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The World Falls Back In Love With Coal
Hugh Pickens writes "Richard Anderson reports on BBC that despite stringent carbon emissions targets in Europe designed to slow global warming and massive investment in renewable energy in China, coal, the dirtiest and most polluting of all the major fossil fuels, is making a comeback with production up 6% over 2010, twice the rate of increase of gas and more than four times that of oil. 'What is going on is a shift from nuclear power to coal and from gas to coal; this is the worst thing you could do, from a climate change perspective,' says Dieter Helm. Why the shift back to coal? Because coal is cheap, and getting cheaper all the time. Due to the economic downturn, there has been a 'collapse in industrial demand for energy,' leading to an oversupply of coal, pushing the price down. Meanwhile China leads the world in coal production and consumption. It mines over 3 billion tons of coal a year, three times more than the next-biggest producer (America), and last year overtook Japan to become the world's biggest coal importer. Although China is spending massive amounts of money on a renewable energy but even this will not be able to keep up with demand, meaning fossil fuels will continue to make up the majority of the overall energy mix for the foreseeable future and when it comes to fossil fuels, coal is the easy winner — it is generally easier and cheaper to mine, and easier to transport using existing infrastructure such as roads and rail, than oil or gas. While China is currently running half a dozen carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects — which aim to capture CO2 emissions from coal plants and bury it underground — the technology is nowhere near commercial viability. 'Renewed urgency in developing CCS globally, alongside greater strides in increasing renewable energy capacity, is desperately needed,' writes Anderson, 'but Europe's increasing reliance on coal without capturing emissions is undermining its status as a leader in clean energy, and therefore global efforts to reduce CO2 emissions.'"
The fact is that today's children are terrible. The increase in coal production is purely for Santa to leave lumps of it in stockings for these children.
Granted the CO2 is not good if we want the climate to stay as is but if coal is too cheap then we MUST figure a way to use it without the drawbacks.
There has been talk about talking CO2 from the air and making diesel out of it. Why not get straight from a coal burning plant? (BTW: sequestration of CO2 in the ground was proven to cause Earth quakes.)
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Sources suggest that apart from a brief blip during the economic downturn in 2009, worldwide coal consumption has been steadily increasing for the past 10 years or so, after plateauing in 1988-2000.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That's what you get for knee-jerking and planning to shut down all of your nuclear reactors. The promise of replacing that power with clean renewable energy is proving a tad hard to follow up, right? I'm not exactly surprised.
I expect Europe will eventually start driving coal down once more, but it'll take a while to do such a shift, during which time coal will be the stopgap measure. That, or they finally wake up and do nuclear right instead of writing it off entirely.
America is the only country it would seem, still building clean nuclear plants (much less shutting them down as Germany has done!). We are also the only country going full speed ahead on fracking, giving us lots of natural gas to use which burns without emitting CO2. Also where are realistic electric cars like the Telsa being designed? America.
Frankly I did not ever see Europe being a leader in CO2 reduction, they were all talk. It's one thing to sign a paper or give statements of support, it's quite another to carry through with real actions that will actually cause the reduction you seek. If Europe had been at all serious about CO2 reduction they would have leaned on Germany not to close down nuclear plants.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Coal reserves are much higher than oil and gas reserves, and it's dirt cheap to extract when strip mined. The only real question is whether we'll make coal plants cleaner by using all sorts of filters.
I misspoke in saying it burnt without emitting CO2, but as you say it burns cleaner than coal which is what as the article says, they are turning to in Europe.
So switching to a much heavier use of natural gas can significantly reduce CO2 emissions.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Since China is the world's largest IMPORTER of coal, there is no cheap Chinese coal on the world market. I didn't even have to RTFA to get that from the summary. The coal industry in the US is hurting because cheap natural gas is displacing it (free market at work, but Murray Energy blames it on Obama). Natural gas outside of the North American market is not (yet) so cheap so it is not pressuring coal outside N. America.
My guess is that the situation in the US is different from the rest of the world in that with the now widespread access to natural gas reserves and all the gas fired power plants built in the 90s it makes more economic sense to burn gas rather than use coal rather. Nothing to do with the alleged Obama policies.
Fukushima killed 20,000 people! Think what a tsunami like that would do in central Europe!
Besides, Europe is going to be 100% solar and wind powered in five years. I think hand-cranked generators are the way to go, though. Think of all the jobs that would be created.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
It's not so much PR as reality. Germany is one of the greenest countries in Europe, yet they're building new coal plants. Why? Because they're decommissioning old nuclear plants, and they have to replace them with some suitable base-load source. Since Fukushima, new nuclear plants are practically off the cards, so coal is about it. It's cheap, it's not nuclear, and we don't have to buy it from the Arabs; what's not to love?
Oh no... it's the future.
It seems to me the Greenpeace's successful campaign against nuclear power and failure to campaign against coal power has been a major cause of global warming. No doubt Greenpeace knew or should have known since the 1980s how much worse coal is for the environment.
China and the US have similar reserves of coal (about a quarter of the world's supply each.) Coal is a PITA to transport compared to natural gas (weight vs. energy). There's lot's of natural gas in the Arctic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_exploration_in_the_Arctic, which is probably why China is building icebreakers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Xue_Long. When their second one is built, they will have as many active as the U.S., which *is* an Arctic nation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Council with corresponding mineral rights http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_the_Law_of_the_Sea.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
It pushes the price down to the point of being affordable to those who couldn't afford it before.
It means more people using it because they are, individually, using less of it, but there are more of them. A lot more. China and india sort of thing.
Still cleaner unless it's 100% coal or very close to it. A dirtier electric car is only possible in a few places in the US and China. In most places they would be FAR cleaner.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This should be great for the zeta cartels - it seems they've expanded from drugs and mass-murder to the coal industry.
Now when we do such things as turn on a light, we can relish more than our collective carbon boot-print on the Earth's bemired face -- we can smile as we bask in the sanguineous luminosity of torture and intoxication too!
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
Coal spews more radiation than a nuclear meltdown, and kills many more people in it's extraction and mining. How's that for some things not to love?
..don't panic
Coal spews more radiation than a nuclear meltdown, and kills many more people in it's extraction and mining. How's that for some things not to love?
Well, I don't love it, and you don't love it, but the people with the money who are making the decisions love it.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The nuclear accident of Fukushima has yet to kill *a single person* due to radiation. I don't know where you get your data, but surely it's not factual.
"Coal spews more radiation than a nuclear meltdown"
I'd like to see a source for that. More radiation than a properly functioning nuclear plant, maybe. But accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima: no way!
Plus: the radioactivity released by coal plants is mostly in the fly ash, which is filtered out in modern plants. So it's essentially comparing near zero amounts of radioactivity.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
The global picture is very different from the American picture. Worldwide, gas is expensive, and coal is cheap. In the US, fracking has caused the price of gas to plunge. (European gas prices have doubled since the 2009 crash; in the US they've *dropped* by 20% since then.)
I teach a college class on energy: we visited a New England coal power plant a couple of months ago. They only operate the plant one day out of four now, because they can't compete against natural gas plants.
So TFA is right, from a European perspective (the article is from a UK site). And in the US, Murray Energy *is* feeling the squeeze. But not because of Obama's "war against coal": coal companies are losing out to gas due to cold hard free-market capitalism, and Murray's taking the opportunity to kick his workers to the curb just before the holidays (as he's done before), and blame his political enemy for it.
It's not so much PR as reality. Germany is one of the greenest countries in Europe, yet they're building new coal plants. Why? Because they're decommissioning old nuclear plants, and they have to replace them with some suitable base-load source. Since Fukushima, new nuclear plants are practically off the cards, so coal is about it. It's cheap, it's not nuclear, and we don't have to buy it from the Arabs; what's not to love?
Emphasizes mine.
Thats wrong.
The new plants are planned and commissioned since a decade, long before the final step to abandone nuclear was done.
On top of that the new plants replace older plants that will get decommissioned. Because the new plants are cleaner and more efficient and integrated into "community heating networks".
And the final error: we don't need more coal plants for "base load", we have by far enough wind power for base load.
What you miss: wind power can not be used to follow the load and adapt to changing load/demand.
Coal can, so coal plants are used for load following, not for base load.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The medical community isn't serious about cancer research, because if they were they'd be pouring money into researching alternative forms of medicine that are more advanced than traditional biology, including crystal therapy and homeopathy. Which based on the evidence are two of the simplest ways to cure cancer.
Well, the 13,000 deaths per year that are attributed to coal-fired power plants in the US alone. How about not loving that?
Source: http://www.catf.us/fossil/problems/power_plants/existing/
How many deaths in the US are attributed to nuclear power per year? None?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Not sure if you're trolling, joking, or just an idiot. You can't point to an example of a Fukushima-like population center wiped out due to radiation from coal because the effects are distributed invisibly among the entire population of the planet. The solution to pollution is dilution, and coal plants get rid of their radioactive waste by 'diluting' it right into our lungs.
You won't see any earnest young reporters taking us through the pulmonary ward at the local nursing home, or the hospice where a wide cross-section of people regularly die of cancers that we normally associate with smoking. Jane Fonda isn't going to picket the ICU at the hospital where people succumb to pneumonia they might otherwise have survived. Nothing in those places is glowing green, melting through concrete floors, or setting off radiation alarms. That's not how coal pollution kills people.
I sincerely hope IHBT, in which case I will STFU and HAND.
The problem is the solutions presented by Gore and others were "buy a Prius", "don't drive as much", "buy a smaller house", things that affect quality of life.
The problem with that is that the big energy hogs and CO2 belchers are not touched. For example, one can let their lawn go completely into tinderbox, but the water saved will just be used by the golf course down the road making the sacrifice of property value pointless.
Same with people buying hybrids thinking they can "save the environment". Nope... the biggest pollution belchers in moving vehicles are cargo ships using "bunker C" fuel, which is very close to tar, and is highly polluting.
Rather than call people "spoiled" and demand they give up their way of life for a 0.0001% improvement in things, focus on the big energy hogs and get 1-2% improvements.
With all the keening from the Greens how everything one does is "not eco", they start to get ignored, or when things happen like the EPA passing too stringent laws that force steel production overseas, greens become reviled. It is no wonder why big business is having a field day.
That's nothing compared to solar power! Have you even seen how much radiation the Sun emits?
Outside of wikipedia the distinction between base and peak is not so clearcut.
Forbes Magazine (outspoken defender of free markets) had these two articles in May of 2012:
"Shale Gas Takes On Coal To Power America's Electrical Plants", May 30, 2012
and "Why Shale Gas Is Closing Coal Plants, So Why Do The Hippies Hate Shale?", May 5, 2012
http://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2012/05/30/shale-gas-takes-on-coal-to-power-americas-electrical-plants/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/05/05/why-shale-gas-is-closing-coal-plants-so-why-do-the-hippies-hate-shale/
So the electric utilities in the US are substituting natural gas for coal due to price differences. I read it first in The Economist.
The 13,000 is CATF's estimate of deaths from *all* power plants in the U.S., not just coal plants.
More directly relevant is that coal plants cause 4000 deaths for every one death caused by nuclear power.
"Coal spews more radiation than a nuclear meltdown" I'd like to see a source for that. More radiation than a properly functioning nuclear plant, maybe. But accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima: no way!
No matter how I count, I get a few PBq in the form of long-lived isotopes from coal, annually, and Fukushima released something like 14 PBq of moderately long lived isotopes, in total. You know, all the 238U and 232Th from the coal is going to stay with us for a very, very long time...
Ezekiel 23:20
And the death's related to coal aren't presented the same way in the media as death's related to nuclear meltdowns.
In a mining disaster, typically a cave-in that traps miners underground, focus is initially on recovering the miners, then the mine owner is fined/put out of business and that's the end of it.
For a nuclear meltdown, it's focus on the actual meltdown itself, then fine/put the owner out of business, then push for the shutdown of all nuclear reactors everywhere.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
And solar radiation is directly responsible for more cancer deaths than any other radiation source. BAN SOLAR FOR THE CHLDRNZZZZ!!!!!
The irony is that the greens spent so much time in the '80's and 90's demonizing nuclear energy and we are just now reaping what they sowed. Nuclear plants could be designed to be basically accident proof, yet they are saddled with such regulatory burden that it is basically not possible to build new ones in the US.
Hence we are stuck with a national energy policy that is based on wishes, rainbows and unicorn farts. And, like it or not, coal.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Yeah, sometimes, and I found my source after the fact with a bit of searching. It basically says what I did above and what you said - thorium and uranium are concentrated about 10x in the ash and are either processed out or go up the stack, but the added radiation is really not a big deal. The radiation burns you get from that giant fusion reactor in the sky are definitely a lot more risky.
Multiply that by 1000x and you get the estimated yearly deaths due to outdoor air pollution, mostly created through burning of fossil fuels. Indoor air pollution (i.e. cigarette smoke) kills about 2 million yearly. I don't know how many deaths occur through uranium mining, but I'm sure it is far outstripped by deaths due to coal mining, as they need an awful lot more coal to make the same amount of power as nuclear.
The wind turbines say "Whoosh!"
The problem is similar to cars vs airplanes - you are WAY more likely to die in a car accident than in an airplane accident, but many people absolutely panic when they have to fly because when accidents do happen, they often kill hundreds of people instead of a handful. People are irrational that way - they see a volume event as a way greater than a gradual event. I have a friend that spends $10 a week to play the lottery because he's sure he will win. If he wisely invested that money instead, he'd probably be off welfare (yeah, we're paying him to play the lottery, facepalm).
I'd like to see a source for that. More radiation than a properly functioning nuclear plant, maybe. But accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima: no way!
Plus: the radioactivity released by coal plants is mostly in the fly ash, which is filtered out in modern plants. So it's essentially comparing near zero amounts of radioactivity.
Much of the radiation from coal is released during mining/extraction. The remainder is released during burning. The problem is, you need many times more coal to produce the same amount of energy, than from uranium. We're talking 5 or 6 orders of magnitude larger masses of carbon compared to uranium. That's why, per kilowatt hour, coal fired plants + extraction of coal emit about twice as much radioactive material into the environment, than nuclear plants.
But the sad thing is, the radioactive material isn't even nearly the worst that coal fired plants release into the environment: the list of toxins that are released is staggering and frightening. One of the worst is mercury. There was a time when eating salmon was a no brainer (sorry for the pun), while today you are weighing the pros and cons, due to the accumulated methylmercury. In Finland, children under 1 year of age are not allowed to eat salmon at all, because of the brain damage that mercury causes.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
We all hate moronic talking points - how about we agree to drop them? Chernobyl is an example of radiation problems. 3 Mile Island was a tamer example. And, now, Fukushima. The Greenies talk about all that radiation from coal, but they can't point to one example of a population center depopulated due to radiation from coal.
Try sticking to the REAL drawbacks of using coal.
The reason you have depopulated population centers around the nuclear plants where things have gone wrong is to prevent deaths that we are already seeing in the coal industry and coal power plants but are used to. Is your goal cheap energy, saving lives, or being green? The only one coal comes out better than nuclear is being cheap. All that mercury that we get warned about in fish, guess what percentage of that came from coal mines and power plants.
If you think wind power provides base load, you may need to review what "base load power source" means.
And you just pinpointed the reason coal is so popular : The damage it does is not concentrated. Instead of wiping out a small area it slowly poisons a large one. The number of deaths may be greater, but they (mostly) can't be proved to be the result of the coal - it's hard for it to kill you quickly. So they just fade into the background - and that's when everything goes right with the power plant.
Nuclear power is capable of high death counts when things go wrong, and very little pollution otherwise. But when things do go wrong, the deaths (even if there are relatively few) are gruesome and therefore highly visible. At the same time it's easier to track the radiation they do release - it's above the normal background radiation, rather then setting the background radiation like coal.
And if you want to drag Chernobyl into it (which was the result of scientists experimenting, not some sort of a random accident), then why not also compare it to some other accidents? Like the Banqiao Dam failure, which killed about 170k people.
The difference is that the residual radioactive materials in coal power station exhaust and fly ash tend to be long-lived ones from natural decay processes -- U238's half-life is 4.5 billion years so a tonne of uranium metal isn't actually very radioactive and in a lump nearly all of the decays that happen every second occur deep inside the lump and never make it to the outside where they can have an effect on the environment. In the case of power station fly ash radioactive contaminants like U238 and Th232 are diluted in lagoons under water and the perceived problem is the chemical toxicity of the sludge (toxic metals, dioxins, sulfur compounds etc.) rather than its radioactivity.
Conversely fission products from a reactor fuel rod that's been run for any length of time have a wide range of half-lifes from milliseconds to millenia. Some are long-lived enough to be an ongoing problem for disposal while also having short enough half-lives that they emit noticeable and possibly dangerous amounts of radioactivity. For example cesium-137 has a 30-year half-life so a kilogram or two spread as fine particles over a wide area due to an accidental release such as in the Chernobyl and Fukushima incidents will emit significant amounts of radioactivity for a time measured in human lifespans. Coal power station waste has virtually no radioactive contaminants with such a short half-life, but there is a very large amount of it produced every year. The exception is radon which is released in both coal mining and combustion -- all of the radon isotopes are quite short-lived and highly active.
Enough radioactive material escapes coal station chimneys even with 99%-plus filtration and precipitation in the stacks that it can be trivially detected downwind for long distances, especially if rain washes it down onto population centres nearby. I've seen a report of radioactive material attributed to the Fukushima releases being detected with simple radiation monitoring instruments in rainwater samples in the middle of St. Louis MO not long after the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. One of the biggest coal-fired power station complexes in the US (Labadie, burning over 8 million tonnes of coal each year to produce 2.3GW of electricity) is about 20 miles to the west from where the measurements were taken.
Here's a little exercise. Find the most radioactive coal on earth and calculate how many hundreds of thousands of tonnes you'd have to extract the radioactive material from to get enough material to give you the infamous "banana dose".
This "coal is nuclear too" bullshit is what we get left over from a backfired PR exercise to try to get people to accept nuclear waste by comparing it to coal ash and relying on people to not be able to grasp the idea of background radiation. I'm sure if you put in a bit of thought you can dig your way out from under this delusion.
As someone active in biomedical research (inflammation, not directly cancer) I can say that any claims that cancer researchers do not want to find a cure and that there would be some sort of "conspiracy" holding progress back is pure bullshit. The sad truth is that cancer is not a single disease and lately it has become evident that even within a single patient, the population of cancer cells can be highly divergent (including the still controversial idea about "cancer stem cells", which are non-dividing and thus resistant to most chemotherapy). There are lots of very interesting data still in basic research which will take years before they get out into clinic and sadly there are also very promising drug candidates that due to economic reasons will have a difficult time getting promoted by drug companies. One of those examples is salicylic acid - which has shown very promising results against colon cancer and a number of other types. The problem is that it is an old drug of natural origin which is basically impossible to patent. This means that no companies are interested in funding phase I to III trials (which is actually the most expensive part of drug development). Other highly interesting developments at the moment are the cancer-specific T-cell treatments (or vaccinations), which I do believe will become a future treatment strategy - unfortunately most of this research is publicly funded at the universities and the industry only steps in after they are nearly sure that they will be able to reap the benefits.
Hello,
It's not clear to me that fusion can EVER be made practical. It's quite possible that a SMALL fusion plant just can't be made, which leaves you with investing in mega-plants. Then, if you pay more in capital to build a fusion plant than you can recover from selling the power than, say, wind power, no one will ever build a fusion plant.
As an example of the stringent constraints on fusion, did you know that a thermal plasma of reasonable size with elements heavier than hydrogen + helium cools off faster via Bremsstrahlung than it generates heat via fusion? That pretty much leaves us with D-D (harder) and D-T (easier) fusion as possible reactions, both of which produce lots of neutron flux. These neutrons activate many materials and require big thermal conversion units that'll get really, really radioactive. Furthermore, it seems apparent that a thermal plasma fusion plant will have to be "big enough" or it won't be able to sustain burning, pointing at a large capital investment to make it go.
Thus, I have strong doubts that fusion plants can ever be justified as a capital investment vs. an investment in, say, geothermal or wind or fission.
Best,
--PM
Up until a few years ago, the main ingredient in solar cells, silicon, piggy-backed on the electronics industry, because the supply chain already existed. Then the volume of silicon for solar cells became larger than that for electronics. Since it does not have to be as high purity, and often can be polycrystalline rather than single crystal, custom plants to make "solar grade silicon" were built. The market price for PV silicon dropped from $400/kg to a current $16, and the price of the cells dropped right along with it.
Today the average price of the completed panels is $0.70/watt, and is expected to fall to $0.55/watt by the end of next year. So the argument that solar is too expensive is just no longer true. Please note that the panels are not the only cost for a utility scale plant, you have inverters and transformers, site prep, installation, and project overhead (design, permits, etc.), but the total cost of a solar plant is now competitive with other sources of power, especially in the US southwest. Rooftop panels are still about twice the cost of utility scale plants, because it is just less efficient to send out a crew to install a half dozen panels on a roof than to install literally hundreds of thousands in open desert.
Anyone who says solar is "too expensive" today has to explain why big utilities are signing power purchase agreements with the PV plant owners, and the banks and Wall Street are financing the plants at attractive interest rates.
And how exactly are we dealing with the pollution that coal causes? Only instead of storing it in the back yard we scatter it around the city before deciding to do something about it 'tomorrow'.
Yes nuclear waste is a problem, but it could fairly easily be handled, either by reprocessing it or by building permanent storage facilities. It's barely a blip compared to all the waste humanity produces or the damage it's causing to the world.