crumble into deadly dust (become friable).
Asbestos illnesses are a serious work-related hazard for power plant workers. This was borne out in a Puerto Rican study in 2003; out of 1100 chest x-rays from such workers, over 130 of them showed signs of asbestos disease.
Asbestos diseases have a lengthy latency period; the time between exposure and the development of symptoms is often measured in decades. Anyone who has ever worked at a power generation facility as well as family members are advised to get frequent medical checkups if possible.
This site was one of countless factories, mills, power plants and worksites that, throughout most of the 20th century, utilized the fibrous mineral asbestos because of its ability to insulate against fire. While using asbestos was usually intended to protect human life, it sadly all too often had the opposite effect: exposure to asbestos in the workplace has resulted in illness and death for thousands of people. The reason for this is that particles of asbestos, if inhaled, can infiltrate respiratory passages, leading to serious illnesses such as pleural plaques and cancer of the lungs. Also, job-related contact with asbestos is the primary cause of the almost always fatal cancer known as mesothelioma, which affects the cells that line the chest cavity (pleural mesothelioma) or the abdominal cavity (pericardial mesothelioma).
Now, regulators are much more knowledgeable about the dangers associated with asbestos exposure, and laws protect those who work with or near this potentially lethal mineral. Even up to the late 1900s, however, laborers all too often were forced to toil in spaces in which asbestos dust was unfiltered; in most cases, the dangers posed by asbestos inhalation were not explained. Furthermore, if companies didn't offer facilities to wash off asbestos fibers, employees carried particles of asbestos home with them in their clothes and hair, thereby exposing family members to this dangerous substance.
As conditions like asbestosis and mesothelioma don't develop until a very long time after asbestos exposure first occurs, people who were employed at contaminated sites, as well as family members of such workers, are encouraged to talk about their history of exposure to asbestos with their medical care providers no matter how far in the past they worked there.
Sources
Bowker, Michael. Fatal Deception: The Terrifying True Story of How Asbestos is Killing America. New York: Touchstone, 2003.
Cabrera-Santiago, Manuel et al. "Prevalence of Asbestos-Related Disease Among Electrical Power Generation Workers in Puerto Rico." Presentation at American Public Health Association Annual Meeting, 2007.
Big Stone Project Website. “Fact Sheets.” http://www.bigstoneii.com/NewsMedia/FactSheets/Facts_BSP2_AtAGlance.asp
