That might not be entirely true. Kintigh Generating Station is in the neighborhood and just shut down last month. There are also a bunch in Pennsylvania. I’m not sure exactly how much you could cut the coal with corpses before the system starts to complain; but coal fired thermal plants aren’t especially picky by power plant standards(no way you’d get away with this sort of thing with combined cycles gas, say); and use literally thousands of metric tons of fuel a day(varies with efficiency and plant size; but I’ve seen usage of ~9,000 metric tons/day for a 1,000MWe plant); with Kintigh a 675MWe unit.
I suspect that there would be social mores to deal with; and some transportation hurdles; but having coal fired generating infrastructure on the scale required to contribute a solid chunk of your grid pretty much implies having plenty of cremation capacity.
Them is fightin" words, good sir. Snarky comments at dawn! Have at thee! No, insurance companies are the absolute bane of my existence and we would be much better off with M4A.
In Italy the crematoria have been running 24/7, and the bodies continue to pile up. I think in NYC, only the rich will have access to that (relative) dignity.
I don’t undestand the space issue. It’s a mass grave. More bodies means dig deeper. In the end, maybe the whole island is a little bit higher elevation. I just figured you need earth moving equipment to really get at that dystopian, postapocolyptic vibe.
In my experience it usually goes “use the backhoe to remove the bulk of the dirt, use guys with shovels to finish squaring off the hole.” It’s hard to get a nice neat rectangular hole with heavy machinery alone.
Funny tidbit … I have a relative who got ran out of the tombstone business when it was taken over by organized crime. Mind you that wasn’t even this century.
Not knowing the funeral industry, I don’t know which is riskier for workers, mass graves or cremation, nor if there is sufficient cremation bandwidth for the expected mortality rates. But if mass graves are needed, surely we should be using machines to dig, not prisoners with shovels.
I suspect that this falls under “social mores to deal with”; but I suspect that a coal pulverizer, possibly assisted by an initial run through a coarser industrial shredder, would be able to provide a usable feedstock; especially if cut with a decent proportion of actual coal and if the thermal output is used for dehydration.
Since Kintigh is not intended to return to service; one could also presumably make more invasive/destructive modifications; exploiting the overall infrastructure but modifying the furnace components if necessary.
I certainly hope that it doesn’t come to this; but I expect that it would not be a technical problem; so much as an all-the-other-problems-one-would-expect-under-circumstances-where-people-are-seriously-asking-“how can I dispose of corpses on a thousands of metric tons/day scale?”
