The World Falls Back In Love With Coal 341
Hugh Pickens writes "Richard Anderson reports on BBC that despite stringent carbon emissions targets in Europe designed to slow global warming and massive investment in renewable energy in China, coal, the dirtiest and most polluting of all the major fossil fuels, is making a comeback with production up 6% over 2010, twice the rate of increase of gas and more than four times that of oil. 'What is going on is a shift from nuclear power to coal and from gas to coal; this is the worst thing you could do, from a climate change perspective,' says Dieter Helm. Why the shift back to coal? Because coal is cheap, and getting cheaper all the time. Due to the economic downturn, there has been a 'collapse in industrial demand for energy,' leading to an oversupply of coal, pushing the price down. Meanwhile China leads the world in coal production and consumption. It mines over 3 billion tons of coal a year, three times more than the next-biggest producer (America), and last year overtook Japan to become the world's biggest coal importer. Although China is spending massive amounts of money on a renewable energy but even this will not be able to keep up with demand, meaning fossil fuels will continue to make up the majority of the overall energy mix for the foreseeable future and when it comes to fossil fuels, coal is the easy winner — it is generally easier and cheaper to mine, and easier to transport using existing infrastructure such as roads and rail, than oil or gas. While China is currently running half a dozen carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects — which aim to capture CO2 emissions from coal plants and bury it underground — the technology is nowhere near commercial viability. 'Renewed urgency in developing CCS globally, alongside greater strides in increasing renewable energy capacity, is desperately needed,' writes Anderson, 'but Europe's increasing reliance on coal without capturing emissions is undermining its status as a leader in clean energy, and therefore global efforts to reduce CO2 emissions.'"
No, it has nothing to do with fuel (Score:5, Funny)
The fact is that today's children are terrible. The increase in coal production is purely for Santa to leave lumps of it in stockings for these children.
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This might be my favorite AC post. Ever.
Re:No, it has nothing to do with fuel (Score:5, Funny)
If it's too cheap to ignore then make it clean! (Score:3)
Granted the CO2 is not good if we want the climate to stay as is but if coal is too cheap then we MUST figure a way to use it without the drawbacks.
There has been talk about talking CO2 from the air and making diesel out of it. Why not get straight from a coal burning plant? (BTW: sequestration of CO2 in the ground was proven to cause Earth quakes.)
Re:If it's too cheap to ignore then make it clean! (Score:5, Insightful)
Because right now, it's cheaper to pull oil out the ground and refine it into diesel.
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In the US it seems that free energy is a right, or at a least such a sign of prosperity that no one is willing to give it up, the new chicken in every pot. Now we focus on cheap electricity, and cheap gas, not making efficient use of the resources we have.
Take christmas. When I was a kid we would
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Oh, climb down off that soap box before you hurt yourself.
We ARE making more efficient use of resources every day, and most of north America does recycle.
Most waste management companies have invested heavily in the equipment. In fact recycling has gotten so efficient and pervasive that the recycling companies are running out of warehouse space to store recyclable paper because the paper mills can't handle the supply. The market price of recycled newspapers has crashed due to an over supply. The recycle m
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In germany its 100%, not sure about China (and also not the USA).
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The words CLEAN and the word COAL should not be allowed next to each other until at least 10% of the coal plants are actually clean.
They are all Clean, Especially in the US and Western European countries. Even China is building new clean coal plants.
In the US, All coal plants have scrubbers, all new plants used fluidized bed boilers [energy.gov], and many are starting on CO2 sequestration. In most cases, they are as clean as gas plants, and some are ahead of gas plants on sequestration projects.
You can continue to demonize clean coal [energy.gov] all you want. It makes you trendy. But it doesn't make you right. Just makes you look uninformed.
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> They are all Clean
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Re:If it's too cheap to ignore then make it clean! (Score:4, Informative)
They don't all have this new technology you're referring to. Saying coal is clean with the amount of CO2 it dumps out is pretty ridiculous. Coal pits also completely destroy the environment in which they are dug.
Clean? Not even close.
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In the US, All coal plants have scrubbers, all new plants used fluidized bed boilers [energy.gov], and many are starting on CO2 sequestration. In most cases, they are as clean as gas plants, and some are ahead of gas plants on sequestration projects.
You can continue to demonize clean coal [energy.gov] all you want. It makes you trendy. But it doesn't make you right. Just makes you look uninformed.
I'm not so sure. Google brought up tons of examples of such fluidized bed plants that are still polluting for several reasons, such as not fully implementing the "green" technology to save money, dumping of hazardous coal ash in local wet lands, etc. It looks like coal CAN be a clean form of power, but the power conglomerates are cutting corners.
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was it ever not in love with coal? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sources suggest [indexmundi.com] that apart from a brief blip during the economic downturn in 2009, worldwide coal consumption has been steadily increasing for the past 10 years or so, after plateauing in 1988-2000.
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Right, but the rich countries (that pay the most) were reducing consumption in the 1988-2000 range, maybe a bit later than that even, while the poor countries were picking up consumption.
And then they started to take off like a rocket.
Coal had fallen out of favour as one of those 'we're not going to eliminate it over night' kind of things. And then china decided it liked being able to power factories and TVs.
Re:was it ever not in love with coal? (Score:5, Interesting)
Coal had fallen out of favour as one of those 'we're not going to eliminate it over night' kind of things. And then china decided it liked being able to power factories and TVs.
Actually what happened was that our corporate overlords decided that cheap Chinese labor was the way of the future so they dismantled our manufacturing industry and moved it to China. This caused a massive increase in demand for electricity in China so that they could build cheap TVs, mobile phones, laptops and other gadgets for us to buy with the top notch salaries we were all earning in the new 'service economy'. In order to keep their prices low and margins high the Chinese went for the cheapest most abundant fuel they could find, unfortunately that also happened to be the dirtiest most polluting one. Of course none of that is our fault, we just buy Chinese TVs, mobile phones, laptops and re-elect the puppets our corporate overlords finance with the money they earned exporting our manufacturing industry to China .... and besides, it's not as if the climate is changing or anything.
Re:was it ever not in love with coal? (Score:5, Informative)
Our manufacturing industry simply evolved towards automation. We make more than we ever did before, its just that we use fewer man hours than we used to. Even small machine shops that used to employ a few dozen people now employ only a couple of people total who monitor CNC machines, but these small machine shops now output more product than they ever did using manual labor, and its made to tighter specifications than ever before too.
I worked in a shop where many employees were grinding some carbide cutting tools that needed to be within a spec of +/- 2 ten thousandths of an inch destined for Pratt and Whitney's jet engine manufacturing facility. There was lots of waste because it was exceedingly difficult to consistently make parts with such a tight specification. That same shop now uses a single CNC machine to make the same part, has almost no waste at all, and only needs a single person to oversee the machine periodically (the person can oversee dozens of machines.)
That, my friend, is what happened to American manufacturing. We didn't stop making stuff. We just stopped using people to do it.
Predictable (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what you get for knee-jerking and planning to shut down all of your nuclear reactors. The promise of replacing that power with clean renewable energy is proving a tad hard to follow up, right? I'm not exactly surprised.
I expect Europe will eventually start driving coal down once more, but it'll take a while to do such a shift, during which time coal will be the stopgap measure. That, or they finally wake up and do nuclear right instead of writing it off entirely.
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Europe doesn't have much good coal left. After centuries of mining, only crappy coal is left behind. Germany, the world leader in brown coal (the worse of the worse) production and consumption..
http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/ [worldcoal.org]
44% of Germany's power production is still coal. But environmentalists say that nuclear is the problem and shut it down. Because we all know that nuclear power causes global warming, destroyed the ozone layer and killed millions in Chernobyl and destroyed the enviro
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Can we switch to burning Activists for fuel?
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Re:Predictable (Score:4, Interesting)
There's a reason why the research into the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) has been dusted off and given serious consideration again.
Unlike conventional nuclear reactors, LFTR's have a lot of advantages:
1. It uses plentiful thorium-233 dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as fuel--cheap to make.
2. You can use spent uranium fuel rods and even plutonium from dismantled nuclear warheads dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as fuel--eliminating a huge nuclear waste disposal problem.
3. It doesn't require an expensive pressurized reactor vessel.
4. Shutting down the reactor quickly involves only dumping the liquid fuel from the reactor--no need for complicated reactor control rod procedures.
5. Using closed-loop Brayton turbines, we eliminate the need for expensive cooling towers or locating the reactor near a big body of water.
6. The radioactive waste generated is very small, and only has a half-life of under 300 years. That means very cheap disposal costs (if the nuclear medicine industry doesn't grab it first!).
So what are we waiting for?
Re: Solar Costs (Score:3)
Up until a few years ago, the main ingredient in solar cells, silicon, piggy-backed on the electronics industry, because the supply chain already existed. Then the volume of silicon for solar cells became larger than that for electronics. Since it does not have to be as high purity, and often can be polycrystalline rather than single crystal, custom plants to make "solar grade silicon" were built. The market price for PV silicon dropped from $400/kg to a current $16, and the price of the cells dropped rig
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Re:Predictable (Score:4, Insightful)
It has nothing to do with nuclear. Keep in mind fukushima happened last year and there is no way new coal plants could have been built as a reaction by now.
The growth has been coming for years due to rising costs in other areas and the falling cost of coal. Carbon capture has also made it more attractive.
I'm sure nuclear will eventually make a difference, but not yet.
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There are two ways I can think of this being a direct reaction within the timescale-- existing idled coal-fired plants / multi-source plants switching to coal, or the addition of coal fired boilers at existing plants.
I have done work in CO2 distillation plant that took feed from a nearby refinery; it is pretty hard for me to imagine carbon sequestration ever being a commercially viable means to keep coal attractive. I would have thought that in-situ gasification would have happened by now.
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Nobody complains about all the nuclear reactors mounted on thousands of kilograms of rocket fuel, pointed directly at the world's major population centers, locked and loaded, a few electrical impulses from going off.
People are stupid, and the anti-nuke people are even stupider. We'll burn every last drop of commercially extractable energy profitable hydrocarbon before we look at nuclear. My only ray of light is nuclear is so clean, and there is so much of it, that it may be able to power a next generation o
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Having fusion reactors would be a national miracle seeing as how all current reactors and weapons are of the fission type.
Re:Predictable (Score:4, Informative)
Fusion reactors we are currently working on will produce more radioactive waste than current fission reactors.
After we have those successful we still need to move/scale them to fuels that don't produce strong neutron fluxes.
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Technically, I suppose. But from the second sentence of that article:
" It is colloquially referred to as a hydrogen bomb or H-bomb because it employs hydrogen fusion, though in most applications the majority of its destructive energy comes from uranium fission, not hydrogen fusion by itself."
Fusion not clearly practical (Score:3)
Hello,
It's not clear to me that fusion can EVER be made practical. It's quite possible that a SMALL fusion plant just can't be made, which leaves you with investing in mega-plants. Then, if you pay more in capital to build a fusion plant than you can recover from selling the power than, say, wind power, no one will ever build a fusion plant.
As an example of the stringent constraints on fusion, did you know that a thermal plasma of reasonable size with elements heavier than h
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Which "greens" are you talking about?
German greens are more liberal than socialists, are against drafts martial law etc. (never saw such a bullshit claim before), what is wrong with wage control? Most people demand a minimum wage so unemployed people can not be treated like slaves and have to work 14h a day to live above "minimum level".
just like the collective decided that it does not want free market competitive capitalism, but instead wants collectivism. In a "free market" nothing changes until prices di
America leader on clean energy, not Europe (Score:3, Insightful)
America is the only country it would seem, still building clean nuclear plants (much less shutting them down as Germany has done!). We are also the only country going full speed ahead on fracking, giving us lots of natural gas to use which burns without emitting CO2. Also where are realistic electric cars like the Telsa being designed? America.
Frankly I did not ever see Europe being a leader in CO2 reduction, they were all talk. It's one thing to sign a paper or give statements of support, it's quite another to carry through with real actions that will actually cause the reduction you seek. If Europe had been at all serious about CO2 reduction they would have leaned on Germany not to close down nuclear plants.
Re:America leader on clean energy, not Europe (Score:5, Informative)
Um, no. Burning natual gas emits lots of CO2. Less than coal or oil, because so much more of it is hydrogen, but there's still a good amount of carbon there and it emits CO2 when burned.
Yes, but still less... (Score:5, Informative)
I misspoke in saying it burnt without emitting CO2, but as you say it burns cleaner than coal which is what as the article says, they are turning to in Europe.
So switching to a much heavier use of natural gas can significantly reduce CO2 emissions.
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Meh. For certain values of "significantly". Compared to coal, yeah, you get a pretty good cut--about a 38% reduction. Compared to oil, you're not doing nearly as well: it's somewhere in the 4% to 15% range depending on exactly what kind of oil you're using.
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Is the reduction not even 40% ? I'd thought it was 50% because gas turbines were also more efficient or something.
Anyway, the poster is skipping that you can't really get gas out of the ground and to the plant without a few percent loss. And since methane has 20X the infrared "X-section" of CO2, every percent lost harms the atmosphere as much as 20% of the coal effect. So 2% methane + 60% of the CO2 = Just as Bad As Coal.
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Aye, but it's still a stopgap measure. We need to cut our emissions dramatically, not let them climb up at a lesser rate, which is what natural gas would afford us at best. Worse, it's not even a step in the right direction, since it's a dead end: there's no logical way of hopping from natural gas to clean energy.
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America is the only country it would seem, still building clean nuclear plants
Canada (specifically Ontario) is too. Several reactors have recently been refurbished and more are underway. A tender to build 4 additional reactors is being prepared.
Canada has very high energy usage on a per-capita basis but a fairly small population.
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Funny you should mention Germany...
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5f1fa75e-047c-11e0-a99c-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2D4Mp89rU [ft.com]
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natural gas to use which burns without emitting CO2
LOLWUT?
It's a fossil fuel, CO2 emissions from it are relatively low but still present. And the extraction process is highly questionable at best...
Re:America leader on clean energy, not Europe (Score:4, Informative)
What do you mean "still"? We had a ~40 year hiatus, while other countries (eg. France) were going full-bore on nuclear power, and we were just hoping our existing plants wouldn't fall apart.
Completely wrong! Less than coal, sure, but it emits plenty of CO2.
This is the "No true Scotsman" logical fallacy. Plenty of electric cars and hybrids are coming from Japan... Nissan Leaf, Mitsubishi i-MiEV, Toyota Prius plug-in, etc. You have to completely contrive your idea of "realistic", going out of your way to make it fit only US-built vehicles.
Other EVs include: Peugeot iOn, Citroen C-ZERO, Smart Fortwo electric, Tata Vista, Vauxhall Ampera, Renault Fluence ZE, Mia electric, Azure Transit Connect Electric; Mercedes-Benz Vito E-Cell; Faam Ecomile; Faam Jolly 2000; Mia U; Smith Electric Edison, BYD Auto's F3DM, Fisker Karma, Ford C-Max Energi.
It might have been a short-sighted and politically motivated move, OR MAYBE the Germans know something about the safety of their existing nuclear power plants that the rest of us do not... Waiting until there's an accident and then shutting them down is the worst of both worlds.
Meanwhile, Germany has been incredibly aggressive in developing solar and wind power, something we can't say about the US, even after Obama's campaign promises.
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Plenty of electric cars and hybrids are coming from Japan... Nissan Leaf, Mitsubishi i-MiEV, Toyota Prius plug-in, etc.
Funny that you should mention Toyota.. whose EV engine design do you think is in the second generation Toyota RAV4 EV?
Toyota went to Tesla for their EV engine. Thats whose engine is in the RAV4 EV.
Re:America leader on clean energy, not Europe (Score:5, Informative)
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In English, America is a synonym for USA. In other languages however, especially Spanish, "America" is the word you use when talking about South + Central + North America.
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Well, to be fair, after a short google expedition, America does seems to be an accepted name for the United States of America, but it is so ONLY in the United States of America.
This isn't really true. When you say that you're an "American" to nearly anyone in the world, the valid assumption they make is that you're from the USA. It only follows that an "American" would be from "America," being the USA.
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What other English-speaking country uses "Americans" to mean anyone in north or south america? My understanding is that Spanish and several other languages use it that way, and that it's a false cognate to translate that into English without changing the word.
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Although, such good use of a semi-colon. I do so admire the juxtaposition of punctuation and profanity.
Get over it... (Score:3)
Coal reserves are much higher than oil and gas reserves, and it's dirt cheap to extract when strip mined. The only real question is whether we'll make coal plants cleaner by using all sorts of filters.
Solution: less people on Earth (Score:2)
I don't see another solution. It seems countries have better _actual_ results in convincing people to have less children than using green energy.
The Foundation (Score:2)
So we are already sliding back, and we haven't even had an Empire and a Foundation.
But coal doesn't cause tsunamis like nuclear does! (Score:5, Funny)
Fukushima killed 20,000 people! Think what a tsunami like that would do in central Europe!
Besides, Europe is going to be 100% solar and wind powered in five years. I think hand-cranked generators are the way to go, though. Think of all the jobs that would be created.
Re:But coal doesn't cause tsunamis like nuclear do (Score:5, Informative)
The nuclear accident of Fukushima has yet to kill *a single person* due to radiation. I don't know where you get your data, but surely it's not factual.
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The wind turbines say "Whoosh!"
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Still cleaner unless it's 100% coal or very close to it. A dirtier electric car is only possible in a few places in the US and China. In most places they would be FAR cleaner.
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Very bad example.
First the high speed traines ARE powered mainly by nuclear or german wind ;D
Secondly even if it was coal, the train would be more ecologic than going by plane.
The plane uses roughly five liter diesel/kerosine per 100km per passenger, the train *one*.
Greenpeace (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me the Greenpeace's successful campaign against nuclear power and failure to campaign against coal power has been a major cause of global warming. No doubt Greenpeace knew or should have known since the 1980s how much worse coal is for the environment.
Re:Greenpeace (Score:4, Informative)
Patrick Moore [wikipedia.org] understood this but of course to the ignorants at Greenpeace this makes him a corporate shill. Environmental protection should be all about setting global priorities straight NOW.
Zeta Power (Score:5, Informative)
Now when we do such things as turn on a light, we can relish more than our collective carbon boot-print on the Earth's bemired face -- we can smile as we bask in the sanguineous luminosity of torture and intoxication too!
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Elections have consequences.
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The global picture is very different from the American picture. Worldwide, gas is expensive, and coal is cheap. In the US, fracking has caused the price of gas to plunge. (European gas prices have doubled since the 2009 crash; in the US they've *drop
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Sorry, answered to some posts and can't mod anymore or I had modded you up again. Complain to support, perhaps the modder is a "known rogue mod".
Re:So why did that prick lay off miners? (Score:5, Informative)
Since China is the world's largest IMPORTER of coal, there is no cheap Chinese coal on the world market. I didn't even have to RTFA to get that from the summary. The coal industry in the US is hurting because cheap natural gas is displacing it (free market at work, but Murray Energy blames it on Obama). Natural gas outside of the North American market is not (yet) so cheap so it is not pressuring coal outside N. America.
Re:So why did that prick lay off miners? (Score:4, Informative)
China and the US have similar reserves of coal (about a quarter of the world's supply each.) Coal is a PITA to transport compared to natural gas (weight vs. energy). There's lot's of natural gas in the Arctic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_exploration_in_the_Arctic [wikipedia.org], which is probably why China is building icebreakers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Xue_Long [wikipedia.org]. When their second one is built, they will have as many active as the U.S., which *is* an Arctic nation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Council [wikipedia.org] with corresponding mineral rights http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_the_Law_of_the_Sea [wikipedia.org].
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Since China is the world's largest IMPORTER of coal
Net, not gross. There's plenty of coal in China, they just consume more than they produce.
there is no cheap Chinese coal on the world market
"Not enough coal to be self-sufficient" isn't the same as "not enough coal to drive down prices."
The coal industry in the US is hurting because cheap natural gas is displacing it
Apples and oranges in the power industry. Coal is base load [wikipedia.org], gas is peak [wikipedia.org].
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Outside of wikipedia the distinction between base and peak is not so clearcut.
Forbes Magazine (outspoken defender of free markets) had these two articles in May of 2012:
"Shale Gas Takes On Coal To Power America's Electrical Plants", May 30, 2012
and "Why Shale Gas Is Closing Coal Plants, So Why Do The Hippies Hate Shale?", May 5, 2012
http://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2012/05/30/shale-gas-takes-on-coal-to-power-americas-electrical-plants/ [forbes.com]
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/05/05/why-shale-gas- [forbes.com]
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It pushes the price down to the point of being affordable to those who couldn't afford it before.
It means more people using it because they are, individually, using less of it, but there are more of them. A lot more. China and india sort of thing.
Re:Hey Slashdot Editor! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not so much PR as reality. Germany is one of the greenest countries in Europe, yet they're building new coal plants. Why? Because they're decommissioning old nuclear plants, and they have to replace them with some suitable base-load source. Since Fukushima, new nuclear plants are practically off the cards, so coal is about it. It's cheap, it's not nuclear, and we don't have to buy it from the Arabs; what's not to love?
Re:Hey Slashdot Editor! (Score:4, Informative)
Coal spews more radiation than a nuclear meltdown, and kills many more people in it's extraction and mining. How's that for some things not to love?
Re:Hey Slashdot Editor! (Score:5, Insightful)
Coal spews more radiation than a nuclear meltdown, and kills many more people in it's extraction and mining. How's that for some things not to love?
Well, I don't love it, and you don't love it, but the people with the money who are making the decisions love it.
Re:Hey Slashdot Editor! (Score:5, Insightful)
And the death's related to coal aren't presented the same way in the media as death's related to nuclear meltdowns.
In a mining disaster, typically a cave-in that traps miners underground, focus is initially on recovering the miners, then the mine owner is fined/put out of business and that's the end of it.
For a nuclear meltdown, it's focus on the actual meltdown itself, then fine/put the owner out of business, then push for the shutdown of all nuclear reactors everywhere.
Re:Hey Slashdot Editor! (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is similar to cars vs airplanes - you are WAY more likely to die in a car accident than in an airplane accident, but many people absolutely panic when they have to fly because when accidents do happen, they often kill hundreds of people instead of a handful. People are irrational that way - they see a volume event as a way greater than a gradual event. I have a friend that spends $10 a week to play the lottery because he's sure he will win. If he wisely invested that money instead, he'd probably be off welfare (yeah, we're paying him to play the lottery, facepalm).
Re:Hey Slashdot Editor! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Coal spews more radiation than a nuclear meltdown"
I'd like to see a source for that. More radiation than a properly functioning nuclear plant, maybe. But accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima: no way!
Plus: the radioactivity released by coal plants is mostly in the fly ash, which is filtered out in modern plants. So it's essentially comparing near zero amounts of radioactivity.
Re:Hey Slashdot Editor! (Score:5, Interesting)
"Coal spews more radiation than a nuclear meltdown" I'd like to see a source for that. More radiation than a properly functioning nuclear plant, maybe. But accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima: no way!
No matter how I count, I get a few PBq in the form of long-lived isotopes from coal, annually, and Fukushima released something like 14 PBq of moderately long lived isotopes, in total. You know, all the 238U and 232Th from the coal is going to stay with us for a very, very long time...
Re:Hey Slashdot Editor! (Score:5, Informative)
The difference is that the residual radioactive materials in coal power station exhaust and fly ash tend to be long-lived ones from natural decay processes -- U238's half-life is 4.5 billion years so a tonne of uranium metal isn't actually very radioactive and in a lump nearly all of the decays that happen every second occur deep inside the lump and never make it to the outside where they can have an effect on the environment. In the case of power station fly ash radioactive contaminants like U238 and Th232 are diluted in lagoons under water and the perceived problem is the chemical toxicity of the sludge (toxic metals, dioxins, sulfur compounds etc.) rather than its radioactivity.
Conversely fission products from a reactor fuel rod that's been run for any length of time have a wide range of half-lifes from milliseconds to millenia. Some are long-lived enough to be an ongoing problem for disposal while also having short enough half-lives that they emit noticeable and possibly dangerous amounts of radioactivity. For example cesium-137 has a 30-year half-life so a kilogram or two spread as fine particles over a wide area due to an accidental release such as in the Chernobyl and Fukushima incidents will emit significant amounts of radioactivity for a time measured in human lifespans. Coal power station waste has virtually no radioactive contaminants with such a short half-life, but there is a very large amount of it produced every year. The exception is radon which is released in both coal mining and combustion -- all of the radon isotopes are quite short-lived and highly active.
Enough radioactive material escapes coal station chimneys even with 99%-plus filtration and precipitation in the stacks that it can be trivially detected downwind for long distances, especially if rain washes it down onto population centres nearby. I've seen a report of radioactive material attributed to the Fukushima releases being detected with simple radiation monitoring instruments in rainwater samples in the middle of St. Louis MO not long after the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. One of the biggest coal-fired power station complexes in the US (Labadie, burning over 8 million tonnes of coal each year to produce 2.3GW of electricity) is about 20 miles to the west from where the measurements were taken.
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This "coal is nuclear too" bullshit is what we get left over from a backfired PR exercise to try to get people to accept nuclear waste by comparing it to coal ash and relying on people to not be able to grasp the idea of background radiation. I'm sure if you put in a bit of
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I'd like to see a source for that. More radiation than a properly functioning nuclear plant, maybe. But accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima: no way!
Plus: the radioactivity released by coal plants is mostly in the fly ash, which is filtered out in modern plants. So it's essentially comparing near zero amounts of radioactivity.
Much of the radiation from coal is released during mining/extraction. The remainder is released during burning. The problem is, you need many times more coal to produce the same amount of energy, than from uranium. We're talking 5 or 6 orders of magnitude larger masses of carbon compared to uranium. That's why, per kilowatt hour, coal fired plants + extraction of coal emit about twice as much radioactive material into the environment, than nuclear plants.
But the sad thing is, the radioactive material isn't
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I have heard coal emits 100x more radiation than nuclear (in normal operation), but that radiation is still is mostly harmless (it certainly doesn't emit less than an uncontained nuclear meltdown, though). Waste coal releases mostly non-fissile Uranium and Thorium, both of which have an extremely long half life and are beta and alpha emitters, respectively. It also will release some radon since that is a byproduct of Uranium and Thorium decay chains, and I'd be a bit more wary of that, but not as much as na
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Yeah, sometimes, and I found my source [scientificamerican.com] after the fact with a bit of searching. It basically says what I did above and what you said - thorium and uranium are concentrated about 10x in the ash and are either processed out or go up the stack, but the added radiation is really not a big deal. The radiation burns you get from that giant fusion reactor in the sky are definitely a lot more risky.
Re:Hey Slashdot Editor! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hey Slashdot Editor! (Score:5, Insightful)
And solar radiation is directly responsible for more cancer deaths than any other radiation source. BAN SOLAR FOR THE CHLDRNZZZZ!!!!!
The irony is that the greens spent so much time in the '80's and 90's demonizing nuclear energy and we are just now reaping what they sowed. Nuclear plants could be designed to be basically accident proof, yet they are saddled with such regulatory burden that it is basically not possible to build new ones in the US.
Hence we are stuck with a national energy policy that is based on wishes, rainbows and unicorn farts. And, like it or not, coal.
Re:Hey Slashdot Editor! (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sure if you're trolling, joking, or just an idiot. You can't point to an example of a Fukushima-like population center wiped out due to radiation from coal because the effects are distributed invisibly among the entire population of the planet. The solution to pollution is dilution, and coal plants get rid of their radioactive waste by 'diluting' it right into our lungs.
You won't see any earnest young reporters taking us through the pulmonary ward at the local nursing home, or the hospice where a wide cross-section of people regularly die of cancers that we normally associate with smoking. Jane Fonda isn't going to picket the ICU at the hospital where people succumb to pneumonia they might otherwise have survived. Nothing in those places is glowing green, melting through concrete floors, or setting off radiation alarms. That's not how coal pollution kills people.
I sincerely hope IHBT, in which case I will STFU and HAND.
Re:Hey Slashdot Editor! (Score:4, Informative)
We all hate moronic talking points - how about we agree to drop them? Chernobyl is an example of radiation problems. 3 Mile Island was a tamer example. And, now, Fukushima. The Greenies talk about all that radiation from coal, but they can't point to one example of a population center depopulated due to radiation from coal.
Try sticking to the REAL drawbacks of using coal.
The reason you have depopulated population centers around the nuclear plants where things have gone wrong is to prevent deaths that we are already seeing in the coal industry and coal power plants but are used to. Is your goal cheap energy, saving lives, or being green? The only one coal comes out better than nuclear is being cheap. All that mercury that we get warned about in fish, guess what percentage of that came from coal mines and power plants.
Re:Hey Slashdot Editor! (Score:4, Insightful)
And you just pinpointed the reason coal is so popular : The damage it does is not concentrated. Instead of wiping out a small area it slowly poisons a large one. The number of deaths may be greater, but they (mostly) can't be proved to be the result of the coal - it's hard for it to kill you quickly. So they just fade into the background - and that's when everything goes right with the power plant.
Nuclear power is capable of high death counts when things go wrong, and very little pollution otherwise. But when things do go wrong, the deaths (even if there are relatively few) are gruesome and therefore highly visible. At the same time it's easier to track the radiation they do release - it's above the normal background radiation, rather then setting the background radiation like coal.
And if you want to drag Chernobyl into it (which was the result of scientists experimenting, not some sort of a random accident), then why not also compare it to some other accidents? Like the Banqiao Dam failure, which killed about 170k people.
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And how exactly are we dealing with the pollution that coal causes? Only instead of storing it in the back yard we scatter it around the city before deciding to do something about it 'tomorrow'.
Yes nuclear waste is a problem, but it could fairly easily be handled, either by reprocessing it or by building permanent storage facilities. It's barely a blip compared to all the waste humanity produces or the damage it's causing to the world.
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It's not so much PR as reality. Germany is one of the greenest countries in Europe, yet they're building new coal plants. Why? Because they're decommissioning old nuclear plants, and they have to replace them with some suitable base-load source. Since Fukushima, new nuclear plants are practically off the cards, so coal is about it. It's cheap, it's not nuclear, and we don't have to buy it from the Arabs; what's not to love?
Emphasizes mine.
Thats wrong.
The new plants are planned and commissioned since a decad
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Re:Hey Slashdot Editor! (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, the 13,000 deaths per year that are attributed to coal-fired power plants in the US alone. How about not loving that?
Source: http://www.catf.us/fossil/problems/power_plants/existing/ [www.catf.us]
How many deaths in the US are attributed to nuclear power per year? None?
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More directly relevant is that coal plants cause 4000 deaths for every one death caused by nuclear power [the9billion.com].
Re:Hey Slashdot Editor! (Score:4, Informative)
Multiply that by 1000x and you get the estimated yearly deaths due to outdoor air pollution, mostly created through burning of fossil fuels. Indoor air pollution (i.e. cigarette smoke) kills about 2 million yearly. I don't know how many deaths occur through uranium mining, but I'm sure it is far outstripped by deaths due to coal mining, as they need an awful lot more coal to make the same amount of power as nuclear.
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Agree.
It's not the cost of regulation that's causing coal to shut down, it's the straight-up cost of fuel vs cost of electricity.
Proof? This fall
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The medical community isn't serious about cancer research, because if they were they'd be pouring money into researching alternative forms of medicine that are more advanced than traditional biology, including crystal therapy and homeopathy. Which based on the evidence are two of the simplest ways to cure cancer.
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The problem is the solutions presented by Gore and others were "buy a Prius", "don't drive as much", "buy a smaller house", things that affect quality of life.
The problem with that is that the big energy hogs and CO2 belchers are not touched. For example, one can let their lawn go completely into tinderbox, but the water saved will just be used by the golf course down the road making the sacrifice of property value pointless.
Same with people buying hybrids thinking they can "save the environment". Nope...