Renewable Energy Plant Demolished on Long Island. [View All]

[NNadir]

In a bit of muted symbolism, Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi personally guided a giant-toothed shovel into the side of the Long Beach incinerator Tuesday, sending bricks and debris crashing to the ground.

Sitting at the controls of a hydraulic excavator for about 15 minutes, Suozzi tore away about one-quarter of one wall of the main incinerator building, which is being demolished to make way for a development along Reynolds Channel...

...The incinerator had served the city for almost half a decade before it was shut down in 1997 after a lengthy battle by environmentalists and area residents concerned about the ashes and contaminants it spewed.

"This is a page-turning event in the environmental history of Long Island," Daniel Hendrick, spokesman for the New York League of Conservation Voters, said in an interview before the demolition began.

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/nassau/ny-lilong0808,0,1019870.story

The plant operated 5 years.

Long Island is famous for building power plants that never operate. The scale of the Long Beach incinerator was about 100 MWe. There is no word on its capacity utilization for the five years it operated.

Long Island is almost wholly dependent on dangerous fossil fuels and generates millions of tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste which it dumps indiscrimately into the atmosphere.

Much of Long Islands densely populated South Shore is expected to be inundated as the seas rise.