"Clean coal technology"?

[SHRED]

Is this a myth?

How the hell do you mine coal "cleanly"?

Any links refuting the phrase: Clean Coal

[napi21]

1. If I remember, Gov. Schweitzer (D-Mont) talked about this.

e uses it in Mt. I believe it's mined totally by machines, without human exposure to coal dust etc. As far as the clean burning technology goes, there are lots of web sites on Google that explain how it's done.

I'm from Pa. and not all mining requires people to go miles deep into mines!

[phantom power]

5. Certainly not. These days, they just level the mountains for it.

[politicat]

2. Can't be clean - coal is more radioactive than uranium.

When measured in equivalent outputs of power, coal residues are more radioactive than the waste from a breeder reactor. (Carbon is a wonderful sink for stray neutrons, and coal is old, so it has picked up a lot of the cosmic radiation that has hit the earth for the last couple billion years, as well as absorbing radiation from naturally occurring sources.) The difference is that people are used to coal and its ash, and don't consider it as much of a danger... and radioactive coal ash is much larger and harder to contain than the equivalent power output of spent fuel rods....

Something like 80% of the nuclear waste in the country comes from coal ash, and about half of all coal ash is radioactive by measurement, but not so much so that it has to be sequestered. THAT gets dumped in the landfill. People who live downwind of coal power-plants take more rads annually than people who *work in * (and therefore live not too far from) nuclear power plants.

Coal isn't clean. It can't be. Not when it's a radiation sink.

[SnoopDog]

3. It is not that you mine coal cleanly...

Supposedly, it it the coal gasification process.

Coal mining will always be the same - mining or scraping the coal.

Ya, the Montana gov is talking about it but it still produces pollution. And, :rofl: no has nothing to do with radioactivity.

The only solution to our energy and global warming problems is to use energy solution of wind, geothermal, and solar cells.

[LiberalEsto]

4. The mining is a very messy operation

and can result in the leveling of mountains and the destruction of stream valleys.

Beyond that, turning the mined coal into energy probably takes more energy than it eventually produces.

Coal burning results in emissions of mercury, arsenic and cadmium as well as greenhouse gases.

[ramapo]

7. Not can...does

Coal mining is incredibly destructive to the environment. Mountains are leveled, valleys are filled in, the whole ecosystem is destroyed. There are no ifs or buts about it.

Check out last month's National Geographic. Whole areas of West Virginia have been and are being leveled.

Coal makes the nuclear option seem environmentally very friendly.

[LiberalEsto]

8. Absolutely

Are you from the Ramapo Mountains of NJ?
I grew up in the foothills - in Wayne before it got suburbanized.

[phantom power]

6. It's possible to scrub stuff like sulfur, but not CO2...

which, as I am fond of pointing out, will kill us all.