Buck Steam Station

Buck Steam Station is a coal-fired power station owned and operated by Duke Energy near Salisbury, North Carolina. A 620-megawatt gas-fired power plant at Buck began operating in 2011. The coal station is scheduled for full closure in April 2013.

Plant Data

 * Owner/Parent Company: Duke Energy
 * Plant Nameplate Capacity: 370 MW (Megawatts)
 * Units and In-Service Dates: unit 3: 80 MW (1941), unit 4: 40 MW (1942), unit 5: 125 MW (1953), unit 6: 125 MW (1953)
 * Location: 1555 Dukeville Rd., Salisbury, NC 28146
 * GPS Coordinates: 35.711029, -80.379359
 * Coal Consumption:
 * Coal Source:
 * Number of Employees:

Emissions Data

 * 2006 CO2 Emissions: 1,803,198 tons
 * 2006 SO2 Emissions:
 * 2006 SO2 Emissions per MWh:
 * 2006 NOx Emissions:
 * 2005 Mercury Emissions:

Proposed Buck coal unit closures
Buck, Duke’s first large-scale power plant, began operating in 1926. Its first two units retired in 1979, and units 3 and 4 in 2011. Units 5 and 6 will retire in April 2013. Three gas units were shut down in October 2012.

More on plant closures at Duke
In September 2010, Duke Energy said it might close seven coal-fired units at its Carolinas power plants within five years as environmental regulations intensify. It may retire by 2015 all coal-fired units for which it's not economical to install sulfur dioxide controls called scrubbers. That would increase by 890 megawatts the coal plants Duke had planned to retire in 2009. The retired units would be at Duke's Riverbend Steam Station in Gaston County, Buck Steam Station in Rowan County, and Lee Steam Plant in Anderson County, S.C. Duke said it might convert Lee from coal to natural gas fuel.

Duke has already agreed to retire 800 megawatts of older coal units as part of an N.C. permit to build a new 825-megawatt unit under construction at the Cliffside Plant in Rutherford County. That will shutter four old units at Cliffside, two at Buck, three at Dan River Steam Station, and two at Riverbend.

Duke's projections show the amount of its electricity generated with coal falling from 42 percent in 2011 to 29 percent in 2030. The share from nuclear power, in contrast, stays steady at 51 percent. The utility continues to plan for a new nuclear plant, its first since the mid-1980s, to open in Gaffney, S.C., in about 2020. Duke is also building two gas-fired power plants, to open at Buck in late 2011 and at Dan River in late 2012.

On February 1, 2013, Duke announced it will close Buck and Riverbend Steam Station in April 2013, ahead of schedule, saying the plants were being little used.

Death and disease attributable to fine particle pollution from Buck Steam 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. 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 Buck Steam Station
Source: "Find Your Risk from Power Plant Pollution," Clean Air Task Force interactive table, accessed February 2011

Coal Waste Sites

 * Buck Steam Station New Primary Pond
 * Buck Steam Station Primary Pond
 * Buck Steam Station Secondary Pond

Buck ranked 88th 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.

Buck Steam Station ranked number 88 on the list, with 279,190 pounds of coal combustion waste released to surface impoundments in 2006.

"High Hazard" Surface Impoundments
Buck Steam Station has 3 coal ash surface impoundments on the EPA's official June 2009 list of Coal Combustion Residue (CCR) Surface Impoundments with High Hazard Potential Ratings. The rating applies to sites at which a dam failure would most likely cause loss of human life, but does not assess of the likelihood of such an event.

Citizen groups

 * Appalachian Voices
 * Asheville Rising Tide
 * Canary Coalition
 * North Carolina Waste Awareness And Reduction Network
 * Sierra Club North Carolina Chapter
 * Southern Environmental Law Center
 * StopCliffside.org
 * Western North Carolina Alliance

Related SourceWatch Articles

 * Existing U.S. Coal Plants
 * North Carolina and coal
 * Duke Energy
 * United States and coal
 * Global warming