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Yeah. Mhm from Gainesville, Florida Hello, I'm Mike Cannon, and this is conversation. I'm situated at Crystal River, Florida, and behind me is a power plant operated by Florida Power Corporation. It's a coal fired plant, state of the art coal fired plant and an innovation that would please any environmentalist in that it produces a very small amount of particulate that is pollution in the atmosphere.

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We're going to find out more about this plant and plants like it, which are the new generation of coal fired plants in the United States. When I return in a moment with my guest. Mhm. My guest on this conversation is Mr Andrew Hines, chairman of the board of Florida Power Corporation, graduate of the University of Florida in 1947 with a bachelor degree in mechanical engineering.

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Is that right, Andy? That's right. Great to have you here on conversation and thank you for the opportunity to see this marvelous new coal fired plant. And I say marvelous, not only because of its immense size, but because it introduces something new in power generation in our society, a means of delivering energy to Florida's people without polluting the atmosphere.

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Now How can you do that with something as black and dark and messy as coal? Well, we burned a great deal of cold here, Mike, and present time with the three cold units that are running today, we're burning about 12,000 tons of coal. We have very modern and highly efficient precipitate urz.

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These are in effect, smoke strainers and they take the particulate matter out of the smoke and uhh! Keep it in hoppers as fly ash. The stacks that you see behind you look clear. But actually we're generating about 720 megawatts in the one that's in operation. The other one, of course, is still under construction.

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So we start with low sulphur coal. Then we install very large precipitate ear's beyond that. We do a great deal on the site in the way of controlling the runoff from the cold power, for example. So to avoid putting sulphur into the environment, is it? He roads out of the coal.

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We have settling ponds for our waists, and we use salt water cooling towers to reduce the freshwater requirement. Now, when I look at the two smokestacks, is that the correct term for the two tall chimney chimneys. I see nothing coming out of them. The plant is operating.

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This number four unit directly behind us is operating now generating power. But there's nothing discernible coming out of the chimneys. Well, the stack on the right is connected to a boiler, which is burning above 300 tons of coal an hour. But you can't tell it from the stack now down below the silver coloured or aluminum structure at the base of the chimney.

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That is the precipitator. Those are the precipitator. How does that work? They? The precipitator is a big electrostatic filter, and as the grains of ash come through, it puts an electrical charge on the grain of ash and an opposite charge on a wire. And there are many, many hundreds of wires that are suspended in there.

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If the particle is charged plus and the wire is minus, they are drawn to each other, and you take the particle out of the stream of gas. So that's just hot gas, without particular, without matter, that's passing up the chimney and into the atmosphere. That's right.

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There is some particular in there. You don't capture 100% but you can see from the stack. That is not what are you expecting here? About 99% capture of the ash above 99%. And then the ash is a by product that has some commercial use. I understand.

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Yes, it's a very fine material that's used in cement for high strength. Some of it's being used in the new Sunshine Skyway. It's used in road paving. We have an experimental program underway to study the recovery of minerals out of the ash. Now isn't the first stage.

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Well, I suppose we ought to go to coal delivery, mining, shipping and delivery. And then, uh, I'll ask you to talk about the pulverize ear's, uh, where is the coal mine? How does it get here to Crystal River? We have three plants that burn coal on this site with 1/4 under construction.

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And from the beginning of our yeah coal program following the OPEC embargo, we made a decision that we would have as much diversity as possible. That is, we would get the cold from multiple locations by different modes of delivery, different terms of contract, different sources. So cold for these plants comes from Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia.

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It's delivered by either rail or barge barge down the Mississippi marched down the Mississippi to appoint south of New Orleans, where it's transshipped across the gulf or else barged to Yeah, Rail to Mobile and Bartsch. From that point on, and it's low sulphur coal, we burn low sulphur coal in this unit and a somewhat higher software coal in the other two units.

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We come down on the software, though I think with our camera we can look over at the coal pile, which is, uh, to my right. Well, that's just one of the of the coal stacks that you have here. Yes, we have a major coal port capable of handling large barges, and then the large covered belts that you see bring the cold a distance of about a half a mile.

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We also bring it in by rail over there beyond those transmission towers, and we have a stockpile over there where we unload in an additional stockpile here and then the first step in the processing of the cold takes place directly behind us, I believe, where it's crushed, not pulverized yet but crushed into smaller pressure down into pieces about that big about the tip of a finger tip of the finger.

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And then it goes through that slanting belt up into the plant. Put it in large silos there, and it comes down through the bottom into a pulverize ER, which grinds it to the consistency of face powder. Face powder? Yes, very fine. And then what happens then?

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That is picked up with hot air and blown into the furnace, and you have a very, very hot flame. We have 54 burners on those furnaces, and you have hot air and powdered coal mixed together in a swirling motion, and it gives off its heat to generate steam to run the generator.

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So ultimately, you come down to a steam driven generator. You told me when we first began looking at the complex drawings of the system that it really is comparable to a tea kettle. If you get down to basics, If you think of a large tea kettle and a windmill, you have the basic principle of the boiler and turbine.

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All right, so the generator then develops the power. But while energy is one product, there's another byproduct, and that would be all of that steam. That fiercely hot water vapor? Um, or I guess it's still in the form of water. Yes, actually, steam is the working fluid in the power plant.

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You take water and convert it to steam. You run the turbine. You then condense the steam back to water to exhaust its heat, and it's now at a pretty low temperature. Say, 80 or 90 maybe 100 degrees. And then you run that water back into the boiler, pick up some more steam and just around and around and around.

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Eventually, though, something must be done with that water to take the heat out of it. Yes, and we use the cooling towers for that purpose. All right. Now that's the tower you can see directly behind the tall tower that we normally associate an imagery with nuclear power plants, and one remembers so many photographs of Three Mile Island with its cooling towers.

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Here we find one used in conjunction with a coal fired plant. Uh, ultimately, the purpose of any cooling tower is simply to cool the water. That's part of the energy producing process is that correct? Cooling tower cools Water That's what it does, whether it's on an air conditioning unit on top of a building or sitting on the ground outside of a power plant.

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These are very large. There are about 445 ft high, 380 ft in diameter at the base, and they're what we call a natural draft cooling tower. What you see that is so high is really the chimney, and the water comes in very low down on that structure, and most of it is just a big chimney for natural draft.

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I had no idea what took place inside a cooling tower until you took me into one that was operating the one directly behind us. The water comes in, as you say, at a very low level. It drips down, and then the Venturi principle causes the draft to take the vapor up the chimney and out.

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Is that correct? You can see it coming out. Moisture, a little bit of vapor coming out the top. Inside. It's like walking into a cloud, a very dense cloud. Turkish bath, Turkish bath is more like it. Well, that's an extraordinary structure, and you could fit a football field I understand inside the base you can fit a football field in there, so we have the coal that is delivered.

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We have the process that you describe. We have the handling of the excess, uh, heat in the water, and then the water is recycled for further use. Yes, and I understand it's saltwater. Why salt water? It is salt water. We were required to use salt water to avoid depleting the fresh water supply in this area.

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Salt water for large cooling towers like that is a novel usage, and we've gone to quite a bit of work to make sure that the towers stand up over a long period of time to the corrosive effects that you get from salt water. Now, Andy, you've mentioned the diversified approach you took to coal acquisition and the various means you chose for getting it here so as not to put all of your eggs in one basket.

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You have not put all of your eggs in any one particular energy basket because you not only have coal fired plants and you have right here at the same Crystal River site a nuclear plant, but I understand you have oil fired plants. You have some that use a mixture of oil and coal and gas and coal.

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What is the? I think we know a little bit about nuclear energy now with all the publicity that has been given to it. But what is this mix of oil and coal and gas and coal? We've done some experimental work over a period of five years on mixing finally powdered cold with oil and burning them in a plant originally designed to burn oil.

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The problem of converting to coal is the enormous capital expense. If you can devise a mixture that you can pump and burn through a more conventional type oil burner, then there's a chance to burn coal in an oil plant. And we are doing that at the moment.

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Down in Saint Petersburg on about 120 megawatt unit program is successful. Economics on it are difficult at the moment because oil prices have dropped down, which is good news for all of us. But we think it's a good long term debt. His oil, the cleanest of all fuels to burn for energy production.

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I would say gas is probably the cleanest fuel of the fossil fuels uranium is really the cleanest fuel for energy production. What is the energy outlook for Florida? We have a grow a rapidly growing state. By 1990 it's projected we will be the fourth largest state in the union in terms of population.

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And that means increased energy consumption. Are we going to be ready for it for the homes? Uh, the offices, uh, the clean industries that everybody hopes to have in the state and also agriculture. And, uh, I guess the tourist industry are we gonna have sufficient energy for all of that?

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I believe that we will for two reasons. The first is that the state has a massive program underway for conservation and load management that is, controlling the growth of the demand for energy program is very large, much larger than most people realize. This tends to dampen the need for new plants.

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And the second reason is there are a number of new plants in the stream that are coming on. Is this plant there to that Florida Power and Light Jacksonville, A building Seminole just brought in one of Palatka. They have a second one under construction. These are all cool.

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These are all coal burning plants, so and of course, Gainesville built deer haven in the last year or so, so they are been quite a bit of capacity added. Lakeland has a new plant. Orlando is getting ready to build one. So there's a sort of a generation of new coal plants coming into service, and they're all following this new clean burning meeting.

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Yes, the environmental standards require that you put a great deal of effort and expense and to controlling emissions today. Now what happens to the energy that you produce here? Does it go into a state grid, or do you service a particular geographic district of the state?

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You can see those transmission towers over there. We have whole six circuits going out to at 500 volts and four at 230 votes, feeding in to what is basically the state grid. We serve in about 20 square miles of Florida service to around 850 individual homes or businesses, and all of the systems in the state are pretty well linked together with the possible exception of the keys, and they're working on it.

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Andy, when you left the university of Florida with your bachelor's in mechanical engineering in 1947. Did you go directly into the energy field? I went to work for General Electric, which is pretty big in the energy business and was with them for four years. And research and development work largely in the gas turbine and steam turbine field.

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So I've been in the energy business most of my career. Well, I asked that question because I'm wondering what was the state of the art in 1947. Did you envision as an engineer the kind of plant that you supervise today or plants? I don't think that most of us thought in terms of this size magnitude, we thought of the steam conditions as being pretty realistic.

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This is 1000 degrees steam 2400 and £50 per square inch. That was not beyond the realm of contemplation back in those days at all. The first oh, units of that size and pressure, we're coming into service around that time. It's been sort of plateau and steam temperatures and pressures, pressures because of metallurgical conditions.

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One of the things that I learned here that surprised me was the fact that all of your plants. Production is controlled by one central control room or panel in ST Petersburg. Uhh! That seems, well, it it boggles the imagination to think that all of this fantastic operation here can be controlled remotely.

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As far away as ST Petersburg, we will have a dozen generating units operating at a given time. We will have 35 or more interconnections with other systems who in turn have their plants on the line. You're turning on lights. Other people are starting elevators and running drag lines and all of those things.

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And it takes a central control system that fully instrumented and with the latest in computer equipment to most efficiently and safely monitor that type of operation back to this plant again. How many employees, Uh, will you have when both numbers four and five, the two new coal burning plants are in operation be a little over 100.

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The two units just 100 people can run these gigantic installations. They get help from time to time on maintenance and so on is required. When you take a unit out for service, you bring in additional help to work on it. By contrast, How many employees do you have in your nuclear power plant?

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Nuclear is heavy on manpower. We've got over 400 people working in the nuclear side, not all of them in the plant itself. Of course, that's a lot of people to run a nuclear operation, and you're situated here at a point where you can draw upon saltwater and your remote from any heavily populated districts.

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Have you, um, given much thought to? Uh, well, that's a ridiculous question, because I know that you must have to the controversy raging in some parts of the country and in Canada over what's popularly called acid rain. Um, have you made studies of what this plant does by way of contributing to anything that might be called acid rain in the peninsula of Florida?

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We have thorough documentation on what this plant is doing, and we are joining with the Florida Coordinating Group in a very extensive study of rainfall. The nature of rainfall and deposition in the state of Florida have a number of monitoring stations that measure each time it rains.

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What the relative acidity is, of course, all rain is acid, some more than others, But you're at a point where you catch the winds from the west that generally carry across the peninsula. Understand, so that if you were contributing, you would be contributing to quite a lot of acid rain.

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But your studies so far show that you are not making such a contribution. Or if so, I'm sure that if you strike a match, you're contributing to acid rain. Probably not a measurable amount. But anything you put in the air ultimately shows up somewhere. And what's tremendously important now is that we properly assess the problem and don't make our solution whatever.

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It may be worse than the problem with which we start. There's a lot of work and money being spent on that. Now, as the oil, the price of oil continues to go down. Do you expect that there will be more oil fired plants to develop? I don't believe you'll see new oil burning plants built because when you do so, you turn your destiny over to unfriendly powers.

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And you say that despite the fact that there has been significant increase in production of oil in our own country, enjoy it while you can, because eventually there will be very little or no more. It's a finite resource. There's a tremendous demand, makes excellent petrochemical feedstock.

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It is the mobile fuel. You can put it in a tank pretty difficult to run a car on coal. You can't put it in a tank, and I am very happy that the prices dropped a little. It still costs a lot more than I think that it ought to.

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By contrast, there are enormous stores of Kolinahr. Yes, and I understand that they could last given present and projected use. They could last for centuries to come hundreds of years. And that goes not only for the coal that is found in the major coal producing states, but in many other places in the United States where the cold has not yet been mine right.

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There's a lot of coal in the United States and tremendous reserves in other parts of the world, which is just now being discovered. Australia is a good example. I think one of the most remarkable things about the plant and I toured just a portion of the interior of it is that everything here is so clean.

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We began by talking about coal as basically a messy substance, very dusty, very black and so forth. And yet here it's almost antiseptic. Is that because all of the process is enclosed, there is no point at which any of the coal dust, which is almost like powder, you say no point at which it escapes into the plant atmosphere.

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We have dirty areas in the plant. You can't handle cold without some coal dust forming. But we tried to hood these and installed filters and keep it confined as much as possible. We try to keep a plant clean because the clean plant is a safer plan.

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Near the channel where the barges bring Colin. There is a tall tower, which you described to me as being a weather tower. What is its purpose? Why is it important for you to monitor weather? We monitor the wind direction always because we have a nuclear unit, and in case of emergency, we need to know the strength, velocity and direction of the wind so we can analyze any increases or releases.

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It might occur, Andy. I understand there are quite a few people from the University of Florida graduates of our institution who work here or work with your firm and you personally have had many associations with the university for Mo and unofficial. You were at one time president of the Alumni Association.

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I sure was. I enjoyed that thoroughly. Do you get back to Gainesville frequently? I do more in a winning season than otherwise, but we're interested in active in the visiting committees for the College of Engineering and the development work of the University of Florida Foundations. What would you say is the image of the University of Florida today in this in this state where there's increasing competition in the field of higher education and where there is at the same time increasing call for scholarship in engineering and other professional fields?

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How do we stand? Uh, when you meet with your colleagues in this and other fields? Does the University of Florida still stand tall as University of Florida stands tall? I was when I was with General Electric privilege to participate in a creative engineering program for the second year, that program there were about 25 class members, mhm schools like Cornell Mitt Purdue.

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There were three from the University of Florida who had more graduates than any other school there. It's a great university, and it's come a long ways in the past few years. And, of course, a recent specialty since the time you were undergraduate is nuclear engineering, and I suppose that you have, I had occasion to work with, or perhaps even to employ some of the graduates of that program.

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We've had a number of our people go through the program, and Dr Hanan is a member of our general Nuclear review Committee that analyzes our operations of the nuclear plant studies and for improving. And one question about Florida Power Corporation, of which you are chairman. How does it compare with other power corporations in the state?

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I think particular of the Florida Power and Light Corporation. Florida Apparent Light is about 22 2.5 times as large as we are. They are very large corporation. We are towards the large end of the middle sized utilities. I guess you'd say we are second in size in the state.

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I believe that I'm going to get a tour of the inside of the plant. I have my hat here. You were very kind to put my name on it and put it on and take a tour of the interior of the area in which the coal is actually being, uh, turned into energy for the creation of steam, which drives the generators, which creates much of the power used in homes, offices and factories in the state of Florida.

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And I thank you, Andy. Hi. It's very much for being with me on conversation. Thank you for the opportunity to tour this marvelous installation. We're glad you could come down and take a look. And again, I say, marvelous because it is a coal burning plant that produces a great amount of energy without damaging the atmosphere.

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It eliminates 99 plus percent of the particulate from the smokestacks before that, hot air is sent out into the atmosphere. And this is the state of the art. This is the new generation of coal burning power plants in the United States, and we've seen a model of what the future holds here at the Florida Power Corporation plant at Crystal River.

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Thank you for being with me on conversation. Uh huh. Mhm. Yeah,