News Hits: Clean Coal and Coal River Mountain

I have two coal links of notice to share today. First up, Michael Brune recently released his book "Coming Clean: Breaking America's Addiction to Oil and Coal," and appeared today on Democracy Now to debate Joe Lucas from the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE). The debate was a good one, with Brune giving some great details on why coal is not clean. Click here to watch the video or to read the transcript.

Second on the list, CNN recently took a trip to Coal River Mountain to see up close the impacts of mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR). MTR is threatening Coal River Mountain now, even though clean energy advocates have a much better plan of putting wind power on the mountain. Click here to read the story from CNN, or you can watch the video segment by clicking here.

Comments

[Joyce]

You bring up a good point about how "clean coal" is mined and its devastating effects on the environment.

[Joyce]

You bring up a good point about how "clean coal" is mined and its devastating effects on the environment.

[Dr. J. Singmaster]

I have pointed out in Carl's last write-up on coal that "Clean Coal" is a farce that will be too expense and involves using toxic and flammable chemicals in large amounts. The idea may continue until one those hazards makes a disaster but perhaps the lack of getting really efficient trapping of carbon dioxide emissions at a viable cost may sink it before such a disaster. I did not mention as is done here the environmental mess that coal mining generates. If land recovery costs were forced on coal companies, it would not be cheap fuel.
What we should be doing is making coal, i.e. charcoal, from the massive amounts of organic wastes sent to dumps and of sewage and other fecal solids that we needlessly let biodegrade in dumps and elsewhere to be reemitting GHGs, mainly carbon dioxide. The pyrolysis process used by Kingsford to make charcoal can be set up to use on those wastes to get inert charcoal and most importantly to destroy all germs, toxics and drugs in the wastes that may escape to pollute water systems causing health problems. The costs for maintaining present dumps to prevent escapes is billions of dollars a year, which could be greatly reduced, probably by a factor of 10 0r more, if the those wastes get pyrolyzed so that they will not be in new dumps at least.
Organic wastes and sewage are ever-expanding messes so we need to find a way to cut the costs of dumps before they bankrupt us or get caught being the source of major water pollution problem costing lives.. The process can be set up to get some of the energy put in converted to electricity, and an expelled mix of useful organic chemicals, water and some gases can be collected and refined.
The biggest benefit of pyrolyzing these wastes will be the destroying of germs, toxics and drugs. EPA has announced a conference in Dec. to evaluate risks of drugs in drinking water indicating the present controls and checks are becoming ineffective. Pyrolysis of those wastes would eliminate the need to evaluate. The July G-8 meeting discussed many points on world health problems with an appalling lack of concern for the role of the mishandling of those wastes play in polluting water and spreading health problems. Dr. J. Singmaster, Fremont, CA