There is no such thing as clean coal

[Jccarlton]

Coal energy is dirty and dangerous. Burning coal puts, CO2 not included masive amounts of gasses that are both toxic and dirty. Life around a coal fired power plant, even a small one is pure hell. Link to a report from the Physicians for social research. The report seems sound though I would usually take a report fr...om PSR with more than a grain of salt :
http://www.psr.org/resources/coals-assa ... ealth.html

Considering the facts, I have never understood why nuclear energy is such a pariah.

[alexjrgreen]

Use Aqueous Froth C02 capture...

[kunkmiester]

Who buys the Calcium carbonate, and will that market be able to support the massive influx of supply? Good idea otherwise. There's a similar concept to make portland cement.

[MSimon]

Coal energy is dirty and dangerous. Burning coal puts, CO2 not included masive amounts of gasses that are both toxic and dirty. Life around a coal fired power plant, even a small one is pure hell. Link to a report from the Physicians for social research. The report seems sound though I would usually take a report fr...om PSR with more than a grain of salt :
http://www.psr.org/resources/coals-assa ... ealth.html

Considering the facts, I have never understood why nuclear energy is such a pariah.

The report is bait and switch.

1. Coal plants emit stuff
2. The Stuff is proven bad for humans

What they leave out is a health survey of people who work in coal fired plants and those who live around them.

I can do the same thing:

1. Arsenic is bad
2. Arsenic is used in computer chips and solar cells
3. Those chips and cells are everywhere
4. We are doomed

[Jccarlton]

Coal energy is dirty and dangerous. Burning coal puts, CO2 not included masive amounts of gasses that are both toxic and dirty. Life around a coal fired power plant, even a small one is pure hell. Link to a report from the Physicians for social research. The report seems sound though I would usually take a report fr...om PSR with more than a grain of salt :
http://www.psr.org/resources/coals-assa ... ealth.html

Considering the facts, I have never understood why nuclear energy is such a pariah.

The report is bait and switch.

1. Coal plants emit stuff
2. The Stuff is proven bad for humans

What they leave out is a health survey of people who work in coal fired plants and those who live around them.

I can do the same thing:

1. Arsenic is bad
2. Arsenic is used in computer chips and solar cells
3. Those chips and cells are everywhere
4. We are doomed

I think that health surveys of people who live near coal plants would be instructive. Unfortunately the greens are to busy chasing nukes to do anything about that. There is a big difference between Arsenic inside a microchip in the quantities they use for a dopant and actually breathing the vaporized Arsenic as well as a bunch of other metals such as mercury and lead. Modern coal plants use injectors to blow powdered coal into the combustion chamber. This ensures as much combustion as possible and converts almost all the carbon in the coal to CO2, which is what you want. That also means that any impurities in the coal, and there are many depending on the kind of coal you are burning also gets vaporized and goes straight up the chimney. You can go to the library and look They don't burn it across grates so that impurities are captured in the cinders. Many of the coal fired power plants even in the US do not have mitigation equipment:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/02/coal-p ... tails.html
The fact is, that when you start to burn coal in millions of tons a year at a plant, constituents measured in PPM start to matter. If they are going up the chimney then the local population has a problem.

[Helius]

Coal energy is dirty and dangerous. Burning coal puts, CO2 not included masive amounts of gasses that are both toxic and dirty. Life around a coal fired power plant, even a small one is pure hell. Link to a report from the Physicians for social research. The report seems sound though I would usually take a report fr...om PSR with more than a grain of salt :
http://www.psr.org/resources/coals-assa ... ealth.html

Considering the facts, I have never understood why nuclear energy is such a pariah.

The report is bait and switch.

1. Coal plants emit stuff
2. The Stuff is proven bad for humans

What they leave out is a health survey of people who work in coal fired plants and those who live around them.

I can do the same thing:

1. Arsenic is bad
2. Arsenic is used in computer chips and solar cells
3. Those chips and cells are everywhere
4. We are doomed

We would be if we required the burning of 4 billion tons of computer chips per year to remain... undoomed.

Midwestern coal plants are devastating to the Adirondacks.

[Skipjack]

Plus: Coal powerplants release radioactive matieral into the atmosphere during normal operation, all the time...
Nuclear powerplants dont. Even the radiactivity released by a medium accident is comparably little (but the entire world freaks out).

[flying_eagle]

More importantly, would be to stop building coal burning plants until we solve the problem which is an important step to solving our co2 emissions problem. At least now, people and congress are beginning to see that pollution is everyone's problem and polluter must assume responsibility. Superfunds at tax payer expense is not the way to solve industries' citizenship responsibilites and likewise, consumers must also take on their fair share as well. Hence the need to put the problem in front of people so that they fiqure out how to deal with it, instead of ignoring it. I assume you don't want future generations digging in trash burials just to find a metal or other resource that once was easy to obtain.

[alexjrgreen]

More importantly, would be to stop building coal burning plants until we solve the problem which is an important step to solving our co2 emissions problem.

It's solved:

Use Aqueous Froth C02 capture...

[blaisepascal]

More importantly, would be to stop building coal burning plants until we solve the problem which is an important step to solving our co2 emissions problem.

It's solved:

Use Aqueous Froth C02 capture...

According to that link, Aqueous Froth CO2 capture uses calcium oxide (CaO) as an agent to capture the CO2, producing calcium carbonate (CaCO3). Since the standard method of producing CaO is to use heat to break down CaCo3 into CaO and CO2, I'm uncertain what overall benefit there is to Aqueous Froth CO2 capture.

[Giorgio]

This is a very old technological idea.
Calcium Oxide (lime) is heavily used to reduce the sulfur emission from power plants burning low grade carbon (carbon with high sulfur content) by transforming it into Calcium Sulfate (gypsum). Using this same technology to capture CO2 would require before everything else a complete cleaning of the CO2 stream from all impurities (including Uranium), otherwise the produced CaCO3 will have very little (if none) market value.

[taniwha]

It's solved:

Use Aqueous Froth C02 capture...

That covers the CO2. What about all the radio-actives? I will, however, admit that the froth might help with that too, though there's still the problem of what to do with the stuff afterwards.

[MSimon]

Midwestern coal plants are devastating to the Adirondacks.

Arsenic?

[MSimon]

This is a very old technological idea.
Calcium Oxide (lime) is heavily used to reduce the sulfur emission from power plants burning low grade carbon (carbon with high sulfur content) by transforming it into Calcium Sulfate (gypsum). Using this same technology to capture CO2 would require before everything else a complete cleaning of the CO2 stream from all impurities (including Uranium), otherwise the produced CaCO3 will have very little (if none) market value.

So true. And we need to get the uranium in sand removed before it can be used in concrete.

URANIUM

We are doomed.

Do you know why dirt is dirty? It has uranium in it.

We need to clean up our dirt.

And rocks. Lots of rocks will need their uranium removed.

And people - people have uranium in them. That will require extensive cleaning.

[Helius]

Midwestern coal plants are devastating to the Adirondacks.

Arsenic?

Burning 4B tons a year, involves a lot more problems than just Arsenic. We burn way too much "*!^&**^" coal. Scrubbers, frothy or not, just plays a shell game, moving heavy metals from air to water. Scrubbers just shift the huge 4 Billion ton burden.

Clean coal is a comical ruse.

The equivalent physical potential energy output of that much coal could be represented by 500 tons of fissionable material converted to fission product.
I see that as potentially *super* clean.