The Oregonian shared an article and a video with me today about the demolition of PGE’s Boardman power plant. The plant operated from 1980 to 2020 until the decision was made to shut it down and move towards other energy sources. Coal had been a convenient, but dreadful, source of energy. Whether one looked at the environmental outcomes of coal mining, coal transport and handling, or coal burning, coal’s impact on living systems were generally bad.
As I learned from the PGE video, the Boardman power plant was located 160 miles east of Portland. Its smokestack was 656-tall, higher than two football fields tilted on their goal lines and stacked end-to-end. Even so, the Cascades prevented Boardman’s smokestack from being seen by PGE’s Willamette valley customers. I could reliably flip the lights on in my office at Reed, power up my computer, prepare for my class, or surf the web, without ever pausing to reflect on where my electrical energy came from. Or, for that matter, reflecting on the the long reach of my actions, adding to drought in California, bringing floods to Pakistan, and killing coral reefs in Australia.
Disentangling ourselves from fossil fuel’s web will not be easy. Scientists were already beginning to sound the alarm about global warming when the Boardman plant went online in 1980, and the shape of a “warmer” future was far from clear. However, the passage of 42 years has finally delivered a significant taste of the “future” dangers that those scientists had warned us about. PGE says it will replace some of Boardman’s power production with electricity derived from the burning of another fossil fuel, “natural” gas. Can we afford to wait another 40 years to see how this turns out?
The Boardman demolition video spends over 24 minutes on scenery, history, and interviews, before it shows the actual demolition of the power plant (if you’re in a hurry, skip to 24:20). The explosions take just a moment, but a long 14 seconds must pass before the smokestack finally hits the ground. Unfortunately, not seen in the video, are the CO2 molecules that were emitted on the plant’s first day of operation in 1980. They are still in the atmosphere today, heating the planet, and they will continue to wreak havoc for decades to come.
