Energistic

John McPhee’s long piece on trains, “Coal Train—II” [The New Yorker, October 10, 2005], describes some very long coal trains and a startling glimpse at where our energy comes from (or where it goes). For one thing, demand for coal in this country is greater in summer than in winter (the AC in HVAC). McPhee rides a 124-car train, a mile and a half long and weighing 19,000 tons, that eventually unloads at Plant Scherer in Georgia, the largest coal-fired power plant in the Western Hemisphere. (It boils 81 million gallons of water a day in boilers 25 stories tall.) The coal train left a mine in Wyoming five days earlier, [and] “Plant Scherer would burn everything in it in less than eight hours.”

Among other fascinating facts and figures, McPhee reveals:

· As fuel, one million tons of coal equals one truckload of uranium;

· Costs for a million BTUs are $9.00 with oil, $6.00 with natural gas, $1.85 with coal, and 50¢ with nuclear;

· Plant Scherer consumes 1,300 coal trains a year -- that’s 2,000 miles of coal cars with 12 million tons of Wyoming bedrock.

Confronted by these overwhelming volumes, and the fact that the population of the world has doubled in the past 30 years, wouldn’t it be nice if we could harness the energy of bad weather, which seems to be plentiful and continually replenishing, or simply burn political waste, which also seems to be bottomless.