People have been talking about shutting down coal plants for as long as Paul Hughes can remember.
Those memories go back all the way to the late 1970s, when a young 17-year-old — hoping to afford a car and a girlfriend — took a job helping to clean out conveyor belts for coal burners in Ohio.
It was a difficult economic time, Hughes told Cowboy State Daily, so there weren’t a lot of other prospects for a young man still in high school to accomplish his lofty ambitions.
“We’re talking 15% unemployment rate at least,” he said. “And mortgage rates were 15%. Car rates, you could only get a 48-month loan, and they were at least 15%.”
That was only if you had a credit history though, which as a teenager, Hughes did not.
So, he took the best job he could get at the time working for an industrial maintenance company. It paid between three and four times minimum wage at the time, $8.50 an hour.
“We sprayed caustic soda in the glass factories here in the Midwest,” he said. “We went into a coal-burning power plant in Coshocton, Ohio. And what we would do there was we would take a big vac truck and vacuum out the coal from the conveyor.”
That was necessary because anytime it rained, there was often some flooding in the underground area of the mine. Mud, debris and coal would get in and clog everything up.
“We’d go down there in 12-hour shifts, dawn till dusk, and clean those conveyors out,” Hughes said. “It was very, very dangerous.”
Hughes would eventually make his way to southwest Wyoming, where his experience in coal plants translated well.
The inside of a coal burner stack with the sampling pipes Samples collected are sent to labs to verify removal of contaminants. (Courtesy Paul Hughes) 
Paul Hughes on a job in West Virginia thats overlooking Ohio River Valley. (Courtesy Paul Hughes) 
A sight not many get to see the inside of a power plant's stack. The pipes collected samples sent to labs to verify removal of contaminants. (Courtesy Paul Hughes) 
Boilermakers prepare to fasten sections of a chimney liner together. (Courtesy Paul Hughes)
The Sword of Damocles
As a young man back East, Hughes said he would hear rumor after rumor that coal plants are getting shut down.
“In the Ohio River Valley, there’s dozens of coal-burning power plants, at least dozens,” he said. “Many, many, many of them are shut down now. But there’s still some big ones here that are burning.”
Because of that, Hughes learned to work with a sword hanging over his head early on.
But in the 1970s through the 1980s, the discussion around coal was centered more on emissions than on things like climate change and carbon dioxide.
“I don’t know whether you all remember acid rain in the Northeast,” he said. “But the sulfur from these coal burners down along the Ohio River, following wind trends, it was deforesting the forests up there because it was dumping acid rain on (them).”
Lawsuits and EPA regulations eventually forced coal plants to do something about that, Hughes said, although he had by that time transitioned to a new and less dangerous career, one where he didn’t have to feel a sword hanging over his industry all the time.
“I took up the electrical trade,” Hughes recalled. “I saw all these guys who were fairly clean with their tools on a cart, taking regular breaks and all that stuff. And I thought if I can only have a job like that, I’d be happy.”
That was good until the 2008 recession hit. Jobs again became scarce, and the coal industry was right there, waiting for him, a fallback Hughes was grateful he could take.
That teed him up for a new phase of work at coal-burning plants, helping to install desulfurization and scrubber projects at plants around the country, including Kemmerer.
“These were several hundred-million-dollar projects in every coal-burning power plant,” Hughes recalled.
Wyoming Was So Pristine It Was A Shocker
Coming to Wyoming was like coming to a different planet, Hughes said. He couldn’t believe how pristine the state’s rivers are, nor how isolated everything is.
“I come from a state with 30 people per square mile,” Hughes said. “Ya’ll have one person per 10 square miles out there.”
Hughes made a point of getting a fishing rod first thing in Wyoming so he could fish the Green River out on Hams Fork.
“There was no one there all day long,” Hughes said. “That shocked me.”
The other thing that was a shocker to Hughes was how little pollution coal mines in Wyoming have compared to what he had seen happen growing up in his home state.
“I’m not one of these people who slam the coal producers,” he said. “I’ve seen just how much money has been spent trying to produce reliable energy, and it’s incredible.
“And I know they respond to the EPA, they respond to the regulations, and they still try to produce a product that’s as economical as possible.”
But that doesn’t mean he turns a blind eye either to some of the downsides he’s seen in his home state.
“In Ohio, we have a long history with coal burners, and people in Wyoming have never seen the kinds of things we’ve seen,” Hughes said. “They don’t discharge into the rivers (in Wyoming), so it’s just a completely different thing.”
Hughes still remembers seeing orange-bottomed beds of dead rivers in Ohio as a child, when his family was driving down to their cabin in the southern hills of Ohio.
“We would pass by several streams that were just orange with mine tailings, mine runoff, and they were dead,” Hughes said. “That really impressed me from a young age. Like how could this be down here in this country?”
It was a beautiful, nice country with rolling green hills and forests. And orange-bottomed streams where nothing alive was left. They didn’t even look like they belonged on planet earth.
There have also been unimaginable disasters, Hughes added.
“There’s a town in West Virginia that was wiped out, hundreds killed,” he said. “And it’s not published much, but that was (from) a slurry impoundment.”
Slurry impoundments are made from ash that didn’t fully burn. The ash is mixed with water and the slurry pumped out to a large reservoir, held behind a dam, and left to evaporate.
It’s a process that takes years, and sometimes there are breaches, which can cause catastrophic flooding.
Nuclear Wave Is Interesting
Hughes was eventually able to migrate back to the electrical trade and has been watching the development of “green” energy with interest.
While he identifies himself as a “progressive,” he is not too sure about this new technology involving lithium batteries.
“Lithium batteries are not the answer,” he said. “There’s a lot of unsafe factors about them.”
He’s also not convinced that in interruptible power source can fully replace coal at an affordable cost.
But he is rather excited about the new nuclear plant Bill Gates-backed TerraPower is building in Kemmerer.
“America’s nuclear energy now is produced basically on 60-, 70-year-old technology,” he said. “And this next generation uses sodium as a cooling agent. It doesn’t rely on water pumps that can never, ever fail. And that’s the problem with (the old technology). You have to keep that water generating.”
Aside from the safety aspect he feels sodium cooling will bring, Hughes is interested in how the fuel for these newer plants can be recycled, meaning there could be less industrial waste, and less need to store spent fuel.
“Coal is a cheap fuel source,” he said. “And it is absolutely reliable. What they call a base-lad source. And you need that or nuclear or oil to have a base-load power supply.”
If coal goes by the wayside, nuclear is something Hughes could see taking its place more efficiently than other options. But he does see downsides to any energy solution, regardless of what it is. That makes him glad he’s in America, where debate about what will really be best for the public at large is allowed.
“The whole thing with nuclear is just the waste of the fuel,” he said. “There are pretty fundamental questions, but I think every fuel source, every energy source has its place.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
