Beesley's Point Future

To the Moderators: I apologize that this entry isn't strictly Rail related but is a response to the article Bracdude181 posted.

I don't understand what this Country is doing with their Energy Policy. We create additional regulations that result in plants incurring too much operating expense to justify their existince and here we are, closing power plants left and right (Forked River Nuclear & Beesely Point Coal just in my "immediate" area) while this current administration is trying hard to shut off th use of fossil Fuels (Coal AND Natural Gas) and yet, they are pushing these ridiculous EVs and electric tools on everyone with States actually banning the sale of new gas and diesel powered vehicles by 2035 (not to mention appliances and agricultuaral/gardening machines).

They have the corrupted idea that windmills and Solar farms are strong enough to power all this additional burden on top of the normal infrastructure needs (not like we don't have rolling black & brown outs now). The real "green" answer was nuclear energy but the Activists managed to scare everyone with "The China Syndrome" while Russia screwed up their crude power plant at Chernobyl.

As a minimum, I would think you want to maintain all the power generating concepts so you can get thru the multitudes of Natural Disasters. Same thing with vehicles and equipment. The market place will separate the chaff from the wheat when it comes to durable, cost-effective, and efficient power generating. If you need to create legislature to kill things, that tells you right there that the new idea is not effective at this time.

@CJPat Up until last summer I lived a mile away from Oyster Creek. It was very reliable power station despite its flaws and questionable maintenance practices during the last few years. Only once a year we would have a power outage usually and more often than not it was because some idiot hit a power pole nearby.

I also agree that wind and solar aren’t as clean as people think. Solar arrays built in NJ are often done by clearing huge areas of forest when not placed on roofs, and their manufacturing process produces greenhouse gases. The wind farm being built off the coast has already impacted marine life. All the survey work they are doing is disrupting anything that sits on the sea bed. Ironically when an oil company previously wanted to drill out there they were shut down by Murphy due to environmental concerns, but doing the same work to bury wind turbine anchors and cables over a much larger area, which also disrupts marine life, is perfectly acceptable!

As to the future of the BL England, I have been keeping an eye on it as I feel CMSL can potentially make use of the BPIT, but it’s gonna depend on what happens with the aforementioned property. All this stuff they wanna put there. Hotels, theaters, parks, etc has me looking at excursion potential. If not, then the line would be perfect for car storage as it could potentially allow CMSL to move all the stored cars off the Cape May Branch for potential future use. A volunteer group (I think it’s the VRA) has cleared about 75 percent of the line in recent months. Including the vandalized section in Dennis…

A variety of separate issues touched on here, but I want to chime in on a few. The opinions on this issue from a majority of individuals has unfortunately been based more on their politics than an un-biased familiarity of the issue. Finding reasonable solutions to all of our problems has become increasingly difficult in the polarized political environment that has evolved in this country.

I agree that a "greener" solution to the energy situation is a nuclear one, but bringing up the Oyster Creek plant isn't the best example. It was one of two of the oldest nuclear plants still in operation. The technology for cooling the reactor depended on water drawn from Barnegat Bay, which was then discharged back into the bay. It made for good winter fishing downstream of the plant (which I regularly took advantage of) but resulted in massive fish kills every time it had to be shut down for either a scheduled or an unexpected reason. Plant personnel were on hand to quickly scoop up the dead fish, to minimize negative publicity. Screens filtering the incoming water had to regularly be cleaned of dead turtles, fish and crabs which were trapped against it. This information comes from past employees I was personally acquainted with.

More modern plants use a closed cooling system, re-circulating water, must the way your car does, as opposed to the way Oster Creek did, which cooled much in the way an outboard motor does. The plant's cooling system also killed untold numbers of smaller organisms, including immature shellfish which swim in the water column until they settle to the bay floor as they grow. I've been acquainted, through my employment, with a large number of older commercial baymen, who directly trace the decline of the bay’s productivity to the years following the plant's early operation.

As for the wind turbine issue, comparing it to oil rigs is an apples to oranges comparison. The disruption of the sea floor is a temporary one in both cases but the potential hazards of the oil rigs are not. One only has to recall the disastrous effects of the Deepwater Horizon incident in the Gulf of Mexico. And the current claims of the sea bed surveying causing the deaths and stranding of whales has zero scientific basis, and is being spread by individuals and organizations who are against the turbines for other reasons and are using the whale issue to forward their agenda. Even the Marine Mammal Standing Center has not only stated there is no connection between the whale deaths and the turbines, but their documentation has shown no significant increase in the deaths and strandings over the last decade. And the majority of the whales washing up have been humpbacks, whose populations have been on the rise, resulting in more ship and small boat collisions, much in the way deer/car collisions increase with population increases.

I'm curious about the claim that the government is pushing electric tools on everyone (I assume that statement was regarding battery powered ones). Contractors and homeowners are freely and enthusiastically choosing those tools, not by government pressure. The reasons don't even warrant explaining.

All this said, I'm not a raving proponent of green energy, but for a reason rarely addressed. It took from the beginning of man to 200 years ago to reach a world population of one billion people. Within that 200 years we've grown to eight billion. In any other species that would be considered a plague. It presents a myriad of problems in addition to energy needs. But trying to meet the energy needs of that kind of growth with green energy is just kicking the can down the road and not addressing the root problem. I'm not suggesting heavy-handed solutions such as those China enacted, but it has to be addressed in some way. Nature deals with overpopulation with either starvation or disease. We've seen plenty of that already.

Part of the reason you caught a lot of fish was because the warmer discharge water drew in lots of fish that prefer warmer waters. As I hear it all those fish are no longer there.

Only one comment: I believe the reference to tools is to outdoor gardening equipment. Several states and some in federal service have at least proposed banning petroleum-based yard equipment

Thank You Rustygunz60. I appreciate your response.

Although my reference to "this administration" was not intended as making this a political discussion. It was meant to point up the ramped up regulations driving up maintenance and operating costs. Costs are not necessarily the end all, be all decision point, but they have to be significantly considered and factored in. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".

I remember when they brought the reactor into Oyster Creek (in/around early 1970s). They had to demolish the Rt 9 Bridge to get the barge far enough upstream (I only recall the bridge being shut down and I think I remember it torn out?). I am pretty sure it resulted in permanently termination of the Forked River branch at that point. I was never sure if the railroad was used to deliver materials or not.

Oyster Creek was an older plant and I was aware of the fish kill events. The plant had looked into converting the cooling system but ran afoul of regulations and requirements before they would be allowed to construct cooling towers. It was deemed to expensive. Oyster Creek may or may not be a good example for the discussion other than to pooint out the loss of power plants in the face of growing power needs.

Charlie L is correct in my reference to agricultural equipment turning electric. Current rules for NJ, NY, & CA are to ban gas powered lawnmowers, weedwhackers, leafblowers and acccessories asssociated with residential and commercial. In the face of them trying to create Electric powered heavy haul trucks (OTR) it is a logical progression to get into Cultivators, harvestors, tractors and other equipment. That should be interesting to see how they will accomplish that. It will definitely kill off small farm ownership. Stepping from small vehicles/equipment to large equipment is their trajectory.

No one looks down the road to see the true impact of reducing/then eliminating the use of fossil fuels. As refineries are also being shut down because they are old and to upgrade them to meet current environmental regulations makes the cost untennable, means reduced capacity to produce oil based products. You can never truly eliminate fuel oils as the use for fossil fuels extends from fuels to lubricants and electric powered equipment is still not developed enough to sustain equipment outside of major urban areas (we used to have a lot of electrified railways and the majority of them were de-electrified due to costs of operating and maintenance over time).

Electrification has it's uses, but is not a replacement. Every technology has its list of Pros & Cons. And that applies pretty much to everyhting. Technology needs another 50-100 years to develop and address a lot of these problems. Today's world is far too short sighted on all sorts of topics and needs to learn to balance efforts, not terminate them.

Rails serving Forked River / Waretown had been torn out, sometime around 1962. They were re-established to provide service for the construction of the nuke plant, then promptly torn out again.

Funny how they want to shut down all the baseline (90+percent reliable) power with no replacement, be it generation or storage, in sight. I guess they're planning on a miracle or two.

Let's try to get back to railroad comments. What you have said is interesting but the main topics here should be about trains--Thanks.

I think that recently coal power plants have been mostly replaced with natural gas power plants, not wind or solar, which does mean less coal trains (the natural gas tends to be piped around).

One of the original plans for the future of Beesley's Point was to convert it to natural gas. However, there were huge campaigns against running pipelines to fuel this endeavor, and it obviously never happened. And I have never heard about natural gas being shipped via rail, so I doubt that could have been an alternative.

JohnFromJersey wrote: ↑Mon May 15, 2023 7:53 pm One of the original plans for the future of Beesley's Point was to convert it to natural gas. However, there were huge campaigns against running pipelines to fuel this endeavor, and it obviously never happened. And I have never heard about natural gas being shipped via rail, so I doubt that could have been an alternative.

Natural gas can be and is shipped by maritime vessel, tanker truck and by rail in the form of liquefied natural gas ("LNG"). LNG is natural gas which is cooled to the very low temperature (minus 260 degrees F) at which temperature the gas condenses into a liquid which is very high in BTU content per gallon (600 times that of gaseous state volume) and the LNG is at approximately regular atmospheric pressure, not compressed. That said, the cost of liquefaction and transportation would likely be too high for use as electric generation fuel.

David wrote: ↑Mon May 15, 2023 10:42 am Let's try to get back to railroad comments. What you have said is interesting but the main topics here should be about trains--Thanks.

Agreed and note that much of the materials and products necessary to construct new solar, wind turbine, and nuclear generation will likely be carried by train given the massive size and number of projects contemplated. The offshore NJ wind projects are a prime example. There is significant potential for a return to railroad electrification as the battery technology continues to improve and diesel locomotives are replaced by battery power. Small sections of catenary could be used along routes for rapid recharging in motion which is far less costly than complete catenary installation except where high density traffic justifies the full installation. Based upon my 40 plus years of work experience in the energy industry, this is my analysis: Solar is the most expensive and wind the next most expensive common source of electric energy in the USA when all true costs are taken into consideration. The capacity credit for wind generation in the 13 state and District of Columbia PJM Interconnection area, including New Jersey, is currently about 18%. The 18 percent capacity credit means that on average, the wind generation that is said to peak at, for example, 1,000 megawatts will produce closer to 180 megawatts on average. Solar is similar to wind. Both wind and solar are intermittent sources. What this means because of the laws of physics, is that a large amount of conventional generation, i.e., natural gas will have to been running at any given time in load following and backup modes to instantly smooth out variations in output of the wind turbines and solar panels to avoid electric grid disturbances and blackouts and potential damage to utility and consumer equipment. The very high cost of this backup is not charged to the solar or wind generation owners or company, but is buried in the service costs of bills for all electric consumers. From a clean air health viewpoint wind and solar are good, but are not a reliable source for a majority of electric needs since large amounts of electricity cannot be easily, economically or environmentally-friendly stored for use when wind and solar are not available due to weather and to handle the variations. The State should encourage wind and solar as a supplemental source, but also be encouraging the construction of environmentally friendly, dispatchable, reliable and intrinsically safe new designs of small modular nuclear reactors to displace carbon based energy. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (sister agency to the FRA) recently approved the design of a small modular reactor and projects are in the early stage of planning in both the US and Canada per news reports. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc- ... tor-design

I thought the general discussion of Beesley Point's future revolved around a material storage yard for the construction and maintenance of the off-shore wind farm as well as an electrical transmission transfer site. I was expecting that they would need to retain rail in suport of receiving materials for the Farm construction, but everything I am reading indicates they are ripping rail out of the entire site?

The electrical transfer station will remain but the wind turbines are gonna be manufactured in Paulsboro then sent to the site by barge.

Bracdude181 wrote: ↑Thu May 18, 2023 10:17 am The electrical transfer station will remain but the wind turbines are gonna be manufactured in Paulsboro then sent to the site by barge.

The final turbine parts are going to be assembled in Paulsboro to be shipped by barge. The actual manufacture is done in China, Germany and Denmark. Most of the labor will be European, with very few US workers.

David: sorry off topic.