Legion Troll
A fine upstanding poster
If you paid any attention to the last presidential campaign, you'll remember ads touting the benefits of "clean coal" power, sponsored by the industry group American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. (The ads featured lumps of coal plugged into an electrical cord.)
Coal power accounts for about 30% of U.S. carbon emissions — the ads promised high-tech and eventually carbon-free power, emphasizing coal's low cost compared to alternatives, its abundance in America and its cleanliness.
The "clean coal" campaign was always more PR than reality — currently there's no economical way to capture and sequester carbon emissions from coal, and many experts doubt there ever will be.
But the idea of clean coal was buried beneath the 1.1 billion gallons of water mixed with toxic coal ash that burst through a dike next to the Kingston coal plant in the Tennessee Valley and blanketed several hundred acres of land, destroying nearby houses.
The accident — which released 100 times more waste than the Exxon Valdez disaster — polluted the waterways of Harriman, Tenn., with potentially dangerous levels of toxic metals like arsenic and mercury, and left much of the town uninhabitable.
For more than two weeks after the spill, workers and machines were still trying to clear the estimated 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash from around the plant.
The breach "is an environmental catastrophe that reveals not only the dangers of burning coal and mismanaging coal combustion waste, but also the need for federal regulation," said Steven Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, at a Senate hearing on the spill. After Kingston, coal may be considered many things — but it's hard to see how "clean" could be one of them.
http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1870599,00.html
