150 years of spills: Philadelphia refinery cleanup highlights toxic legacy of fossil fuels

[turbinetree]

ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT
FEBRUARY 16, 2021 6:01 AM UPDATED 3 HOURS AGO

By Laila Kearney, Valerie Volcovici 9 MIN READ

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Wearing blue hard hats, white hazmat suits and respirator masks, workers carted away bags of debris on a recent morning from a sprawling and now-defunct oil refinery once operated by Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES).

Other laborers ripped asbestos from the guts of an old boiler house, part of a massive demolition and redevelopment of the plant, which closed in 2019 after a series of explosions at the facility.

Plans call for the nearly 1,400-acre site to be transformed into a new commercial hub with warehousing and offices. All it will take is a decade, hundreds of millions of dollars, and confronting 150 years’ worth of industrial pollution, including buried rail cars and a poisonous stew of waste fuels poured onto the ground. A U.S. refinery cleanup of this size and scope has no known precedent, remediation experts said.

Reporting by Laila Kearney Philadelphia and Valerie Volcovici in Washington; additional reporting by Dane Rhys in Philadelphia; Editing by Richard Valdmanis, Brian Thevenot and Marla Dickerson

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-energy-refinery-cleanup-insight/150-years-of-spills-philadelphia-refinery-cleanup-highlights-toxic-legacy-of-fossil-fuels-idUSKBN2AG12O

[Stuart G]

1. Thank You for posting...K and R

[turbinetree]

3. Your welcome....................

[bronxiteforever]

2. Kick and recommend for visibility

[ProfessorGAC]

4. Is This The Old Refinery...

...south of the city?
I remember one there flying into Philadelphia. The flight path was right over that plant.
It always looked pretty old from the air.
We've got one in our county.
Owned by Texaco. Shuttered a long(!!) time ago and remediation is still not complete.
Geez, it took 20 years just to get rid of the towers & tanks. I have no idea what the state of ground remediation is at this point.

[turbinetree]

5. Marcus Hook area just south of the airport when I was going to work at the airport

they started the clean up about 5+ years ago

[ProfessorGAC]

6. That's The One!

It looked like a dump when I was flying over it in the early 90s.
I've been in fantastically managed, clean facilities & I've been in "Can I leave now?" dumps.
This always looked like the latter.

[turbinetree]

7. Yeah it was pretty disgusting and when the wind was just right we could get the wiff

on the airport tarmac

[hunter]

8. Many of these toxic fossil fuel wastes have a half life of FOREVER.

Not to mention the greenhouse gasses which will be nearly impossible to remove from the atmosphere, and the air pollution that kills thousands every day...

I've never spent a penny on Microsoft products, but I agree with Bill Gates (and DU's NNadir) that innovative nuclear power systems are the only way out of this mess.

Existing light water reactor designs conceived in the 'sixties use only a small fraction of the potential energy available in their fuel. Modern, innovative reactor designs could extract energy from used nuclear fuel that's now considered waste, depleted uranium which is now uselessly stockpiled, toxic abandoned mine tailings, and atomic weapon cores.

Wind, solar, and other alternative energy schemes simply can't support the affluent lifestyles many of us are now accustomed to. It's possible they can't even feed the current human population.

If we don't quit fossil fuel soon billions of people will die as the weather becomes more violent, oceans rise, and extreme droughts become a regular occurrence.

All that cold in Texas means the normally cold Arctic is getting much warmer.