Besides not existing, that is.
The photo (from NY Times) shows a house in Tennessee that is buried by fly ash, a sludgy waste byproduct of coal incineration. Approximately 500 million gallons or 1.7 million cubic yards broke out and covered a big chunk of eastern Tennessee on Monday.
Clean-coal lobbyists are going to have to use all of their superpowers to spin this one. The reality is whenever coal is incinerated, no matter what the bells and whistles, there is waste, and there has to be a mechanism to store this waste. The lobby can’t wish away the laws of physics.
Now let’s take a moment to consider what it must feel like to lose one’s home and neighborhood three days before Christmas, in the middle of the worst economic crisis in decades …
The lobby can chant “clean, clean, clean” ad infinitum. The image I am left with is of a house buried to its eaves in heavy-metal waste and a family left homeless.
I recently heard on NPR that clean coal is in fact possible, and not necessarily an oxymoron, but such horrific waste disasters are tough to ignore. Certainly every power generation system has its waste product, but this should be a reminder that coal ain’t a panacea.
Posted by Ames | December 24, 2008, 9:39 pmwell, i have to say this spill is not from a clean-coal process, but the idea is the same.
fly ash is “trapped” and contained, rather than being released into the air. this waste is stored … think nuclear-power waste.
“clean-coal”-plant construction requires immense investment. the process might be able to burn a cleaner product (the idea being to blast, zap, scrub, wave-a-magic-wand over the coal until it is near-pure hydrocarbon, ridding the fuel of heavy metals and other impurities), but there is still the issue of what to do with the stuff that is blasted, zapped, scrubbed, magic-wanded away …
it’s gotta be stored.
similarly, additional mega-investment is needed to develop this mythical carbon-dioxide-sequestration system. CO2 needs to be stored, too … apparently, they want to shoot it underground.
of course, there is the ever-present issue of how to strip the earth of coal in the first place.
hundreds and hundreds … and hundreds of billions of dollars in (public) investment and subsidies for clean-coal development OR the same investment in solar and wind technologies …
hmmmm …
i’d rather see the investment in new technologies. keep the coal process the same, and focus on way to effectively shift from existing coal technology to wind and solar.
(BTW!!! congrats on finishing exams and making it to winter break!!!)
Posted by didionsmommy | December 25, 2008, 11:42 amoh, and here’s an article from huffington post on the recent npr story i am assuming you heard (earlier this month) …
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-roberts/clean-coal-salesman-joe-l_b_148790.html
i’d look for the original npr story, but i gotta get (holiday) cookin’, literally!
cheers!
Posted by didionsmommy | December 25, 2008, 11:45 amNot all fly-ash is stored, actually. Some of it gets used in the manufacture of a variety of concretes and other industrial ceramics. Generally, as a replacement for a previously-used material that would’ve had to have been mined & refined – and the massive quarrying operations and factories needed to make Portland cement aren’t exactly doing the environment any favors.
In that sense, it’s a case of environmental policy being about trade-offs, not solutions. Nuclear power, for instance, produces zilch for air pollution, but the trade-off is that you’ve got to deal with some rather uniquely nasty solid and heat waste. Wind and solar produce no byproducts of any sort, but you’ve got to kill a lot of vegetation and critters to make room for the power plants, which take up more land-per-watt than waste-producing generators (damned if I know what happens if you base the comparison on the total lifecycle inputs & outputs of, say, wind turbine manufacture versus mining and waste disposal, though).
Environmental decisions are almost always a case of mutually exclusive benefits and having to pick one. The idea that you can solve one problem without creating another’s a pipe dream. Eventually, you’ve got to accept that and just pick the negative that’s most acceptable, then live with it.
I kind of picture it as being a farmer with two cows and enough fodder for one. You can dither about trying to feed both, and starve both in the process, or you can accept that the tradeoff of feeding one is killing the other – then choose which cow lives and which cow dies, and carry through with it.
Posted by Steve | December 26, 2008, 11:41 amthanks, steve, re: fly ash … that is true … in fact, it is shocking how gross concrete manufacturing is … and then, too, there is sheet-rock production … totally gross … and totally necessary …
i understand the trade off issue … there is nothing … N-O-T-H-I-N-G … that comes without cost … i have decided the land-use costs associated with solar and wind power are the least of all evils …
Posted by didionsmommy | December 26, 2008, 6:55 pm