Russ said:

@ DV82XL: If you want to hold coal power plants to the same standards as nuclear plants and the same kind of regulation, then there will be a lot of people sitting in the dark. Especially any coal plants that have been in continuous operation since before 1977. If you applied the same containment requirements as a nuclear plant, they would all shut down overnight and probably never open again.

I am well aware of that and it isn’t my contention that we should, (or could, rather) just that I see a situation developing where we will have the wool pulled over our eyes by ‘Clean Coal’ where it will amount to nothing be hollow promises without a regulatory mechanism in place to enforce them. This to me is the issue.

Frankly, from what I have seen none of the clean coal ideas I have seen put forward are practical, and I doubt many of them will ever be commercialized without making the cost of coal powered generation totally uncompetitive. My suspicion is what we will seeing is some marginal improvements, and pilot-plants to give the illusion the industry is doing something. This nuclear energy could never get away with.

What I would like to see is all the various national regulators from nations with a nuclear a power sector, take a less adversarial approach to the industry they are responsible for, and like the aviation regulators, see themselves as facilitators. I have worked with American, Canadian, European, and Japanese air transport bureaucracies in my day, and they always struck me as having a real sense of balance in the conduct of their duties. I have seen nothing of that in the stories I hear from the nuclear side.

@ DV82XL: If you want to hold coal power plants to the same standards as nuclear plants and the same kind of regulation, then there will be a lot of people sitting in the dark. Especially any coal plants that have been in continuous operation since before 1977. If you applied the same containment requirements as a nuclear plant, they would all shut down overnight and probably never open again.

        DV82XL said:

That’s why I was asking in another thread about the approval process. From what I can see in about every jurisdiction the authorities responsible for the licensing of dirt-burners don’t hold the licensee to the same standards as nuclear plants are held to by their regulators. Thus I can see a ‘clean coal’ plant being granted a permit, and when it doesn’t preform exactly as promised, ‘accommodations’ will be made, whereas a reactor would be immediately shut. In fact there are examples of both these things having happened in the past.

In the US, getting approval for a coal power plant is not comperable to a nuclear plant. In general, there is no “license” in the sense that the there is with a nuclear plant with the NRC. THe NRC has nothing to do with coal and that’s that. There is no formal submission process or anything.

What you need is basically the following:

1. A building permit/zoning permit/infrastructure permits (local or state. you’d need this with anything you build, regardless. You need the permits to bring in rails and such).

2. You may need utility permits or approval to be a mass market electricity generator (if you’re not already). This again goes for anything – or at least any utility plant. It’s possible you could have trouble here if the local utility commission gets enough protests due to property value and such.

3. Emission approval – this is the only part that is in any way related to the approval for the coal exhaust. This is through the EPA. Basically you have to show that the plant meets emissions standards by the EPA. They’re not all that tight, so if you have some very rudimentary scrubbers and fly ash traps, you should be good.

Of course, there are other local and state issues. Many times, a coal plant is difficult to build because locals will start calling politicians to get strings pulled to stop it, but it’s not as bad as nuclear. Generally, they’re not that difficult to build. Like I said there is no real “coal burner” license.

One of the big things though is that in most places there are some major grandfather issues that can effectively make things regulation-free. If a utility owns property that it has had since before regulations exist they might be able to claim it has always been utility property and therefore can’t be expected to conform to new rules. Any facility that has been burning coal for any period of time generally gets a pass and that can even mean adding more units to it.

I would say that the regulations relating to a coal plant are generally the incidental ones that come up just due to the needs of the plant: Railroad permits, dock permits, permits to build a structure over 300 feet tall, permits for thermal discharge. That kind of thing. There isn’t a single major regulatory hurdle that is attached to coal.

        Gordon said:

The whole argument for “clean coal” that we’re somehow going to cap a coal fired plant and burn thousands of tons of coal and then take the massive volume of hot corrosive and dirty flu gas and separate it out and sequester it and grab and compress all the CO2 to stick in the ground makes me wonder about something. When the coal advocates go out to speak about that, do they have to practice ahead of time in the mirror to keep a straight face?

That’s why I was asking in another thread about the approval process. From what I can see in about every jurisdiction the authorities responsible for the licensing of dirt-burners don’t hold the licensee to the same standards as nuclear plants are held to by their regulators. Thus I can see a ‘clean coal’ plant being granted a permit, and when it doesn’t preform exactly as promised, ‘accommodations’ will be made, whereas a reactor would be immediately shut. In fact there are examples of both these things having happened in the past.

The other thing coal gets is a free ride on releasing radioactive waste. Typically a coal-fired power plant emits about 3.3 times the amount of radioactive waste into the environment that a nuclear plant produces for a similar amount of power produced. This is due to the fact that coal contains radioactive material, mostly uranium and thorium, at about 4 parts per million. Now this does not seem like a lot until the quantity of coal a 1000 megawatt plant will burn in a day, around 11,000 tons, is considered. This works out to be roughly 40 kilos of radioactive material (88 pounds) each day. About 10% of this will be released to the atmosphere and the rest will end up in the ash pile and subject to weathering. ‘Clean coal’ or not, there is no requirement for this material to be sequestered, as is the case with spent fuel from a nuclear reactor despite the fact that along with the uranium and thorium there are concentrations of more dangerous radioisotopes of elements like potassium and phosphorous in the ash.

It is not a level playing field at all, and that needs to be pounded into to the public’s mind at every opportunity, because I am sure there is a Nancy Burton or two out there with too much time on their hands to make themselves a pest to a coal plant in their region.

        drbuzz0 said:

I’m currently sitting in a room “full of radiation” all kinds of radiation actually.

There’s carbon-14 and potassium-40 decaying in my body, there are cosmic rays coming through here and various other natural radioisotopes, meanwhile my cell phone and computer are creating electromagnetic fields, the monitor and lights are producing visible light and everything in the room is radiating energy in the termal infrared and high microwave/terahertz range.

If I wanted to be somewhere devoid of radiation I’d have to find a cave surrounded by a very large amount of purified lead or other dense material.

I’d also have to cool it with liquid helium.

This would kill me, of course.

I’ll give you a better test: stand just downwind of one of the two kinds of plants.

Been there, done that. Which is the source of my all to powerful loathing of coal fired power plants. I grew up seeing one at its worst and I know just how bad they are.

        DV82XL said:

I am prepared to go into a room full of CO2 for two minutes, if he is prepared to go into a room full of radiation for two minutes.”

I’m currently sitting in a room “full of radiation” all kinds of radiation actually. There’s carbon-14 and potassium-40 decaying in my body, there are cosmic rays coming through here and various other natural radioisotopes, meanwhile my cell phone and computer are creating electromagnetic fields, the monitor and lights are producing visible light and everything in the room is radiating energy in the termal infrared and high microwave/terahertz range.

If I wanted to be somewhere devoid of radiation I’d have to find a cave surrounded by a very large amount of purified lead or other dense material. I’d also have to cool it with liquid helium. This would kill me, of course.

I’ll give you a better test: stand just downwind of one of the two kinds of plants.

Yes I can just imagine what the outcome would be if someone with such a flimsy intellect crossed swords with the Iron Lady. Bet he was checking between his legs to see if everything was still there after she finished with him.