Orano warns of financial problems at Niger uranium plant
The West African nation increasingly seeks new partners, such as Russia, in its mining sector.
What happened to the clean coal movement?
Benjamin Gotlieb, blogging for the web news portal of the Los Angeles-based Annenberg School for Journalism and Communication, addresses the question of whether carbon dioxide can safely be stored in the earth’s crust.
Noting that almost half the electricity in the United States is produced from coal and the fact that the industry supports 80,000 coal-related jobs, Gotlieb says “the case for cleaning up coal’s dirty image is awfully compelling.”
But while the idea of “clean coal”, which posits that coal-fired plants can pollute less by storing harmful emissions in deep underground caverns, gained traction in the early 2000s, almost a decade later the concept has “yet to leave the drawing board” observes Gotlieb.
The biggest obstacles? Hard science, such as finding enough suitable caverns to store the waste, and a strong environmental movement opposed to coal and coal-fired plants, period.
But as Gotlieb reports, that didn’t stop the US government from using $1 billion of taxpayer dollars to pay energy company FutureGen Alliance to create a clean coal facility that relies on underground carbon capture:
The idea is not so much to give coal a soothing bubble bath and a hearty scrub, but rather to capture the CO2 created during the coal-electricity generation process and “pump it in to deep geologic formations thousands of feet below the earth’s surface,” FutureGen said in a recent release.
By storing the C02 deep underground, coal plants will, in theory, significantly reduce their contribution to global warming and scale back the health risks associated with coal production.
However, according to a spokesman for the Sierra Club quoted by Gotlieb, the idea does not satisfy environmentalists because it does not address pollution problems caused by coal-powered plants:
“Think about cigarettes… [Carbon sequestration] would be like taking out just one of the 100 horrible toxins in cigarettes,” David Graham-Caso said. “The Sierra Club does not support it.”
