Damage Control

"I have a huge coalition up here," Brown says. "These issues cross all political lines. It's just a group of people -- business people, Democrats, Republicans, everyone is concerned about their health and the health of their children and the elderly."

Concerned Citizens started holding public information sessions, sponsored by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources and attended by representatives from the Sierra Club, EPA Region 7 and Terry Eaton, an environmental services manager at Great Plains Energy. Since January 8, people have met in cafeterias and gymnasiums at schools in Weston, Parkville, Liberty, St. Joseph, Camden Point, Leavenworth and Atchison. Grandmas in flag sweaters and mulleted men in mesh hats filled the folding chairs and raised their hands with questions.

At each, someone invariably asked, "Why here? And why coal?"

Corporate spin No. 3
We run the cleanest coal-fired plant in the country.

KCPL's Hawthorn plant, with its red-striped exhaust stack, is hard to miss. It's a few miles down Front Street off Interstate 35, northeast of downtown. It was especially hard to miss back in February 1999, when it was on fire.

Company officials attributed an explosion there to a buildup of natural gas used to start the plant's boiler. Hawthorn, which began operating in 1956, generates 15 percent of KCPL's energy. Seventy-five percent of KCPL's power comes from coal burned at four stations: Hawthorn, Iatan, Montrose and La Cygne. The rest comes from the Wolf Creek nuclear plant in Burlington, Kansas, from natural gas plants in Gardner and Paola, and from a few "peakers" that run on fuel oil and only operate during the periods of highest demand.

KCPL rebuilt the Hawthorn plant. Now it burns 5,479 tons of coal from Wyoming's Powder River Basin every day. (The Wyoming coal emits less sulfur than the locally mined coal the company used until 1990.) The plant uses the best-available technology to meet air-emission limits for some of the pollutants that create low-level ozone. President George W. Bush singled out the Hawthorn plant in his 2001 National Energy Policy Report as an example of a state-of-the-art coal-fired unit. The new plants proposed for Atchison and Weston are supposed to use the same technology as Hawthorn's.

But, as has been widely reported, Hawthorn's pollution controls haven't been working properly. For most of the three years since the equipment was installed, it hasn't reduced emissions to the levels that KCPL has bragged about.

The ash from the Wyoming coal was interfering with a chemical reaction meant to reduce the plant's nitrogen oxide emissions. Meanwhile, to keep the unit working, KCPL poured extra ammonia (which converts harmful nitrogen oxide into a safer nitrogen gas) into the plant's converter. But ammonia is a pollutant, too, and some of it escaped from the smokestack with the rest of the emissions.

Vasto, of the Landmark, requested a tour of the Iatan and Hawthorn plants in February. Media wranglers at KCPL told Vasto they would conduct tours for no fewer than 25 people. So Vasto invited Brown, her Concerned Citizens and the Sierra Club's Blakley to tour the plants on February 27.

At the Hawthorn plant, KCPL officials gave the group fliers proclaiming that Hawthorn was the "cleanest coal-fired plant in the United States," even though it wasn't.

Because of the Hawthorn plant, the EPA last year cited KCPL for violating clean-air laws on 12 days in 4 months by emitting illegal amounts of sulfur dioxide, a major pollutant.

"At that meeting, they admitted to having problems," Vasto says. When he asked when the Hawthorn plant was due to live up to its "cleanest" title, Great Plains Energy's Eaton told him the company would fix it out of corporate pride.

Lisa Hanlon of the EPA tells the Pitch that the Hawthorn plant hasn't earned any more violations for sulfur dioxide levels. And Jon Knodel, an EPA environmental engineer, says KCPL has tinkered with its equipment and processes over the past few months and that they now work.

Corporate spin No. 4
We're not sure we'll even build anything.

At least 65 new power plants are going up around the country, eight of those in the EPA's Region 7, which includes Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska.

The area north of Kansas City along the Missouri River is a magnet for new coal-burning plants. That's because power plants require a source of cold water. (The heat from burning coal combines with water to make steam, which forces turbines into motion to create electricity.) The plants also need rail lines so that trains can haul coal to them. And power plants can be built only where a U.S. Department of Natural Resources study for "air increments" has ensured that room is left in an area's "airshed" for additional pollution. Weston (population 1,631, according to the 2000 U.S. Census) has air increments to spare.

Great Plains owns 562 acres adjacent to its Iatan plant. That area, just off State Highway 45, is all green fields. It's a perfect spot for another plant.

Over the past few months, Great Plains Energy CEO Chesser consistently suggested that the company had no firm intention to build new plants -- despite the fact that it had been applying for construction permits since November 2001.