The coal industry wants to reuse their fly and bottom ash(e.g. in embankment, stabilisation of soft soils, geopolymer, cement...).
I don't believe the driver for this is a desire to sell fly-ash as much as it is to avoid regulatory risk; they might one day be forced to go back and retroactively pay for remediation and disposal of waste generated over many decades. But that's not going to be the case if their ash has been incorporated into cement and other products.
Im curious as to what if any reusing alternatives have been used by the coal Industry?
The coal ash from Coal power plants contains 100 times more radioactive waste material than a nuclear power plant of equal electrical capacity. Even Obama's new Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, has made this observation.
Still, there are laws in various states that say that no new power plants can be built within their states unless this 'so called' nuclear waste problem is solved.
We both agree that Yucca Mountain is a non-solution. But spent fuel is still a Federal responsibility, and should continue to be so, IMO (We're not talking about transporting, reprocessing, and storing 'olive oil').
I think the fairest solution, is for the Federal government to verbally commit itself to a several long term options (reprocessing, transmutation, deep ocean deposition, extraterrestrial disposal) while also committing itself to the short term option of temporarily storing (up to 200 years) spent fuel or reprocessed residual radioactive material in government protected and secured central repositories in every state that currently produces radioactive material.
So if I were Obama, I'd simply say that the state of California is currently producing radioactive waste material from its hospitals, research facilities, and nuclear power facilities. So in order to secure this radioactive material, the Federal government will fund, construction, and secure of a temporary (up to 200 years lifetime) repository for the radioactive waste created in the state of California.
Such a program would create jobs in every state that produces radioactive material while also providing a short and long term solution to the relatively meager scientific problem of radioactive waste material.
But for states like California that currently ban the construction of new nuclear power plants because of the nuclear waste issue while continuing to produce radioactive material themselves and import electricity from nuclear power plants in Arizona-- is the ultimate in energy and environmental hypocrisy, IMO. And the Federal government needs to do its part in ending this hypocrisy by funding, building, protecting radioactive waste storage facilities within those states that produce it!
Marcel Williams
http://newpapyrusmagazine.blogsp...to-
nuclear.html
If nuclear plants emitted the waste that coal-fired plants do they would be shut down.
I often suggest to people who are worried about being exposed to (low-dose) radiation from a power plant to focus their attention on coal-fired plants, which account for 100x or more release of radionuclides than nuclear plants.
"Im curious as to what if any reusing alternatives have been used by the coal Industry?"
The American Coal Ash Association claims that 44% of a total of 72 million tons of fly ash(short tons, metric tonnes or long tons?) produced each year is reused for various applications.
They list: building foundations, soil stabilization, exterior and interior walls, flowable fill, pavement, sidewalks, carpet backing, floor slabs, floor underlayments, bricks, manufactured soils and composts, concrete masonry units, pervious concrete, fiber cement siding, mineral filler in asphalt/road base/pavement sub-base, ceramic tiles, metal castings, composite materials and portland cement feedstock.
Portland cement is the most common use for reused fly-ash, with 23% of all US fly-ash.
(by the way, they're holding a hillariously named conference in may of this year called "world of coal ash"; that doesn't exactly bring to mind anything pleasant)
Sulfur removal systems produce huge piles of gypsum at some coal fired plants -- I think that some of these have been "mined", but generally there is more material produced then there is a demand for.
For that matter, large piles of sulfur are accumulating outside oil processing facilities that strip sulfur from heavy crude.
The Jedi Mind Trick that the coal industry pulls on people always amazes me. Just about every day, a 120+ car coal train barrels through Ithaca NY. Despite the fact that the train derailed 8 years ago and blocked traffic for a day, not that many people know where the train is going or what it carries. Physics professors as well as shoppers at the local food cooperative are equally oblivious. You'll see mothers who are opposed to nuclear, wind, natural gas and ever other form of energy hold up their kids and tell them to "wave at the choo choo."
Tompkins County made a report about global warming emissions from the county which made no mention whatsoever of Cayuga AES (the coal fired plant), which is a larger point source emitter than all other sources in the county combined. Their excuse was that the coal fired plant exports power outside the county, and that we're only responsible for the demand that we generate.
When are we going to see a movement to shut coal fired plants down?
I wonder if people on the political left are reluctant to oppose coal on the basis that "we don't want to throw the poor coal miners on welfare..."
Remember that coal miners were traditionally the spearhead of the labour movement!
George: The railroad unions also played a big role in the anti-nuclear movement in places like Australia.
I presume that is because just-in-time business models made rail freight transport uncompetitive with trucking, except for commodities such as coal whose sheer bulk makes road transport impracticable?
I'm not really a fan of JIT anyway -- I think it makes the economy too brittle. Thoughts?
George: Coal and rail have been intimately tied together for more than 100 years. Coal is a nearly perfect baseload commodity for rail in that it moves in large quantities from fixed locations to large fixed location customers. Once the tracks are laid, there is the potential for additional customers, but in many cases the real underlying economics for the line was to move coal.
In the US, coal represents more than 50% of the rail freight volume and I am pretty sure that its concentration in Australia is even greater.
I am quite opposed to the existing implementations of JIT, especially in cases where the bean counters have no idea what inventory they are trying to minimize looks like compared to the machinery that can be rendered unusable without the correct raw material inputs or spare parts. The whole notion is really dangerous when you are part of an organization where the top level managers often get their ideas from airplane magazines.
Well at least it appears that the TVA has provided Team Obama with a bunch of new "shovel ready" jobs -- just in time -- that can also be billed as "Green". Seriously, we should be able to quickly gauge the commitment of this next administration on "GHG"s and environmental issues in general by how quickly they regulate this coal waste problem and commit the TVA (itself part of the federal government) to phasing out its approx. 15GW of coal burning assets. It is only about 10,000 times more urgent than Yucca.
Commenting by HaloScan
