The "Dirty" Electricity

DAP Sandakan found it to be repulsive and irresponsible for Datuk Raymond Tan, Datuk V.K Liew and LDP spoke persons to jump the gun in supporting the proposed 300kw coal-fired power plant to be site in Sandakan without first carefully evaluating or weighting the issues of environmental pollution to the air, land and water.

Sandakan DAP will not support the proposed coal-fired power plant unless SESB come up with the detail explanation to alleviate the public fears as to how well the toxic wastes are to be deal with and the type of technology being adopted. As Environmentalist call it the “dirty” electricity.

What is well known now, the plant will burn a massive amount of about 1 million tones of black coal annually and will produced 300,000 tons of toxic wastes, and the Plant is said to have a life cycle of 75 years, therefore, it will produce a mountain of 22.5 million tons of toxic wastes. How well SESB are going to contain those wastes?

These toxic wastes are made up of three components, namely air-borne particles, solid waste materials and sludge.

The air-borne particles of Sulphur dioxide and Nitric oxide charged-micron particles are actually too fine to clean by any latest known modern pollutant filtering technology. This would contribute to the acid rains, global warming, aggravate asthma and people living near the plant will be more susceptible to respiratory diseases.

The solid waste materials cannot be destroy and are kept in the land-fills that contain mercury, lead and other heavy metals which could easily find their ways into the many boreholes or the rivers after heavy down-pour and ultimately will pollute the source of our drinking water. The contaminated water if taken is known to be cancer causing.

Systematic drawing of a coal-fired plant.
The plant is also needed to be sited near the sea, like a car engine it required billion litres of seawater just for cooling and in the process produced sludge laced with tons of Chlorine Oxide that are conveniently dump back to the sea which will have an adverse effect to the marine ecosystem.

The Federal and The State government through SESB knew all along the projected needs of electricity in Sabah because of poor planning and implementation, the 120MW open-cycle gas-fired Plant in Kota Kinabalu which was awarded to a consortium in mid-1990s that was suppose to be completed in July this year never get off the ground.

Our State are endow with many oil and gas fields off our coast and this resources should be fully tapped for the generation of electricity. And I urge all the parliamentarians and state assemblymen from Sandakan to call for a 300MW open-cycle gas-fired Power Plant sited in Sandakan.