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Fukushima, Chernobyl, Mayak, Three Mile Island, Lucens, Sellafield, Ibaraki, Jaslovské Bohunice, Idaho Falls all INES level 4 or higher. You can argue in favour of nuclear till you are blue in the face but, fair or not, given the long history of nuclear safety issues the public is about as interested in living within 500 kilometres of a nuclear plant as it is in eating as vanilla ice cream with ketchup and onions.

And yet coal-ash disasters can destroy tons of square miles, pollute rivers for hundreds of miles, and cost over a $billion to clean up, and nobody says a word. The coal industry better thank $diety that "nuclear" is a now a curse-word...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://appvoices.org/coalash/d...
(and more I'm too lazy to look up)

Is meaningless, or at least misleading. A coal power station produces more energy than it consumes. If that's intrinsically green, then we should be building more coal power stations.

Would you want a coal power station in your office or house? Solar, wind generators, and a Bloom Box are a hell of a lot cleaner.
And they don't require us to blow up Appalachian Mountains in the process.

Mining normally involves tailings, except for Coal. With coal, they simply strip mine it as you have pointed out.

Tell that to people in Roane County, Tennessee, who's land was contaminated by the Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash slurry spill in 2008, the coal s Tell that tolurry spill in southern Belmont County, Ohio last week, or any number of other coal slurry spills. Tell that to those who see mountain removal in action. Google has some before and after photos of it. Or tell it to those miners trapped in that Chilean mine. How about the 13 miners who died when the Sago Mine Disaster happened in West Virginia in 2006.

In the end, you have to pick your poison on where you are going to get your energy. Myself? I will take geo-thermal.

You pick the energy source by what's available in any given location. Use geothermal where it is available, solar, where it is sunny, and wind where it's windy. The one advantage geothermal has over others is that it can provide a baseload, it can constantly generate electricity.

Ideally, we would allow all energy to compete on a level field, rather than allowing politicians to pick it by who lines their pockets.

That is something I've been advocating for years.

Falcon

Yeah, if you go to the anti clean coal websites, that seems to be their only legitimate complaint.

Some who oppose may only do so because of CO2 but others do for other reasons as well. Others, like Appalachian Voices and Mountain Justice oppose Mountaintop Removal. And others have other reasons to oppose coal.

Falcon

I find it odd you didn't even mention the clean up procedure mentioned in the document you quotes.

Step 1: Evacuate the area....

Really, you can't have it both ways. CFLs can't be less of a threat than an incandescent bulb AND require an evacuation followed by airing out the room for 15 minutes followed by a scrub down and containment of the cleanup materials.

You're ignoring the mercury from a busted bulb is localized whereas the mercury in emissions is spread out all over. While mercury may be scrubbed from some coal-fired power plants mercury is already in the air and water. CFLs also mean less coal plants are needed and coal mining itself is dirty. For instance asbestos is released. Mountain top removal is leveling the Appalachians and the debris clogs streams. Coal slurry impoundment containment failure can cause a lot of damage. Just last year a dam broke releasing slurry at a TVA plant.

Falcon

So all of the other posts here explaining technologies that convert coal to another, cleaner form of energy are all wrong, and you are right?

Burning coal and emitting CO2, mercury, and other pollutants isn't the only part of coal that is dirty. So is coal mining. Have you ever seen a beautiful mountain top turned into a parking lot? Do you know what heavy metals are released by such mining? All "clean coal", carbon capture and storage, and other technologies do is reduce CO2 emissions.

Falcon

I'm looking at an upgrade - installing a heat pump system this summer, assuming I can get good price information and ordering ability on line. Last time they were 'out of stock'. That might be your best option, as well. 3X the heating ability per kwh, even over tankless.

Unfortunately I don't have such a choice now, I rent an apartment.

if you put a carbon tax in coal gets slaughtered. Even clean coal

If carbon emissions were taxed alternative energy wouldn't look as expensive. And there are no clean coal plants in commercial production, what plants there are are for research. Even then though I doubt nuclear power would be profitable without subsidies.

Hmm, also disagrees with the cost for clean coal

I agree too, coal can not be clean. Sure emissions can be cleaned up but mining is far from being clean. A lot of coal is mined by mountain top removal. Google as some good photos of what it looks like.

So the tech isn't ready. To reduce the waste that's already there I may agree to reprocess it so it can be used in power plants that have already been built but I don't think I could agree to building more nuclear power plants.

Engineering always needs to be done. Basically, we're putting solar, wind, and other experimental electricity generation systems up left and right.

Yes, engineering always needs to be done but they are not being subsidized at the same amount as coal or nuclear. They may have but I doubt either First Solar or Nanosolar received subsidies directly. You could say Germany's Nanosolar order is one, and it might be, but I don't think of it so much as a subsidy anymore than first adopters subsidize research and development.

Falcon

Part of the problem is that we have been brainwashed by the corporate influences to think that something given basically for free (after startup costs for construction) such as wind and photovoltaic power, can not be THAT useful for our busy, important lives. As ijustam and others mentioned, if one looks more closely, the windfarm may be large but the land for the towers is minimal, and the remaining land can be used for other purposes, such as farming.

This is the discussion we need, so politicians can not make baseless claims and fool the people with nuclear and coal, for example.

Someone mentioned $90 million for the wind farm - but what would a new, equivalent coal plant cost? What would be the total cost comparison for both over, say, a 20 year period? As the "RiotingPacifist" said, ignoring the contradiction in her/his name, coal plants are not only expensive to build, but the cost of the fuel is increasing, as is the environmental cost. According to http://www.appvoices.org/index.php?/air/coalplants/, a 1 gigiwatt coal plant costs 1.3 BILLION dollars to construct - and that is without the new regulations and standards that need to be met.

The goal these days is to calculate total cost to the country and to the world. Cleanups from coal, health effects, damage to natural resources, and so on, are large costs that have typically been hidden because they were paid by taxes and never connected back to the cost of the product (coal).

Now people are starting to look at the real economics as it affects our lives as a society, and I believe solar in all forms is pulling well ahead of the "traditional" sources of power, economically as well as in terms of preservation of beauty and respect for the planet. There are currently several power storage methods in use, and they are gradually being improved on, and will make the solar answer even more advantageous as they improve.

well let's put it this way, while mining the moon for HE3 will be intractably expensive for decades and possibly a century or more, shooting a couple hundred tons of radioactive waste to a barren lifeless rock or the sun is much more feasible.

I don't know if mining the moon for HE3 would ever be economically feasible or not but I bet travel to the moon will be before the end of the century, unless a catastrophe occurs before then. At first only the rich may go but as with many other things the rich will pave the way for cheaper travel. But again why use nuclear power at all when non or low polluting alternative energy sources along with conservation provide all the energy needed?

so, every 35 years or so we gather the nuclear waste and send it off our planet, there we go no "environmental harm" from nuclear waste.

BS! Where is all the fuel to come from? Mining that's where and mining is very environmentally harmful. That's one area people don't think of when it comes to nuclear power though admittedly coal is dirty, especially Mountain Top removal. And what fuel will be used to send the waste into the sun, or anywhere else off planet? It might actually be more feasible to put nuclear waste in a hole drilled into a subduction zone but as this "New Scientist" article says injecting the waste into the mantle in the ocean or sea may be better. However as I see it there is no need for nuclear power plants what so ever.

challenger's crew capsule survived the catastrophic shock of a point blank detonation of several kilotons of liquid and solid fuel

I don't even want to think of the Challenger. When it launched a group of us students were out on a patio to watch the launch, campus was about 50 miles from the cape and though distant offered a good view of launches. To watch the launch 3 of us decided to be a few minutes late to our physics class. A minute after we saw it go up we knew something was wrong so after another minute we dashed into the student lounge to check the TV and they announced it had exploded. Eventually we made it to class where we announced what happened. The professor basically said so what, we could watch it later on the TV. Since it was a physics class he could have turned the accident into a physics lesson, but instead he showed indifference to the lives lost, saying "So what?". Sorry but it still bugs me.

You are holding up a single method of mining as representitive of the entire industry.

In the Appalachian mountains much of the coal mining is done by Mountaintop Removal. Here's Google's case study on Appalachian Mountaintop Removal. Mountaintop removal has been used in the Appalachians for 20 years under a cloud of legal and regulatory confusion. "In just two decades, hundreds of mountaintops, more than a thousand miles of stream, and hundreds of square miles of forests have been obliterated by the practice. Opponents say the pollution is also dangerous to people who live in the region." So it's not simply one wiki article as you make it out to be.

Stop coal-mining,

Especially mountain top removal.

start recycling plastics rather than burn them. Use oil only for producing plastics

Originally plastics were made from cellulose, plants, and though some still are much plastics are made from petroleum. In the 1930s it was found that hemp was a good source for making plastic but Du Pont was given a patent on a process to make plastics from petro, so they joined others in pushing for the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 which basically made hemp illegal.

not for fuel. Use bio-fuels for vehicles.

Rudolph Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, designed his engine to run on most any vegetable oil including hemp seed oil and peanut oil. In the '30s Henry Ford built a car on his Iron Mountain Estate that was not only partially built using hemp but was fueled by alcohol made from hemp he grew on the estate. There's some good research going on now to use alga to produce hydrogen.

Stop deforestation of the rainforests in particular.

Unfortunately this isn't going to happen until those living in rainforests, whether in the Amazon or in Southest Asia, are given an economic reason to stop deforestation. They need to be rewarded for conserving the rainforest and/or they need to be made to pay for logging.

Start massive re-forestation. Somebody should think very hard of ways to transform deserts into woodlands.

Less than an hour ago I read an item in "New Scientist" on how farmers are reclaiming the desert in the Sahel region of the Sahara Desert. What was a barren wasteland of desert on the southern edge of the Sahara is now becoming productive farm land. Comparing satellite photos of the region from now and 20 years ago show that because of the resurgence of trees in the region the desert is retreating. As many as 3 million hectares in Niger have turned green. When more farming is done more tree grow which encourages more lifestock and wildlife, which further encourages more trees to grow thus creating a positive feedback loop.

Given that this would eventually become a profitable source for wood, it would also be a way for Africa - the poorest continent, if I'm not mistaken - to achieve prosperity

Economically Africa is poor but they are wealthy in natural resources. The problem is that most African don't benefit from any economic activity related to the extraction of the natural wealth. For instance the Congo serves as a good example. Hardwood trees are harvested from the Congo and much of it ends up in Europe and while the middlemens reap profits most of those in the area the wood comes from see little income. Then there's coltan. Coltan is used in electronics, from computers to cellphoes, and most coltan comes from the Congo. Different governments and rebel groups seek to control areas with coltan so they can collect the money which they use to buy more weapons and so on. And again as with logging the local not only see little economic benefit but they are also being killed. In Angola the San Bushmen, the oldest people in the region, are being driven off their land so international companies can mine for diamonds on the land. They suffer while the companies and a few local politicans get the money. Stories like this are all over Africa.

Head down the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky and ask the people who live there. Coal mining has done substantial damage to the environment, and to people's lives.

Coal mining today is not about underground mines - it is about strip mines and mountain top removal. Instead of digging holes underground you blast the top few hundred feet off of a mountain and dig straight down. Of course the blast debris - thousands of tons of it - has to go somewhere. Usually into the neighbouring valley, destroying homes and watersheds.

The Industry says that today's coal burns cleaner. Do they tell you how?

That's because the coal is washed before being trucked to users. Where do you think the solvent laden waste water goes? Into large holding ponds, dozens of which are known to be on the brink of collapsing.

One such pond broke in 2002. The Martin County slurry spill, at over 300 million gallons, was the largest disaster of its kind ever in the southeastern United States. The spill released nearly 30 times more liquid than the Exxon Valdez.

You also need to factor in the coal company's history of just abandoning mines, leaving them for local and state governments to clean up. And the ongoing damage and injuries caused by coal trucks hauling grossly overwieght loads - by ten or twenty tons - on narrow highways.

There's more to being clean than measuring smokestack emmisions.

No trees were killed in the sending of this message. However, a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.

That is extremely and profoundly incorrect. Trees were killed. In fact, streams, valleys, and even entire mountains and watersheds were destroyed so that you could send this message. See for yourself.
Here and Here.