Milton R. Young Station

Milton R. Young Station is a coal-fired power station owned and operated by Minnkota Power Cooperative near Center, North Dakota.

Plant Data

 * Owner/Parent Company: Minnkota Power Cooperative
 * Plant Nameplate Capacity: 734 MW (Megawatts)
 * Units and In-Service Dates: 257 MW (1970), 477 MW (1977)
 * Location: 3401 24th St. SW, Center, ND 58530
 * GPS Coordinates: 47.066389, -101.213055
 * Coal Consumption:
 * Coal Source:
 * Number of Employees:

Minnkota Power Cooperative and Square Butte Electric Cooperative
On April 24, 2006 the Department of Justice and the U.S. EPA announced a settlement of a case alleging violations of the New Source Review (NSR) provisions of the Clean Air Act requiring Minnkota Power Cooperative and Square Butte Electric Cooperative (both member-owned rural utilities) to reduce emissions of two harmful pollutants by more than 33,000 tons annually.

The plants will be reducing emissions of about 23,600 tons of sulfur dioxide (SO2) and 9,400 tons of nitrogen oxide (NOx) per year from the coal-fired Milton R. Young Station in North Dakota. This was the first NSR settlement with a power plant in the Western U.S. The settlement and the pollution control upgrades are estimated to cost the company $100 million. In 2005, the Milton R. Young Station was the second largest emitter of NOx pollution in the entire country. The settlement states that the utilities will install a new SO2 pollution flue gas desulfurization device (scrubber) to reduce SO2 emissions by at least 90 percent as well as an upgrade on an existing scrubber. Additionally, NOx reduction systems will be installed, with work beginning in 2007 and ending in 2011.

Both utilities will also fund $5 million in renewable energy projects such as wind power in North Dakota and Minnesota.

Emissions Data

 * 2006 CO2 Emissions: 5,862,979 tons
 * 2006 SO2 Emissions: 26,879 tons
 * 2006 SO2 Emissions per MWh:
 * 2006 NOx Emissions: 21,924 tons
 * 2005 Mercury Emissions: 502 lb.

Death and disease attributable to fine particle pollution from Milton R Young Station
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. The study found that over 13,000 deaths and tens of thousands of cases of chronic bronchitis, acute bronchitis, asthma-related episodes and asthma-related emergency room visits, congestive heart failure, acute myocardial infarction, dysrhythmia, ischemic heart disease, chronic lung disease, peneumonia each year are attributable to fine particle pollution from U.S. coal-fired power plants. Fine particle pollution is formed from a combination of soot, acid droplets, and metals formed from sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and soot. Among those particles, the most dangerous are the smallest (smaller than 2.5 microns), 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. 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. The table below estimates the death and illness attributable to Milton R. Young Station. 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 Milton R. Young Station
Source: "Find Your Risk from Power Plant Pollution," Clean Air Task Force interactive table, accessed February 2011

Milton R. Young Station ranked 37th 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.

Milton R. Young Station ranked number 37 on the list, with 1,036,290 pounds of coal combustion waste released to surface impoundments in 2006.

Related SourceWatch Articles

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 * United States and coal
 * Global warming
 * EPA Coal Plant Settlements