My little boy and I were out in the truck the other night and pulled up to the Burnt Creek boat dock. The sun had already set, but it was still casting color to our sky, and it was a suitable backdrop for MDU’s power plant north of Mandan.

Remember the stereotypical image of stacks belching forth acrid black smoke? Those days are long gone, thanks to pollution control measures. In fact, the only thing you’re likely to see from today’s power plants is steam…which makes sense, because that’s all a power plant really is: a steam factory. Once they’ve made the steam, they force it through the turbines of some very large generators, but the process of the plant is the liquefaction and ignition of coal in order to heat water into steam. As cleanly and as safely as possible, I might add.