As Duke Energy reaches a milestone by beginning the years-long process of moving stored coal ash at its Belews Creek Steam Station to a sprawling, lined landfill, North Carolina’s largest utility also is contemplating a future at the Stokes County site that potentially could include nuclear power.
Coal generation at the 50-year-old facility is scheduled to end by 2035 under a state-mandated plan to reduce climate-impacting pollution in electricity production 70% by 2030 compared to 2005 levels and reach “carbon-neutral” status by the middle of the century.
A key element in that transformation is a project to excavate 12 million tons of ash, the carcinogen-laden byproduct of burning coal at the complex for decades, from unlined storage basins and move it to a landfill with watertight barriers above and below.
That strategy wasn’t the company’s first choice.
Charlotte-based Duke preferred to leave the ash in unlined basins and seal just the surface and six North Carolina facilities where the substance is stored.
But, with groundwater under the unlined basins already contaminated by ash, the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality and environmental groups, demanded a more aggressive approach.
The result was a 2019 settlement agreement requiring the company to dig up accumulated ash and move it to lined, sealed landfills.
At Belews Creek Steam Station, on the western shore of Belews Lake, that process began in May.
On a sweltering day this past week, a swarm of yellow front-loaders, dump trucks and bulldozers labored like a colony of perpetually busy ants in a canyon-like section of the site scoured from what once were rolling hills of green forest.
Ash once stored under 400 acres of now-drained water was scooped into the truck beds, carried a few hundred yards and deposited in the lined landfill where it was smoothed neatly by the bulldozer blades.
Finally, to prevent dust from being carried in the wind, tanker trucks sprayed water on the packed ash like groundskeepers wetting the dirt section of a baseball infield before the first pitch.
Over and over, the process repeated itself, as it is expected to do for another decade.
“The ash is going to stay basically where it was before,” Duke spokesman Bill Norton explained. “We’re just taking it out of the ground and putting it back in. It’s a crazy process.”
That process is scheduled to continue until 2033, although the company says it hopes to complete the work earlier.
Simultaneously, Duke continues to monitor and treat ash-contaminated groundwater at Belews with a system of more than 100 wells that pump clean water below the surface and extract tainted water, which is piped to an onsite treatment facility.
Rainwater that puddles on exposed ash during the transfer process also is removed from the basin and treated.
Groundwater at the site moves a few feet a year, and monitoring has determined that neighbors’ wells and the nearby Haw River have not been impacted.
As excavation work carries on, Duke is preparing to submit a proposal to the N.C. Utilities Commission next month outlining its preferred plans after coal operations are retired at Belews Creek.
The company is considering nuclear, “hydrogen-capable” natural gas, battery storage, solar or some combination of those options, Norton said.
Duke plans to increase its use of natural gas as it continues to shutter coal-fired power plants, and began complementing coal-fired energy generation at Belews Creek with gas units in 2020.
The plant can operate on either fuel, or both at the same time.
Natural gas emits about half the carbon dioxide — the leading human cause of climate change — than burning coal does. That’s why Duke considers a moderate hike in natural gas use to be a bridge that will allow for the gradual incorporation of renewable energy, a strategy panned by critics who prefer a more aggressive shift to solar and wind generation.
Meanwhile, an energy source that once seemed on the way out is on the verge of a comeback.
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Over the past decade, utilities have shut down nuclear plants early in favor of cheaper natural gas.
The last nuclear facility to come online in North Carolina was Duke’s Harris Plant in Wake County in 1987.
But a new generation of nuclear power, which produces no greenhouse gas emissions, is gaining momentum as a potential alternative to fossil fuels.
However, that future does not necessarily involve the massive plants with hulking cooling towers we’ve come to know.
Small modular reactors, still in their infancy, essentially are the tiny-house version of atomic energy.
SMRs generate a fraction of the electricity generated by a traditional nuclear plant, but pack a much more powerful per-acre punch than solar and wind farms.
That makes nuclear a viable alternative for offsetting the loss of at least some coal capacity, Norton said.
“To replace Belews Creek’s 2,200 megawatts of generation with solar would require clear-cutting about 20,000 acres of land — about twice the size of this entire site, including Belews Lake itself,” he noted. “So you’re talking covering (about) every inch of forest surrounding our site, all of Belews Lake and most of the surrounding neighborhoods with solar panels.”
As envisioned by Duke, new nuclear facilities at Belews Creek — capable of generating non-stop energy with or without sunlight and wind — would take up 300 to 500 acres, Norton added.
But critics note that the still-unproven small modular reactors would not be environmentally pure. They’d still produce nuclear waste that would need to be disposed of somewhere.
In North Carolina, some of Duke’s familiar foes also suggest that trying to replace fossil fuel production on a megawatt-by-megawatt basis at the facility level is a shortsighted strategy aimed at slow-walking the switch to renewable energy.
“Duke should retire all of their remaining coal sooner rather than later, and relying on gas or not commercially available, likely very expensive technology like new nukes or hydrogen is a waste of customers’ money,” Dave Rogers, Southeast director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal program, said in an email to the Journal. “In this particular case, Duke should be moving to retire the Belews Creek plant by 2030, and using the intervening years to deploy the clean resources like solar, storage, wind, energy efficiency and demand response as fast as possible, as well as investing in building out the transmission system.”
Norton, meanwhile, pointed out that Duke’s power plants often are the economic bedrocks of the typically rural communities where they’re located.
In the case of Belews Creek, it generates 17% of Stokes County’s property-tax base.
“From a jobs and tax base standpoint, building new nuclear and natural gas plants have the most benefit for Stokes County among the replacement generation options,” Norton said.
Belews Creek currently has 140 employees. A gas-only plant would have a workforce of 35 to 70, while a small modular reactor would take between 250 and 500 people to operate, according to Duke’s projections.
“A solar facility would have significantly fewer jobs — no one dedicated to Belews Creek itself, but a regional team of eight to 10 employees monitoring this site and others in the area,” Norton said. “So it makes all the sense in the world to replace this plant with something else right here in Stokes County that would keep the tax base here, keep the jobs here and keep the economy thriving.”
John Deem covers climate change and the environment in the Triad and Northwest North Carolina. His work is funded by a grant from the 1Earth Fund and the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.
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