Meramec Power Plant

Meramec Power Station is a coal-fired power station owned and operated by Ameren near St. Louis, Missouri.

In Feb. 2011, Ameren filed its integrated resource plan, outlining the company's strategy for meeting energy demand for the next 20 years, and said the updated coal regulations for air pollution, water use and coal waste disposal would probably prompt the company to close its 58-year-old Meramec Power Plant sometime between 2015 and 2020. The company is looking at a nuclear- or natural gas plant to make up for the plant, rather than improvements in energy efficiency. Although the company found in the report that efficiency is cheaper, they said the company cannot collect the revenue from efficiency measures quickly enough to please its shareholders.

Plant Data

 * Owner: Union Electric Company
 * Parent Company: Ameren
 * Plant Nameplate Capacity: 923 MW (Megawatts)
 * Units and In-Service Dates: 138 MW (1953), 138 MW (1954), 289 MW (1959), 359 MW (1961)
 * Location: 8200 Fine Rd., St. Louis, MO 63129
 * GPS Coordinates: 38.401348, -90.334862
 * Coal Consumption:
 * Coal Source:
 * Number of Employees:

Emissions Data

 * 2006 CO2 Emissions: 6,929,442 tons
 * 2006 SO2 Emissions:
 * 2006 SO2 Emissions per MWh:
 * 2006 NOx Emissions:
 * 2005 Mercury Emissions:

Death and disease attributable to fine particle pollution from Meramec Power Plant
In 2010, Abt Associates issued a study commissioned by the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization, quantifying the deaths and other health effects attributable to fine particle pollution from coal-fired power plants. Fine particle pollution consists of a complex mixture of soot, heavy metals, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides. Among these particles, the most dangerous are those less than 2.5 microns in diameter, which are so tiny that they can evade the lung's natural defenses, enter the bloodstream, and be transported to vital organs. Impacts are especially severe among the elderly, children, and those with respiratory disease. The study found that over 13,000 deaths and tens of thousands of cases of chronic bronchitis, acute bronchitis, asthma, congestive heart failure, acute myocardial infarction, dysrhythmia, ischemic heart disease, chronic lung disease, and pneumonia each year are attributable to fine particle pollution from U.S. coal plant emissions. These deaths and illnesses are major examples of coal's external costs, i.e. uncompensated harms inflicted upon the public at large. Low-income and minority populations are disproportionately impacted as well, due to the tendency of companies to avoid locating power plants upwind of affluent communities. To monetize the health impact of fine particle pollution from each coal plant, Abt assigned a value of $7,300,000 to each 2010 mortality, based on a range of government and private studies. Valuations of illnesses ranged from $52 for an asthma episode to $440,000 for a case of chronic bronchitis.

Table 1: Death and disease attributable to fine particle pollution from the Meramec Power Plant
Source: "Find Your Risk from Power Plant Pollution," Clean Air Task Force interactive table, accessed February 2011

Coal Waste Site

 * Meramec Power Plant Bottom Ash Pond
 * Meramec Power Plant New Fly Ash Pond
 * Meramec Power Plant Old Fly Ash Pond
 * Meramec Power Plant Retention Pond

Meramec ranked 59th on list of most polluting power plants in terms of coal waste
In January 2009, Sue Sturgis of the Institute of Southern Studies compiled a list of the 100 most polluting coal plants in the United States in terms of coal combustion waste (CCW) stored in surface impoundments like the one involved in the TVA Kingston Fossil Plant coal ash spill. The data came from the EPA's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) for 2006, the most recent year available.

Meramec Power Plant ranked number 59 on the list, with 481,318 pounds of coal combustion waste released to surface impoundments in 2006.

Related SourceWatch Articles

 * Existing U.S. Coal Plants
 * Missouri and coal
 * Ameren
 * United States and coal
 * Global warming