What does it actually mean when regulators say a proposed power plant is expected to meet air-quality standards? In this episode of Plugged In to Public Health, Lauren talks with Dr. Patrick O’Shaughnessy, professor in the University of Iowa College of Public Health’s Department of Occupational and Environmental Health, about the proposed Morgan Valley Energy Center near Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and the broader public health questions surrounding energy production and air pollution.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the student hosts, guests, and contributors, and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the University of Iowa or the College of Public Health.

Lauren Lavin:

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Plugged in to Public Health. When a new power plant is proposed in your community, how do you actually know whether the air around it will be safe to breathe? And how do regulators make decisions about health risks from a facility that has not even been built yet? Today, we’re talking about the proposed Morgan Valley Energy Center near Cedar Rapids, and using it as a case study to understand the much bigger public health questions surrounding air pollution, energy production, and environmental health. Joining me is Dr. Patrick O’Shaughnessy, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Public Health, Department of Occupational and Environmental Health. Dr. O’Shaughnessy has a background in environmental engineering, and extensive expertise in air pollution, aerosols, respiratory protection, and the movement of dust and gases through our environment.

In this episode, we break down what actually comes out of a natural gas power plant, how pollutants, like nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter can affect human health, and how the Clean Air Act regulates these emissions. We also get into the difference between computer modeling and real-world air monitoring, why neither can answer every question perfectly, and what public health professionals can do when communities understandingly want a simple yes or no answer about risk. And toward the end of our conversation, we talk about what should happen after a facility like this begins operating, including traditional air quality monitoring, and some newer citizen science tools that could give communities more information about the air around them.

I’m Lauren, and if it’s your first time with us, welcome. We’re a student-run podcast that talks about major issues in public health, and how they’re relevant to anyone both in and outside the field of public health. So let’s get plugged in to public health. Plugged in to Public Health is produced and edited by the students at the University of Iowa College of Public Health, and the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the student hosts, guests, and contributors. They do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the University of Iowa or the College of Public Health. Thank you so much, Dr. O’Shaughnessy, for getting on the podcast with me today. Could you start by introducing yourself, who you are, what you do at the University of Iowa?

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

I’m a professor in the Department of Occupational and Environmental Health here in the College of Public Health. I have a PhD in environmental engineering, however, so I didn’t start off in the world of health. Prior to that, I was in construction, so I guess I was worried about my health back then, mostly my safety. Yeah. I’ve been here for almost 30 years, and I work primarily in the field of workers, the bad air they breathe, as I call it, the gases and dust at various industrial sites and in agricultural areas and things like that here in Iowa that led to work on respirators and other things, and always an interest in outdoor air as well, air pollution and other aspects like that.

Lauren Lavin:

Where did you get your PhD from?

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

University of Vermont. I’m an East Coast guy.

Lauren Lavin:

So are you from the East Coast then?

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Yes, originally, yep. I’m here because of the job here at the University of Iowa. But been here for 30 years, so I like it here in Iowa City.

Lauren Lavin:

Would you consider yourself a Midwesterner now or still East Coast?

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Yes, I think so, yeah. I don’t know if I fully got that Midwest nice thing going yet, but pretty close.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay. And then, you said you worked in construction. What’d you do in construction?

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Small house repairs to complete house builds and things like that. So scampering around on construction sites and up on second floors with sheets of plywood in your hand and things like that. That’s always a little dicey.

Lauren Lavin:

What made you decide to get a PhD? What was the educational path?

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, yeah. I had an undergrad in wildlife biology, actually, from the University of Vermont. And then, hit right around 30, I decided I don’t know if I can do this kind of job for the rest of my life, this being construction, which is really tough on your body. So that’s when I went back for a degree in engineering. And then, one thing led to another. In terms of the research I was doing, that was something that they were interested in here in public health, and that’s what got me the job here. Yeah.

Lauren Lavin:

Interesting. I always love hearing how people’s paths end up-

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Yep.

Lauren Lavin:

… in PhD land, because I always think it’s good for students to hear.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Mine was not straightforward, that’s for sure.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah. And I think that’s honestly most people’s, and I like that students get to hear that when they listen to this. So I read an article about the Alliant Energy Morgan Valley Energy Center that they’re proposing, and I decided that would be a good podcast episode. So to give a little bit of background on that, Alliant Energy is proposing a 720-megawatt natural gas power plant that would cover approximately 160 acres of West Cedar Rapids near Highway 30 and then Benton-Linn Road. So that’s the background for that for those that are listening and may not be familiar. But can you talk a little bit about what that proposed energy center is, and why a project like this is in any way related to public health questions?

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah. So we all know that suddenly, within the past half-year even, very suddenly, this whole issue of data centers and their massive power needs have hit the airwaves, so to speak. So whether or not this is actually in response to that by Alliant Energy or not, they say it’s more associated with their continuous efforts to just make sure we’ve got enough energy on the grid at all times, and this is just making sure that happens. But there’s no coincidence that there’s data centers popping up, even down not too far away from where they’re building the plant, so it’s all related. And yeah, even a couple of years ago, I don’t think most people would understand how intensive the energy demand of these data centers is, and how the AI expansion has suddenly, again, very suddenly created this high energy demand. So that’s the background.

Yeah. So this is going to be, it’s not a huge plant, but it’s big enough. It’s big enough that if it was in your backyard, you’d be a little concerned about seeing this thing pop up. And so that’s what’s triggered some local pushback. They have a community group up there that’s highly concerned about it, and yeah, so we can talk more about why that is. Obviously, I guess, just briefly, this is not going to be a bunch of solar panels passively sitting there in a farm field.

Lauren Lavin:

That’s what I was wondering about. 160 acres of a plant-

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah. I don’t know why they need that much land, but they are occupying that much, probably because it’s just the quadrant of acres that some farmer has sold to the company to put this thing on, but the actual building footprint is probably much less than that. It’s going to be three natural gas-fired burners and a backup diesel generator, basically. So it’s going to have three stacks sticking out of this large building in the farmer’s field.

I was just up there this morning, actually, doing a side study on air pollutants related to dusty conditions around gravel roads. So one of the neighbors near the place said, “Oh, maybe we can get a twofer out of it and we can put a monitor up there to see what kind of background levels are. What’s the air quality like now versus what will it be after the plant is built?” So yeah, so it is going to burn. So burning, obviously, then is going to do what burning does, which is, at its minimum, creates water vapor and carbon dioxide. That’s just the burn equation. We do it breathing out of our mouths. Right now, we’re burning up the oxygen in our bodies, putting out CO2 and water vapor.

So anything that’s burned, obviously, in this world we live in now is now a climate issue at its basic level, but that’s a regional, national, worldwide problem that it will contribute to. So the more local effect is what are the air pollutants that are going to come out of the plant, and whether or not they’re going to be at a level that could cause health effects.

Lauren Lavin:

How would you measure that? What kind of pollutants, beyond that water vapor, carbon dioxide, could it release, and which of those would be most relevant from a human health perspective?

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

So in order to burn something, you need air, and actually, the air contains oxygen. It’s the oxygen that you want to burn. But unfortunately, our air containing the oxygen carries along an awful lot of nitrogen. So the nitrogen is part of the problem. It goes through the plant, and it turns into what’s called a nitric oxides, otherwise referred to as NOx. The X stands for [inaudible 00:08:22] nitrogen dioxide. So there are known human health effects, a lot of upper respiratory effects especially, so that’s one of them.

If you don’t get a burn completely correctly, exactly the way it’s supposed to go, instead of CO2, you get O. CO is carbon monoxide, so that’s another unhealthy gas that can be put out by this kind of process. And then, it’s possible that you could end up with particles coming out. I started to say particulate matter. That’s what EPA refers to. PM, you may have heard of PM10 or PM2.5. These are little super tiny particles that they’re interested in. Some of that can come out of natural gas as well. So those are the big three, I would think, in terms of potential problems.

On the downside is ozone, and I say downside because ozone is not emitted by a power plant. It’s something that will be created in the atmosphere when you start mixing all these chemicals together up in the air. So that’s a possibility there as well, although that would be, again, more long range and intermittent, especially in the summertime.

Lauren Lavin:

Are those visible? Would I know… Obviously, particulate matter might be, hence the name particle. But the rest of them, would you know that you’re breathing that in?

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

No.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, that’s the problem. Ozone is an upper airway irritant. It’s OE, and it’s highly aggressive in a sense as a molecule, three oxygens that just don’t want to be three oxygens. They want to be two oxygens, O2. So in the process, they can be reactive and they can react to the tissues in your lungs. I’m saying that because say if you’re a runner or something, you might start feeling a little chest burn or irritation in your throat from breathing a lot of ozone. And NOx as well. NOx is the contributor to the brown color of smog, so we get to that level. So if you see some of these photos of Los Angeles from a distance and there’s this brown haze, that’s from the nitrogen in the air as well. And so, yeah, if you’re highly active, you’re running around, you may notice something, but typically not.

But then, you always have to… This is what I learned in the world of public health versus engineering. Engineers are just, let’s just make this thing and make it work. They’re not thinking maybe down to the individual level of in public health, where you think of those most susceptible to problems, those who are already weakened and they have pulmonary problems already, the children with asthma, old people with pulmonary problems, like bronchitis or COPD. So they should be able to live their life without being affected badly by air pollutants.

So ostensibly, the levels that we’re allowed to breathe… Which is true, the EPA has decided we cannot make zero particles in the air, it’s just impossible. So we’re going to establish limits, some sort of levels by which they predict that, I think their odds ratio are like one in a million, one person out of a million, okay, sorry, you will have a bad reaction from this level, but the other 999,000, no, you’re going to be okay. And so that’s what the levels are. So that’s maybe getting back at another one of your questions. I want to just go ahead.

There are monitoring stations out there for these things I just referred to, the gases and the particles. So that’s part of the Clean Air Act, is first of all, is our air clean enough? Is it under these threshold levels? And then, their second pronged approach is, okay, you’re an emitter, you’ve got a big stack, you’re not allowed to emit more than X amount per energy unit or something like that. In this case, BTUs in America. British thermal units is a form of energy. And so you’re not allowed to emit more than so many pounds of particles per million BTUs that you are creating, and you have to have a monitor in your stack constantly sampling to prove that you’re not.

So between those two things, you’ve got the monitors on the outside just sucking in the air that everybody’s breathing and seeing whether or not it’s good, and then from the standpoint of emissions, what’s getting emitted. So Clean Air Act, in a sense, what I tell my students, it has worked really well. When I was a kid, back in the day in the ’60s, this country was a polluted mess. There was no Clean Air Act. There was no Clean Water Act. There was no hazardous waste reduction kind of acts, nothing. And it was a problem. There was leaded gasoline, so there was lead in the air that everybody was breathing in. Things have really gotten a lot better. That being said, again, things should work. If everything’s ideal and perfect, then things should be okay. The problem is reality can rear its ugly head and you could have problems with the plant, how it’s operated, how it’s being burned. More carbon monoxide could go out than they expect, things like that.

Lauren Lavin:

With Iowa, we see a lot about water quality. What is, at baseline, Iowa’s air quality? Would you say it’s good?

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, yep. So back to these monitoring stations, they’re not everywhere, so that’s a problem. But it’s a network run by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources primarily, although up in… Is it Cedar County or Cedar Rapids? Linn County has their own separate little office for that and they do their own monitoring. The Iowa department has some monitoring stations purposely put into very remote areas. Lake Sugema is somewhere off way out of the way of every other major town, for example. And so they have one there to show this is what Iowa air should be, and so that’s their baseline, as it’s called.

Lauren Lavin:

[inaudible 00:14:08]

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah. So again, there’s always something in the air. There’s always a little something. And so then, a company comes in, they want to build. There’s also maybe a little elevation from that little something in a town like Cedar Rapids, because you go up there and you can even smell the little extra something up there, right?

Lauren Lavin:

You can.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah.

Lauren Lavin:

It depends what they’re making that day.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

All that little extra something should still be under the limits set by the Clean Air Act for these particulate matter, ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxides, and others. So then, a company wants to come in and they want to add to that mix. The Clean Air Act, in its wisdom, has a system for that as well and say, “Okay, you can come in, but you’re not allowed to just add all this additional pollutant all the way up to… If the limit’s down low, hey, let’s keep it down there. But you’re allowed an increment. We’re going to give you a little fraction of that total still up to the top.”

And so that’s what’s going on here with this plant. They have already submitted their air permit. It’s online now, I just looked at it this morning. And they have gone through the whole process of, we’re going to put this on our stack, and this kind of stuff, and this kind of stuff, and this is how we’re going to control it, this is how we’re going to control it. And we’ve gone through this dispersion modeling, which is a way of mathematically determining the extent by which they will influence the surrounding area, and whether or not they are going to contribute so much that now the area is in exceedance of the national ambient air quality standards. And they’re saying, “No, we will not be putting out so much that will occur.”

Lauren Lavin:

How do they do that? How do they estimate how much they’ll be putting out? And then, how do regulators? Do they both come to their own independent [inaudible 00:15:56] or…

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah. That’s a good question. Thankfully, that is also an established process through the Clean Air Act, down to the DNR that says, “You will use this particular highfalutin, really fancy mathematical model, in which you put in all the kinds of information you can about your plant, right down to the…” Thinking about a map looking down on the plant, and this is where the stack is going to be, and this is where the other stack is going to be, and the other one, and exactly how much is going to come out of that stack. And then, the model predicts, given meteorological information, the conditions, the wind speed, the temperature of the day, all those things that can influence where those particles and other things are going to disperse, and then it chucks it out.

It actually goes through every hour of five years worth of met data, hour by hour, and it considers these little snapshots of, okay, it’s this hour, wind’s going this way. Oh, next hour, wind’s shifted a bit. Now, we’re going to predict what’s going on here. And it keeps track, it goes through that, and as it’s iterating through all these hours, it’s keeping track of the worst case scenarios, the worst and highest concentrations across the landscape around it. And finally, after sometimes hours of number crunching, this thing stops and says, “Okay. Here’s all the numbers we have, and these are the worst case values all around for six miles around this plant. And according to this model and how much you’re putting into the air, nope, you’re not going to exceed the limits,” or, “Yes, you are.” In this case, their air permit is saying, “No, we are not going to exceed the limits.” So that’s where it stands right now.

Lauren Lavin:

So as I was doing some research, I saw that an issue that was coming up was the difference between these types of models and then physically monitoring the air. Describe what a computer model can do that the air monitor can’t do, and vice versa?

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah. That’s a good question. I’m glad you looked into that. That’s one of the dirty little secrets of this whole process you’re tapping into there, which is say you had one of those monitoring stations operating downwind of the plant. It’s got to be downwind, right?

Lauren Lavin:

How far would that be away?

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

The model, again, is fairly accurate, I’m using bunny fingers, whatever, right now, for about maybe, again, a six-mile… I don’t know.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

It’s a 10-kilometer range is typically what it’s used for. Okay. And so say there’s a monitoring station within that circle around it that it’s modeling, and it has actual accurate data. Those things are really accurate. There is no messing around with these. Every instrument that’s measuring ozone, they’re $30,000-plus. They’re handled by highly qualified people that have a lot of training, et cetera, high quality assurance, all that stuff’s built into it, constantly calibrated and things. Okay. So let’s say they’re really accurate.

You go to model that on a day that you know exactly what the wind speed is, you know what the temperature is, and you say, “Okay. Predict that spot there where the monitor is, and whoops, nope, maybe close, maybe way off, buckshot,” as they say in a business. So they have done these tests, and what they decided finally was the idea that… Back to that five years worth of, I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of hours that is, it’s a lot for five years. I don’t know, it’s a lot. That the model will ultimately predict the worst case scenarios, which is what they’re after, pretty accurately if you had the monitor on over those five years as well. And they’re assuming any five years is going to be predictable of any other five years because you’ve got so much data. And so that’s the excuse that they use in a sense, that over the five years, the model does a pretty good job of predicting worst case scenarios, even if, on any one particular hour-to-hour relationship, no, it’s really pretty far off.

Lauren Lavin:

Interesting.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Totally confused you on that one.

Lauren Lavin:

No, I think I’m following. So you said it’s good at predicting worst case scenarios. Do you think it’s also fine at just monitoring best case too?

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah. They’re not really interested in best case.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Best case is just the normal and it happens all the time. And rightfully, they’re interested in, are there going to be… A lot of these ambient air quality standards are based on a 24-hour average. Are there 24-hour periods that will exceed the limits, that’s all we care about really, yes or no? Does the model say yes or doesn’t it?

Lauren Lavin:

Okay.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

And we don’t care what 24-hour period it was in that whole five years or not. So what they do is, so for example, back to what I just talked about, if you took all the model data over all those hours and then sorted it high to low, and you took all the monitoring data and sorted it high to low, that’s where the highest values tend to match up pretty well. Again, not necessarily on an hour-to-hour basis, but on a high-to-high basis. And so it’s fairly good that way for indicating, yeah, this plant’s going to have a really serious impact on the air quality of this region, and they’re going to have to put in some super deluxe control systems.

See, that’s the next step is, okay, what can you put in? And you’ll see in these air permits this term, they constantly talk about the BACT. The BACT is the Best Available Control Technology. So again, EPA and the Clean Air Act says, “You have to apply a BACT, a known technology that will clean out your exhaust air to the best ability that mankind knows, and you have to prove that’s the type of technology you’re going to apply.” So the nitrogen oxides, for example, are often the most difficult to control. You can’t get them get trapped into a filter or absorbed onto something, or you can’t bubble it through water and get it through. Really, the only way to minimize it is to burn correctly. It’s all about the combustion process. So it has to do with the burner and its technology, and how you get the oxygen and nitrogens to interact with each other so that they don’t form these NOs.

Whereas PM, you can imagine, oh, there’s some sort of big filter or something to capture them before they go through the stack. Yeah, actually, it’s called a baghouse, these big tall bags that all the air is pushed through. The bags capture the particles before they go out the stack. That’s what Iowa City, the university’s power plant uses, for example.

Lauren Lavin:

But if there are ways to reduce pollution, like what you just described, why don’t organizations, companies employ them from the very beginning?

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Oh, they will.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Yes. Let’s say you’re burning coal. You will have a black smoke coming out of your stack without any controls. I guess we could assume that. Coal is a rock that you’re trying to burn, so it’s got a lot of actual unburnable parts in it, and then they’ll go out the stack, and then it’s creating soot and other things because it’s really a messy fuel type. It’s hard to get the oxygen to really interact with it really well and burn it down completely, so that’s why it’s putting out a lot of soot. It’s your campfire and you sit around it, same thing. So again, I have a view of the university’s power plant down around the corner here, and I don’t see anything coming out of the stacks, even though one of them, the biggest and widest stack is burning coal as I speak to help chill the buildings, actually, and create steam to chill the buildings in this time of year. So they’re very effective.

However, every coal-fired power plant has to reduce the total amount of particulates by at least 99%, only let 1% go through. Okay. That’s pretty good. But what if you have a really big coal-fired power plant that’s burning gazillion tons of coal per hour? Okay. 1% is a lot bigger than the 1% coming out of a much smaller plant. So there’s that issue, and that’s why the big huge coal-fired power plants, if you ever go by one, there’s one in Central Illinois, driving down, what’s that, 75 or something, you go down there, you go by, and that stack is way up there. That’s to dilute it before it hits the ground level. That is part of the control, is the solution to pollution is dilution when it comes to air pollution.

Now, we turn to this plant up in Morgan Valley, as they’re calling it. It will burn natural gas. It’s not a rock, doesn’t contain a lot of extra junk in it, as you can imagine, no inorganics that can’t be burnt, and a big thing, sulfur. Coal contains sulfur, no matter what they say about clean coal, which is like, what? I don’t know what they mean by that. But certainly the word clean can be applied to natural gas relative to coal as something to burn. No one’s going to create a coal-fired power plant in this day and age. They’d be complete… I’ve got to be careful with my politics here. But it just wouldn’t work. Just for the Clean Air Act purposes alone, you’d just run into so many problems, it would just be ridiculous. So now, about the natural gas, is that how clean is clean, right?

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

It can still create some of these NOxes, because no matter what you try to burn, you’re going to create some of that. But it’s going to be much, much less in particulate matter, almost down to zero, very low. There is a little bit of sulfur in natural gas, because there’s a lot of sulfur in the raw form of natural gas that comes straight out of the Earth, so they have to remove that, actually.

And so, yeah, if you have to burn something, natural gas is mostly methane. Methane is a very simple chemical compound. It’s C… Something like that. It’s very simple. So that means it’s easy to crack it open, to burn it, form that CO2 and H2O and move on in life, so to speak, without creating these extra things that you don’t want as a pollutant. So Alliant Energy knows that. That’s why they’re using it. Again, that’s still… Back to that person sitting near the fence line-

Lauren Lavin:

Yep.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

… and that’s who I was talking to this morning. If you look at the map and you look at the southwest corner, somewhere near adjacent to that property, this is where this person’s house is, and he has put a lot of money into the house, and is that going to be a long-term health problem to him and his family? I think he’s at ground zero, so to speak, and he’s going to have very little dilution capabilities.

So again, this model is supposed to indicate even that, these folks in the landscape around it, and it’s the best anybody can do. I talked to KGAN or somebody about this, but I said, “Unfortunately, a model is a model, and a model is a model, and an estimate is an estimate, and it does the best it can to get through the permitting process and stuff, but you never quite know until you get the thing up and running.” This one, I guess, is going to be maybe even a startup-shutdown kind of process. They’ll put it on when they need it, maybe like today when you need tons, everybody’s got their air conditioners on, and then they’ll shut it down. And so in that startup and shutdown process, the controls don’t work quite as well, and so you spit out more air pollutants when that’s happening.

Just last thing on that point, a lot of the fear around these data center power plants has been around the diesel generators than the power plants themselves. If you look into this, some of the big data center power plants, they’ve thrown in a hundred of these diesel generators because they want full-on power. To replace the power of the power plant, they need enough diesel generators to completely replace what the power plant should be creating. And so now, you’re going from a clean, so to speak, clean energy source of the natural gas to a fairly dirty source in diesel fuel, which at its worst, you see a truck go by and you’ve got black smoke coming out of the exhaust, so there’s a lot of particles coming out of it, a lot of sulfur, so that creates sulfur dioxides. Yeah.

Whereas this plant up here in Morgan Valley is, again, digging into it more, and I am not an expert, so I’m going to just give myself a universal… But my understanding is the one diesel generator they have there is just to power the plant, keep it running. It’s not to completely replace the megawatts that the thing is producing. So that also was a relief to me, actually, to read about that.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah. So zooming out a bit, obviously residents around it, like the man that you spoke with, want a yes or no answer, whether or not this is going to affect them. Like you said, you can’t know until it’s up and running. So how do you think that public health professionals or experts should be communicating that uncertainty without either minimizing the risk or overstating the risk?

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah. Another really good question, because that’s at the core of public health practice-

Lauren Lavin:

Exactly.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

… that I learned from being here, that again, the engineers don’t have to worry about, is that communication piece and the public piece. Yeah. So it really comes down to information, wouldn’t you think, and the more you can inform them of these issues.

And unfortunately, there’s also the other side, is the information that’s overblown and the fear may go, “Hey, this is bad. I don’t care what it is. It’s bad. It’s got to be bad.” So we’re starting off negative from day one on it. And then, there may be some that go, “Oh no, this is super clean energy. Don’t worry about it. Everything’s good. Most of these things, they take years to finally get to you.” So you’ve got to be somewhere in between there, and the reality of the person. So in this scenario is… And again, that’s the other thing, that anyone communicating to the public on this has to get into the mind of the person they’re talking to, I think.

So I’ve done this with communities that are upset about lopping off the tops of hills in Wisconsin because they’re using it for this sand that they use in the fracking industry. They’re seeing this sand dust all over their homes. That’s not good. I talked to the people in Muscatine back when they had definitely exceedances of air quality standards there because of the factories there that were pumping out pollutants into the atmosphere. And so when you see them there and they bring their kids or something, it’s like, wow, this is real to them. And also, in this case, for example, finally, you’ve got your beautiful home in the countryside, and you want to see countryside. You don’t want to see some massive plant in your backyard. So there’s that aspect of it, and even fear of property devaluation that goes on, so it’s not even a health concern. That’s tied into the reality of it.

So yeah, you can’t negate their fears. But at the same time, you can try to give them some reality check, that thankfully, again, this is not the first time anything like this has ever happened. For example, Alliant has done the same thing in Marshalltown. They’ve got one that’s now in the same process. It’s gotten through everything. I don’t know if it’s been completely built. But there’s other ones like this in other towns. So if I were recommending something, I’d say, “Go look where this has occurred already and start talking to those folks and see what you think.”

But you made that one point that was really good, about you can’t really detect it yourself. It’s not like it’s egregious, again, you see stuff coming out of the stack. So it does make for maybe an unknown, I’m being slowly affected by these toxins, which might be the term used, and I don’t know what they’re doing to my body, but I know they’re out there now. They weren’t there before, and now they are. So yeah, it’s a tough nut to crack, for sure. And yeah, you think, obviously, the closer you are to the source, the worse the problems. That may or may not necessarily be the case.

Again, it takes a little bit for the wind to transport things downwind, and sometimes you’re actually under the curl of this smoke, as you can imagine, versus being at that point just a little further away, like a kilometer, two kilometers down, close to a mile, where that’s when the plume finally hits ground level often under most conditions. And again, this plume dispersion model considers all that. So the worst case scenarios are actually inversions, where something gets warmer above, air gets trapped underneath it, and then it gets windy and it gets roiled around, and that’s when concentrations start getting dropped right on your lap, so to speak. So that doesn’t get back to your point there of what do you say or how do you calm fears maybe or… I don’t know. Most people have made up their minds already.

I guess, again, if I had to try to convince them otherwise, I would go back to the success story of the Clean Air Act and the process that these companies have to go through, and unless you can see somewhere in their process that they are seemingly trying to shirk the system… And that is true, again, of these other data center power plants, where these… Again, back to these diesel generators, they’re just bringing them in at nighttime practically and throwing them in there, and considering that’s just one little diesel generator. Oh, you have 200 of them? No, let’s just consider one. And one is called a minor source, and it just falls under the wayside of the Clean Air Act, that’s too small to worry about.

Because really, that’s what diesel generators were considered back even 10 years ago. They were never meant to be producing megawatts. They were supposed to be backup generators. There’s one in our hospital, there’s one down at the power plant, or two of them down there, and they’re there for backup. Now, you start using them for a massive amount of output. That was never the case. So there actually may be a hole in the Clean Air Act that is being exploited by those types of companies. From what I can see up in Cedar Rapids, that is not the case. But yeah, good question, difficult answer.

Lauren Lavin:

I know. That’s how all the good ones are. But I think what you pointed out, that just getting facts out into the world, while people probably have, for the most part, made up their mind, being able to even have a resource like this, where it’s a casual conversation and you present some facts, I think, can always be helpful.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, yeah.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay. So as we wrap this up, if the Morgan Valley Energy Center is ultimately built, what kinds of data would you want to see afterwards to evaluate whether the assumptions made during this permitting and information-gathering process were accurate?

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Again, there’s two sources of data that’s mandated. That emission data out the stack, I would want to see some reports of that. They have to, I’m quite certain, go through an annual permitting process, that’s called a title, that they have to undergo and submit these results to the [inaudible 00:35:23] or Linn County. I’m not sure which. So that would be one, to see are they maintaining their outputs under the levels that they’re supposed to, keep them to task on that.

And then, there’s the monitors out in the community, and that’s a tougher one because the monitors have been already placed. There are three or four sites in Cedar Rapids, so that’s pretty good. Actually, for a town of that size, that’s pretty a lot, probably because they already have the polluters that they need to keep track of. So I would want to see that data as well. And it’d be interesting to see down the road and when this plant goes online, do we see any kind of uptick in those official monitors?

Now, there’s one other little device out there that I’m starting to get really jazzed about. It’s called PurpleAir. It’s weird. But this is a company that is now selling $300 monitors for particulate matter only that you can put up in your house and you can broadcast it to the world and set up this network, basically. It is possible now, this citizen science, they call it. It’s now gotten to the level cost-wise that a person could put their own little at least particulate matter sensor out there and track it themselves. If you Google PurpleAir map, for you to do, zoom in on the United States of America, you will see these things all over the country now. I actually Googled that there’s 15,000 of them in the United States.

Lauren Lavin:

Oh, wow.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Very few in Iowa. The number of them is related to the concerns of air pollution, and the highest concerns are actually in cities that have had the most impact by the wildfire smoke. So I looked at Eugene, Oregon, they have probably 200 or 300 of them around their town for that reason. It’s just peppered with them. But they give you this air quality index value and give you some idea of whether you’re in healthy air or unhealthy air. So that’s something that I’m interested in. Getting that kind of a network going, that would be helpful to people to better understand the impacts of this thing.

Lauren Lavin:

Interesting. For those sensors, are they indoors or outdoors?

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah. They’re outdoors. They’re made to be pretty robust. They’re little plastic coffee can size, not even that big, fit onto the palm of your hand, robust to rain and everything else. But they do need a power source, unfortunately, so you’ve got to plug them into an external power supply in your house. But yeah, again, you can hook them into your router, and then they’ll beam out the information. And then, you pull up this PurpleAir map and go, “Oh, there’s mine right there.” So you can track it that way.

Lauren Lavin:

Fascinating.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah.

Lauren Lavin:

What a cool invention.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

It is, really. It’s amazing and it’s really taken off. And even the EPA is using it for its air quality. So when there’s one of these smoke events that even hit Iowa this past summer, they utilize that network to help understand this, what they call air quality index, which I don’t have time to get into. But it gives you, again, a general sense of healthy versus unhealthy.

Lauren Lavin:

I’ve learned a lot over these last 50 or so minutes, so I really appreciate you taking time out of your day to chat with me. I’m sure this will be a much-listened-to episode, because I know that the topic is timely and people are out there looking for information about this.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

Okay. Great. Glad to be of help. Hope it touched a chord with some, and I hope I didn’t irritate others. You never know, right?

Lauren Lavin:

It’s always a fine line, right?

Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

That’s right, fine line. Exactly.

Lauren Lavin:

Thank you so much. That’s it for our episode this week. A big thank you to Dr. Patrick O’Shaughnessy for joining us today. One of my biggest takeaways from this conversation is that determining whether something poses a public health risk is rarely as simple as declaring it safe or unsafe. Air quality regulations rely on decades of science, monitoring, modeling, and pollution control standards. But models are still predictions, and communities living near a proposed facility are asking very real questions about what those predictions will mean once a plant is actually operating. We also learned that evaluating a project like the Morgan Valley Energy Center doesn’t end when a permit is approved. Emissions data from the facility, community, air quality monitors, and even new low-cost monitoring technologies can help researchers, regulators, and residents compare what was predicted with what actually happens over time.

This episode was hosted and written by Lauren, and edited and produced by Lauren Lavin.You can learn more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook. Our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help support the podcast, please share it with your colleagues, friends, or anyone interested in public health. Have a suggestion for our team? You can reach us at cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. This episode was brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Until next week, stay healthy, stay curious, and take care.