Scientific American: Kyle Nelson points upward to show off the six-story-high main boiler of Holcomb Station. The 370-megawatt coal-fired power plant sits on the rolling prairie of southwestern Kansas just a few miles from the small town of Holcomb, population 2,100, roughly 40 miles (65 kilometers) east of the Colorado border. Enormous metal pipes crisscross far overhead in a facility where the temperature is a little too hot to ignore, and the machinery’s din is deafening. Nelson, a senior vice …