Biomass Incinerator a Threat to Children

- by Nor­ma Kreilein, MD, Fel­low of the Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Pediatrics

[The bio­mass facil­i­ty pro­posed for Jasper, Indi­ana referred to in this let­ter was can­celed this year thanks to the hard work of Dr. Kreilein and Healthy Dubois Coun­ty –Ed.]

I am writ­ing as a con­cerned pedi­a­tri­cian in South­ern Indi­ana. We live in the heart of the pow­er plant belt of the Mid­west. For many years I have sus­pect­ed that our local pol­lu­tion is great­ly respon­si­ble for our high rage of inflam­ma­to­ry process­es, malig­nan­cies, and increas­ing rates of autism.

I have been try­ing to fight the addi­tion of a bio­mass plant to our city. The city has long been an indus­tri­al base with many wood fac­to­ries, so there has appar­ent­ly been a high VOC load. In addi­tion, we live near many pow­er plants. There was a coal fired munic­i­pal pow­er plant with­in the city lim­its and very near a res­i­den­tial neigh­borhod since 1968. The city has said that the plant has been shut­tled for approx­i­mate­ly the past 3 years because it isn’t “prof­itable.”

They have been plan­ning a bio­mass refit for the past 3 years, although the plan became more pub­lic only less than a year ago.

Strong oppo­si­tion was voiced from the time it was pub­licly men­tioned, but the city has pushed the plant through, any­way. Much manip­u­la­tion of emis­sion data has occurred (aver­ag­ing emis­sions out over the whole coun­ty to make them appear insignif­i­cant), but iron­i­cal­ly one of the more inter­est­ing argu­ments is that the plant, though pol­lut­ing and with­in 1/2 mile of a res­i­den­tial neigh­bor­hood, should nonethe­less be built because the plant will decrease our depen­dence on coal fired plants.

Essen­tial­ly the argu­ment is to build more so we are not as depen­dent on the ones we can’t seem to shut down. Many of the argu­ments against coal-fired plants are used by manip­u­la­tive enti­ties to jus­ti­fy con­tin­u­ing to poi­son the pop­u­la­tion. In our par­tic­u­lar city, the greed for devel­op­ment appears to take prece­dence over the con­sid­er­a­tion of air quality.

Until the EPA begins to man­date states to use more accu­rate expo­sure mod­els (bet­ter than aver­ag­ing con­cen­trat­ed pol­lu­tion over a coun­ty), states like Indi­ana and cities like Jasper will con­tin­ue to actu­al­ly increase pollution.

Bio­mass com­bus­tion is being sold to com­mu­ni­ties around the coun­try by high pres­sure, ambigu­ous, unscrupu­lous car­pet­bag­gers who promise “jobs” and “green ener­gy” but are vac­u­um­ing pre­cious fed­er­al funds to pro­duce expen­sive ener­gy that will nev­er solve our depen­dence on for­eign oil nor make our air any clean­er. Worse yet, they use exist­ing knowl­edge about coal-fired plants and aggres­sive manip­u­la­tive math­e­math­ics to con­vince com­mu­ni­ties that the particulate/dioxin emis­sions will be nonex­is­tent or “min­i­mal.”

The ulti­mate prob­lem is that the same mon­i­tors and reg­u­la­tors that fail to close down coal plants will do no bet­ter with bio­mass. We will just spend more and think we feel bet­ter about it.