Canaday Station
The Canaday Station is a gas-fired electrical power generation facility. Located near Lexington, Nebraska, Canaday was built in 1958, and has a generative capacity of 119 megawatts.
The facility was originally owned and operated by the Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District. It was taken over by the Nebraska Public Power District in 1995, shut down and kept on standby as a reserve station during times of unusually high demand. This is Canaday's primary function today.
In addition to natural gas, Canaday can also use fuel oil. While some emission monitoring equipment has been installed, the use of such fossil fuels produces toxic fumes and poses a fire danger as well.
Power plants constructed built prior to the 1980s usually contained large amounts of asbestos insulation at some point. The reason is that asbestos offers excellent resistance to heat and flame as well as electrical current. Asbestos-containing materials have indeed saved thousands of lives and prevented massive amounts of property loss over the past century; however, those who contracted asbestos diseases suffered disproportionately.
Asbestos illness was clearly shown to be a serious hazard for power plant employees in a 2003 study carried out by Puerto Rican researchers. The research team examined chest x-rays from 1100 power plant workers; once tobacco use was factored out of the equation, indications of asbestos disease were noted in over 13% of the images.
For most of the century, generators, boilers and turbine combustion engines as well as thermal control devices contained large amounts of asbestos insulation. Prior to 1977, knowledge of the health hazards of asbestos were kept secret by the corporations that manufactured asbestos products. In 1977 however, evidence came to light proving that the entire industry had engaged in a massive conspiracy of suppression going back to the 1930s.
EPA and OSHA have since issued strong regulations to protect workers and govern the general handling of asbestos. However, asbestos disease symptoms take decades to becomes apparent. By then, the disease has usually advanced into its final stages.
New diagnostic methods have recently been developed that enable pathologists to detect the signs of asbestos disease at their earliest stages. Those who have ever been employed at a power generation facility should tell their primary care doctors and get regular checkups whenever possible.
Given its ability to block fire, the mineral asbestos was often utilized in almost all factories, mills, power plants and worksites in every state of the US. It is ironic that protecting lives was almost always one of the primary reasons for utilizing asbestos in places because the result was in fact to put laborers at risk of serious illness due to asbestos exposure. The reason is that asbestos fibers, when inhaled or ingested, embed themselves into internal organs, leading to debilitating health conditions such as "miner's lung" and cancer of the lungs. Also, mesothelioma, the fast-growing and mostly untreatable cancer of the cells that line the chest cavity, has been proven to be caused by even low levels of asbestos exposure.
Today, regulators are much more knowledgeable about the dangers associated with asbestos exposure, and laws ensure the well-being of people whose jobs put them in contact with friable asbestos. In earlier days, however, workers frequently were forced to operate in areas in which airborne asbestos was unfiltered; in most cases, the risks of asbestos exposure were little understood. Moreover, workers brought asbestos particles home in their clothes and hair when decontamination procedures were not provided at the job site; as a result, the potentially deadly mineral also put at risk families of those who worked around asbestos.
As conditions such as mesothelioma often do not manifest until a very long time after asbestos exposure first occurs, those who were employed at contaminated plants, as well as those who lived with them, are advised to discuss their history of asbestos contact with their physicians regardless of how long ago they worked there. If caught early the disease can be treated with mesothelioma chemotherapy by doctors like Dr. David Sugarbaker at Harvard University's Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
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.
Nebraska Public Power District. “Canaday Station.”
http://www.nppd.com/about_us/energy_facilities/facilities/canaday.asp
