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Energy Secretary Chu Endorses "Clean Coal"
DesScorp writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Energy Secretary Steven Chu is endorsing 'clean coal' technology and research, and is taking a pragmatic approach to coal as an energy supply. '"It absolutely is worthwhile to invest in carbon capture and storage because we are not in a vacuum," Mr. Chu told reporters Tuesday following an appearance at an Energy Information Administration conference. "Even if the United States or Europe turns its back on coal, India and China will not," he said. Mr. Chu added that "quite frankly I doubt if the United States will turn its back on coal. We are generating over 50% of our electrical energy from coal."' The United States has the world's largest reserves of coal. Secretary Chu has reversed his positions on coal and nuclear power, previously opposing them, and once calling coal 'My worst nightmare.'"
Oxymoron of the century.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
...ideology meets reality.
Will "clean coal" provide health care for the miners? Will it eliminate those nasty, dangerous sludge ponds that occasionally break through their retaining walls? For some reason I doubt it.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
A major political figure completely reversing his stance a subject and is able to provide straightforward and logical explanations for the change? Maybe I'm used to the previous administrations policy of "what we say goes, no matter what" but, yeah, this does kind of surprise me.
Say what you will about clean coal, but he is right about one thing. China is going to keep burning coal until there's no coal left to burn or something cheaper is found. Why not research the hell out of the subject and sell it to them in 10 years when they realize that they're killing their population with pollution? And if they somehow work out a way to have truly clean coal (burning coal with no particulates and no release of CO2) then why shouldn't we use it here at home?
Personally, I like nuclear, solar, and wind for our energy needs. But I think we should be researching every possibility, including clean coal and biofuels. Having a diverse set of energy sources means that when when resource becomes scarce we can more easily shift our focus and continue on.
Well, well. Some truth about energy! Amazing. Lets take this a bit further and say that if certain groups haven't scared the hell out of people about nuclear, we wouldn't have so many coal plants in the US. We could be selling the coal to other countries. :)
Why not work harder to scrub it better and deliver more electricity for the plug in hybrids?
I don't think scrubbing the exhaust of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate emissions is the controversial part, it's the carbon. At the end of the day, coal is nearly pure carbon. As you likely know, burning carbon produces carbon dioxide. This is very alarming to those who are concerned about global warming.
Unfortunately, the coal industry only has one solution for the global warming crowd. They suggest we bury the carbon dioxide underground. This in itself is controversial, because nobody knows if it will work on such a massive scale.
Personally, I don't see how they will store it underground without it leaking to the surface. If you are going to store carbon, it's best to store it as coal, or in some sort of plant matter.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
One the problem with "clean" coal is the radioactive waste. For the amount of energy produced, coal created more radioactive waste then nuclear. The difference is it is mixed in with tons and tons of chemically toxic ash, so there is no way of ever disposing of it safely. For nuclear energy the waste is conveniently concentrated and small enough it can be disposed of safely in stable rock.
Perhaps if we mixed the waste from our reactors with coal ash, people won't be so worried about it.
You can't build nuclear plants that fast
Why can't we? Would it have anything to do with the fact that the enviro-nazis and NIMBY bastards successfully stymied the construction of new plants back in the 70s and 80s and in so doing left zero incentive for American industry to retain the plant and equipment to build reactors?
I read somewhere that there's only one steelworks in the world that's capable of forging the reactor containment walls and they have years of back orders on the books. Of course it didn't used to be that way but the various anti-nuclear movements drove down demand to the point that it wasn't profitable for other steelworks to retain the equipment to produce them. Other parts of the supply chain have been equally impacted.
Congratulations environmentalists -- you ripped the heart out of the only energy source that could have weaned us off carbon in our lifetimes. Seems a bit shortsighted in retrospect, doesn't it?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Stop burning coal. This isn't the industrial revolution. It's 2009 for pete's sake. Breeder reactors. Pull your superstitions out of your brain and your heads out of your asses. B-R-E-E-D-E-R R-E-A-C-T-O-R-S!
Funny you should mention that: linky
Step 1: Mine coal
Step 2: After burning the coal, take the thorium from tailings
Step 3: Use liquid fluoride thorium nuclear reactors to provide energy for a few thousand years
Step 4: Profit...for everyone...
Of course they did. They wanted to get the electoral votes in swing states like OH and PA.
Your mistake is in thinking that it had anything to do with energy policy.
See Carbon sequestration
I think the problem with carbon sequestration is that most of the schemes don't pass a sense check. Perhaps if someone were to present a detailed proposal about how it works, I might buy it. However, all of the proposals I've read don't make any sense.
Examples:
Bury the CO2 - Why won't it leak back up to the surface?
Bury Plant Matter - Why not burn the plants instead of coal?
Convert CO2 into some other chemical, and bury that - The laws of thermodynamics would like to have a word with you.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Congratulations environmentalists -- you ripped the heart out of the only energy source that could have weaned us off carbon in our lifetimes. Seems a bit shortsighted in retrospect, doesn't it?
Yes, it's the environmentalists that got us into this mess. Back then, they were saying that nuclear will kill us all. The debate was over.
Now they are making the same arguments about carbon while adding "but THIS time, we are right!"
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
In a nutshell. Just because you're pro-green, doesn't mean you're completely out of touch with reality. We use coal for a HUGE amount (it's the largest single source) of our national energy production, and it'll be decades before that can change in any meaningful way, so it only makes sense to see if you can make a virtue of necessity.
The thing I liked about Obama was that he wasn't batshit crazy. This is a perfectly sensible move, something he promised to look into during his campaign, and something worthy of study at the least. I am at a loss to explain all the crazy that's leaking out in this thread.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
"Would it have anything to do with the fact that the enviro-nazis and NIMBY bastards successfully stymied the construction of new plants back in the 70s and 80s and in so doing left zero incentive for American industry to retain the plant and equipment to build reactors?"
Nope. It's the cost thingy. It costs big bucks to build a nuclear plant. As a result the power is expensive. So you have to be sure you will need the energy and the price will be competitive in decades to come. And there still is that annoying waste issue.
It's cheaper to pay people to use less energy (efficiency), build coal plants or add wind or solar in small increments.
You fucking idiots are so fucking funny.
Coal technology is already clean [...]
About 525 million gallons of ash slurry clean, yeah.
In addition, though DesCorps uses the quote from Chu that coal is his "worst nightmare" to imply that Chu has flipped-flopped on the issue, reading TFA the quote is taken from shows that even then Chu was talking about 'clean' coal.
Don't worry about the mule, just load the wagon.