The goal to bring environmentally friendly energy such as natural gas and nuclear power in the wake of existing coal burning facilities, could have serious consequences to industries that rely on coal driven by products. What, you mean that other industries use coal by products? I thought the coal is the enemy of the state, only used by fascist-communist driven uber capitalist oligarchs, who rape, pillage and plunder our natural wonders at the behest of corporate profiteering.
Over 60% of power in this country is powered by coal. As a result this provides quite a bit of coal ash, that is highly toxic and can wreak havoc if it leaches into water tables or rivers. Fortunately 43% of this by product has been put to work as a useful raw material in other manufacturing sectors – for Concrete this is Flyash and Slag. Our industries reliance on these materials as a standard prescription in properly designed concrete can not be overlooked. Large scale projects (Freedom Tower) and government agencies (Caltrans) all mandate the use of fully sustainable, eco friendly materials combined with reduction of carbon intensive ingredients such as Portland Cement. So what happens to these materials as the reduction of coal burning plants get moth-balled? That’s subject to much debate as this is process is fluid and our current reliance on coal will have to be dealt with gracefully, if at all seeing that other alternatives are not necessarily benign (see Chernobyl) and other eco-friendly alternatives prove costly.
Roughly 8 million metric tonnes for fly ash is used in the manufacture of Ready Mix Concrete per year in this country. If that were substituted with traditional Portland Cement that would equal the same amount of tons of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere per year. This not a zero sum game. Although material derivatives should not be the sole basis for how our country deals with sources of renewable energy and our policies of dealing with global warming, they most certainly need to be understood holistically. Cap and trade based policies and pie in the sky energy endeavors such as nitrogen and bio fuel, have extensive costs that ultimately will impact consumers. That’s nothing that Greenpeace, Sierra Club or the Democrats are worried about, but you should. Clean coal may be an oxymoron, but I think zero based emission policies for energy are as well. FutureGen the DOE’s answer to clean coal’s with zero based emission using carbon capturing technology is obviously less evasive and less disruptive to sourcing coal based on pozolans.
