Do Power Plants Make Us Sick?

by Keally, posted on August 20th, 2010.

We’re not epidemiologists here at One Block Off the Grid, but we do think quite a bit about the social implications of electricity production. Lately we’ve been especially interested in the connections between standard grid power and our health.

Earth’s atmosphere is a complex system.  There are tons of different physical, chemical, and biological factors that shape the air around us.  As a result, it’s difficult to connect the dots from, say, the emissions of a coal-fired power plant to asthma in the lungs of a kid.  This complexity, however, hasn’t stopped several researchers from trying to understand how these things might be connected [4].

Let’s unscientifically sketch out the “dots.”  Here is some of what we know:

• We produce 68.3% of our electricity in the United States from either coal or natural gas (44.9% from coal and 23.4% from natural gas) [1].
• These fossil-fuel based power sources spew out the following main air pollutants: Carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter.  In short, the primary ways we get our electricity in this country produce some pretty intense by-products that find their way into the very air around us.
• Power plants or “electricity generating units,” account for 3.7 million tons of carbon dioxide and a whopping 70% of sulfur dioxide air pollution in the US [3].
• Sulfur dioxide is particularly nasty all by itself—an irritant to human lungs and a potential carcinogen.  It also contributes, through chemical reactions, to the amount of particulate matter in the air.  And, according to the EPA and the Annual Reviews of Public Health, inhalation of particulate matter contributes to over 60,000 premature deaths per year nationally [5].
• In 1998 35 million children in the U.S. lived within 30 miles of a power plant – a distance within which communities may be directly affected by the power plant’s smoke [6].

These aren’t fun dots to connect, even in an unscientific, speculative way.  We don’t often stop to think about the fact that the way we power our homes might be causing harm to our health and that of our families. It’s imperative, however, that we start to really look at how our power is generated and how we might change that.

Unlike grid power, solar energy is a clean, renewable, and zero-emission way to supply electricity to our homes.  We owe it to our health and the health of those around us to use more solar energy every day. If you’ve been thinking about going solar, you should check to see if there’s a group discount on solar available in your area.

[1] http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1.html

[2] http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/coalvswind/c02c.html

[3] 2002 National Emission Inventory Booklet, US Environmental Protection Agency

[4] Pollution’s Toll on the Brain. By: Gold, Sunny Sea, Scientific American Mind, 15552284, Nov/Dec2009, Vol. 20, Issue 6

[5] Integrated Science Assessment for Particulate Matter: First External Review Draft; Environmental Protection Agency, National Center for Environmental Assessment: Research Triangle Park, NC, 2008.

[6] Children At Risk: How Air Pollution From Power Plants Threatens The Health of America’s Children. By: George D. Thurston, Sc.D. New York University, April 2002