Coal Ash Chronicles

Stories about America's second-largest waste stream.

Posts tagged coal

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If you got all of your electricity for your lifetime solely from nuclear power, your share of the waste would fit in a single soda can. If you got all your electricity from coal, your share would come to 146 tons: 69 tons of solid waste that would fit into six rail cars and 77 tons of carbon dioxide that would contribute to accelerated global warming.
Gwyneth Cravens | Power to Save The World (via professorspacegiraffe)

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Consider This: Santee Cooper Coal Ash

Santee Cooper had a long run in Conway at the Grainger electric plant. It provided many jobs, a boost to the local economy and reliable electricity. It also produced coal ash.

Consider This:

Now that the facility is being shut down, Santee Cooper has to come up with an acceptable way to deal with the coal ash left behind. The utility operator wants to create a vault to seal the ponds holding the debris. But that’s not the only option.

Read — or watch — more here.

Filed under South Carolina Santee Cooper coal ash coal plant coal

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Coal Fired: A poem written and read by Rob Mulford - Northern Media Alliance

During this year’s May Day gathering at the Dome Home, whistle-blower Rob Mulford shared an excerpt from “Coal Fired”, an epic poem he wrote after a fellow employee was seriously injured in an accident at the Fairbanks Aurora Energy Coal Plant. He went public with claims that Aurora had repeatedly violated worker health and safety standards for the sake of increased production, and that the incident was not only preventable, but foreseen.

Filed under coal coal ash independent media Alaska poetry

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revkin: Tom @Yulsman photo peering into the “Cretaceous on fire,” a porthole in an old coal-fired power plant. Brings me right back to Loren Eiseley’s “Man the Firemaker”! As I explained in my 1992 book on global warming:  In his 1954 essay “Man the Firemaker,” Loren Eiseley correlates human progress with the use of ever-more-potent fuels. First came firewood, which enabled humans to cook meats and thus increase food’s nutritive value. Then came charcoal. The Iron Age would have been meaningless without the hot charcoal fires over which metals become malleable. Mastery of glass, ceramics, and steel was a function of rising temperatures in kilns, forges and furnaces. As Eiseley put it, “Man’s long adventure with knowledge has, to a very marked degree, been a climb up the heat ladder…. Today the flames grow hotter in the furnaces…. The creature that crept furred through the glitter of blue glacial nights lives surrounded by the hiss of steam, the roar of engines, and the bubbling of vats…. And he is himself a flame — a great, roaring, wasteful furnace devouring irreplaceable substances of the earth.”

revkin:

Tom @Yulsman photo peering into the “Cretaceous on fire,” a porthole in an old coal-fired power plant. Brings me right back to Loren Eiseley’s “Man the Firemaker”!

As I explained in my 1992 book on global warming: 

In his 1954 essay “Man the Firemaker,” Loren Eiseley correlates human progress with the use of ever-more-potent fuels. First came firewood, which enabled humans to cook meats and thus increase food’s nutritive value. Then came charcoal. The Iron Age would have been meaningless without the hot charcoal fires over which metals become malleable. Mastery of glass, ceramics, and steel was a function of rising temperatures in kilns, forges and furnaces.

As Eiseley put it, “Man’s long adventure with knowledge has, to a very marked degree, been a climb up the heat ladder…. Today the flames grow hotter in the furnaces…. The creature that crept furred through the glitter of blue glacial nights lives surrounded by the hiss of steam, the roar of engines, and the bubbling of vats…. And he is himself a flame — a great, roaring, wasteful furnace devouring irreplaceable substances of the earth.”

Filed under coal