Article published Jan 17, 2008

Coal plant aftermath

Something that is not discussed by SME is the procedures and costs for closure and decommissioning of the HGS plant after its lifetime. We are left to infer that SME will just tear down the stack and buildings, sweep up the debris and walk away much like the ACM Smelter did in Black Eagle, which left us with a toxic hill for the county taxpayers to deal with, thus far unsuccessfully.

The toxic materials buried on site will require monitoring forever and necessary emergency measures taken when they fail and contaminate the ground waters, local wells, etc. It will be the taxpayers who will be held accountable for the cleanup; the owners of HGS will have taken their profits and will be long gone.

Who will pay for all this — your grandchildren and future generations? I don't think they will be saying kind words about what we have left them there. The materials in these mono-fill landfills, including radioactive ones, are some of the most dangerous materials known to mankind. They will pose a major hazard for many thousands of years.

SME needs to properly address these serious omissions to also include addressing potential long term environmental problems, faulty mono-fill engineering that does not consider proper barrier materials, forever leak detection monitoring, leakage cleanup and importantly who pays for all these now and into the future.

These are very serious omissions by SME that points out this application to rezone prime farmland for a coal-fired plant has many serious flaws.

— Neil J (Jerry) Taylor, Great Falls