Jan022009
Where does PSNH put its coal ash?
Filed under Energy by david brooks at 8:01 pm
The collapse last month of a massive coal-ash slurry lagoon in East Tennessee (not far from where I once lived, concidentally) led me to wonder what PSNH does with the ash generated from its coal-burning power plants in Bow and Portsmouth.
Company spokesman Martin Murray answer my query - here’s a slightly edited version:
We handle our ash dry, not wet. Our ash is managed dry by putting it in tanks via pneumatic pipelines where it is removed by truck and either land-filled (environmentally approved and fully permitted sites only) or sold to companies for the manufacture of cement as a replacement for Portland cement. Otherwise it is reinjected back into the burner area of the boiler furnace.
About 60-70% of our ash is removed from the boiler combustion process as bottom ash or slag because of our boilers’ design. This slag is an inert, glass-like material used for sand blasting grit , roofing shingles, etc. …
Thus we manage a much lower volume of total ash then TVA and also use dry ash systems and processes in totally different ways. We have control of how it is managed. The type of event that has occurred at TVA will not occur here - we do not have ash slurry lagoons, etc.
I’m not sure how much they generate, but back in 1995 (before one-third of the Portsmouth plant was converted to burning wood) they produced roughly 70,000 tons of the stuff annually, according to this DES posting.
Here’s more info on slag. Here’s more info on ushing coal ash in cement.
January 4th, 2009 at 10:01 am
A good story to pursue. Thanks for doing so.
January 6th, 2009 at 9:06 pm
Much of their “stuff” is shipped to one customer that uses it as the stones on shingles and a lot of the rest of it is that tough grit you find on abrasive cutting wheels used to cut steel and stone. In other words it is recycled to be used by other industries. We had a discussion on that on one of the Rail fan web sites.