Field Trip to the Power Plant
Field Trip to the Power Plant
      The name of the power plant we went to is the John Amos Power Plant that is located in Big Scary, West Virginia.  The name used to be The Big Scary Power Plant.  Since they thought that name would scare people they decided to name it after a very famous person in West Virginia, John Amos. Hope you have fun!   In our field trip they told us how they made the electricity there. If you want to know more about fossil fuels read in How Electricity is Produced. Don't worry.  We will tell you what is it.
  John Amos is really made up of three plants: one big unit and two smaller units.  Combining the smaller ones make just as much as the big one does.  You can only see one from the bus window.

In this picture you are seeing how the power plant gets the coal out of the train cars.  We were unable to see how they take it out of the barges because we didn't have enough time.  We can still tell you how it happened.  First, big scoopers like big buckets came down and get all the coal out of the barge.  This process takes about 1 and 1/2 hours .

In this picture you can see that after they dump the coal out of the cars and the barges, they put them into a pile of coal that is waiting to heat up water. It is then transformed into water vapor and goes into the turbine.

In this picture, as you can see, the coal is being put on the conveyor belt to a big machine that puts it in another pile waiting to go into the plant and be crushed.

As you can see, in this picture the machine in the center is the conveyor belt that takes coal into the building to be crushed.

    Since we don't have enough pictures we are going to have to tell you what else they did next.  After they picked up the coal, they took it to the pulvarizer, the big machine that crushes the coal so it can be burned easier.  After we saw the pulvarizer, we saw the turbine which turned the generator and took electricity to the homes.
 
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