With Coal Production, Cleaner Skies Could Mean More Landfills

[4dsc]

6 of one, half of dozen of the other here..


http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070826/clean_air_dirty_land.html?.v=3

As the nation's coal-fired power plants work to create cleaner skies, they'll likely fill up landfills with millions more tons of potentially harmful ash.

More than one-third of the ash generated at the country's hundreds of coal-fired plants is now recycled -- mixed with cement to build highways or used to stabilize embankments, among other things.


But in a process being used increasingly across the nation, chemicals are injected into plants' emissions to capture airborne pollutants.

That, in turn, changes the composition of the ash and cuts its usefulness. It can't be used in cement, for example, because the interaction of the chemicals may keep the concrete from hardening.

That ash has to go somewhere -- so it usually ends up in landfills, along with the rest of the unusable waste.

"You're replacing an air problem with a land problem -- a disposal problem," said Bruce Dockter, a research engineer with the Energy and Environmental Research Center at the University of North Dakota.

[Gregorian]

1. Not to mention radioactive particulates into the air.

It's one of those details most people don't realize. Mining coal doesn't just yield coal. And it's not insignificant radioactivity.

/talk amongst yourselves. I'm off for a coffee.

[spag68]

2. Use of coal

Should be fazed out as soon as possible. We don't need to be b;owing off the tops of mountains, or having miners die in the ground. there are now so many alternatives that it's only the greed of the industry's owners that is holding back new clean energy. This should not surprise any one as it goes back to the Rockefeller's.