The Crumbling Clean Coal Myth

A month of negative news for the Tennessee Valley Authority could lead to positive changes in national policy, including federal regulation of toxic coal wastes and new legal constraints on coal-fired power plants. More broadly, the authority's recent travails may help persuade the public that coal is nowhere near as "clean" as a high-priced industry advertising campaign makes it out to be.

In December, hundreds of acres of Roane County in eastern Tennessee were buried under a billion gallons of toxic coal sludge after the collapse of one of the T.V.A.'s containment ponds. It was an accident waiting to happen and an alarm bell for Congress and federal regulators.

Senator Barbara Boxer of California noted that coal combustion in this country produces 130 million tons of coal ash every year -- enough to fill a train of boxcars stretching from Washington, D.C., to Australia. Amazingly, the task of regulating the more than 600 landfills and impoundments holding this ash is left to the states, which are more often lax than not. Ms. Boxer will press the Obama administration to devise rules for the disposal of coal ash as well as design and construction standards for the impoundments.

Read the full story here

OR check out HuffPost's coverage of the TVA coal spill:

::VIDEO: How Coal Ash Was Almost Regulated Under Clinton/Gore
::Erin Brockovich: TVA Disaster Spreads Far And Wide
::Jeff Biggers: What's It Going To Take -- Dead Bodies?

Comments

[plantguy]

02:02 PM on 01/25/2009

Dystopic's comment is pretty ignorant! Why dont u stop using power if u dont like the coal thats being used to power your home.

[SeenItBefore]

07:20 AM on 01/24/2009

O.K., let's start at the beginning.

Any time any carbon based substance is burned in the atmosphere, CO and/or CO2 is released, along with a host of other nasties.

Clean coal fires are a myth. So are clean forest fires, chemical plant fires and oil refinery fires. NO combustion is clean.

Scrubbing helps, but only because the CO/CO2 is displaced and ends up stored somewhere else.

The obvious answer to slowing CO/CO2 buildup in the atmosphere is to stop burning things.

What to do for cheap, readily available power, I don't know. But I do know alternate power systems work. I went off the grid in 1993. I can't have everything I want successfully powered by the sun and wind due to high amp start-up, but life is full of compromises.

I have done my small part in reducing my carbon footprint. The amortized cost of my power plant is $12.222 dollars per month. Next month it will $12.155, and so on. The local electric co-op charges $25 per month to buy the privilege to buy power at ever increasing rates.

If I find the need for more electricity, I add more panels and more storage to the battery. The only way I waste power is to NOT use it all up every day! And I get to smile when my, all-electric, "smart house" friends get an electric bill each month that exceeds their mortgage payments.

[plugger]

04:27 PM on 01/23/2009

The NYT the collapse of the myth they have journalistic credibility

[RTIII]

03:35 PM on 01/23/2009

FANTASTIC - sometimes you have to suffer some unfortunate and devastating setbacks before you can move forward. This appears to be true with the Rs and the likes of Junior, and also, "clean coal."
.

[TimNorman]

01:36 PM on 01/23/2009

One Voice In A crowd your wrong.
you cant scrub C02 out of coal smoke.
In New Hampshire scrubbers were going to be for one small plant;
100 MILLION
180 MILLION
200 MILLION
280 MILLION
400 MILLION ACTUAL COST INSTALLED!
For a plant that could be replaced by two wood fired plants.

[OneVoiceInACrowd]

01:42 PM on 01/23/2009

Scrub / Sequestor - do something to prevent it from entering the atmosphere. We need to start doing something now to reduce their emissions.

And why can't you? are you saying there was a cost overrun? Well did it work?

[ObjectiveRealist]

02:46 PM on 01/23/2009

Replacing coal plants with windmills will reduce their emissions.

It is peculiar that "strong on defense" type politicians don't appreciate windmill farms' absence of a single point of failure. They are better for energy security for exactly the same reason that the Internet, as originally designed by DARPA, is better for communications.

[OneVoiceInACrowd]

12:16 PM on 01/23/2009

I don't think we can go cold turkey on coal. The alternative technologies do not have the maturity or the infrastructure to fulfill our energy needs even with a modest reduction due to conservation.

However, we need to set an aggressive strategy to eliminate coal emissions. People may be equally concerned of nuclear energy due to its waste and safety issues, but if you compare the harm of GW to Nuclear I think you will realize that GW would effect a much larger group, and nuclear risk can be mitigated.

I am not a huge proponent of nuclear, but I think it is the best bridge until we can sustain ourselves on alternative energy sources.

But even getting more nuclear plants online will take some time. In the immediate future we need to scrub the coal emissions of as much CO2 as possible.

Alternatives can start playing a role now, but it will take a bit longer to get them online than building nuclear plants now.

If you have the time see what Dr. Hansen has to say about it:

http://gristmill.grist.org/images/user/8/20081229_Obama_revised.pdf

[Tom95134]

11:25 AM on 01/23/2009

And the truth shall set you free.

[zelator]

11:00 AM on 01/23/2009

I live in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which - as I understand it - is basically floating on an enormous sea of coal. Many Pennsylvanians make their living pulling this stuff out of the ground for fuel and industrial purposes.

The PA coal lobby - which claims coal is a 'green' technology - is quite powerful and has a great deal of influence at the state and national level.

With the only alternative for powering the grid being fossil fuels or nuclear (nu-kew-ler for you Bushies) fuels, the future is quite bleak.

I have heard some say that Pennsylvania is, however, "the Saudi Arabia of wind" - let's see if we can capitalize on that natural resource instead of blowing the tops off mountains and digging out dirty, toxic fossil fuels!

[emily00011]

12:10 PM on 01/23/2009

Supposedly there is enough coal in the ground to keep the world going at its current energy usage for 57 years. And given the lack of interest Americans are showing towards the environment right now, I wouldn't expect any changes anytime soon. A few more TVA messes might change the opinion, but I wouldn't hold my breath. It's always someone else's problem.

[mjt218]

04:40 AM on 01/26/2009

Kind of funny actually that you mention wind in context with PA coal . . . One of the largest footprints for proposed wind projects in the state of PA is in the "original" coal regions of Central Pennsylvania (nice ridge extends from Harrisburg NE to I-87).

Now, most of these projects are just proposed, and on file with the regional electrical authority, PJM. I'm not sure you could even call any of them "shovel ready", and their eventual construction probably depends more on access to credit than it would on the efforts of any lobby.

[alvdh1]

09:53 AM on 01/23/2009

When you see the handwriting on the wall, you have to reinvent yourself as is the case with the coal industry and coal fired utilities. They will not give up until billions of taxpayer dollars are wasted on a useless technology. We should first target coal miners with wind and solar training to ease the pending loss of jobs. The transition to clean energy will create millions of jobs.

[Dystopic]

11:26 AM on 01/23/2009

uh, most coal miners are illiterate. you become a supervisor when you learn to read & write

[RTIII]

03:40 PM on 01/23/2009

Then we have an education system to fix too.

Get to work, you dystopic!
.

[StringOfLights]

07:07 PM on 01/25/2009

Did you write that comment from the 19th century, perchance?