Why not build bigger and coal fired power stations. there splenty of coal?
Answers:
People have mentioned that coal is the most polluting source of energy, which is true, but they did not describe the specific pollutants. 2 major pollutants that are produced by coal plants are sulfer and mercury. Those are in turn carried down into the soil and waters by rain. Mercury gets into plants and animals, and especially fish, and mercury is of course toxic to humans and some other animals. Sulfer in the air produces acid rain (dilute sulfuric acid), and acidifies soils and waters, threatening plant and animal life.
By the way, nuclear power may be a clean source of energy, but it is not a sustainable source. Uranium will run out eventually just like fossil fuels. Nuclear power requires very little uranium (as compared to fossil fuels), but there is very little uranium in the earth.
coal will run out and think of the pollution
polution
Coal is also the dirtiest means of producing power. Can you see the Environmentalists going for THIS one? I think not.
Pollution
I agree - we should build more. The technology now exists for clean fossil fuel burning.
er no theres not! why dont you look into what coal is, how long it takes to form any how cost effective it is before you make anymotre statements like that. x
We can clean it, but then we have huge containers of CO2, and what do you want to do with all of those. The 'Clean' coal still creates on the pollution, its just stored. Might as well go Nuclear, at least the left overs are small in volume.
China increases its coal consumption equal to building two new power plants each week. Now the smoke reaches all the way to California. It is only going to get worse.
Even if the technology exists to burn coal cleanly, it will not be installed where it is needed, in India and China!
;-D Do you know the song 'Smoke Gets In Your Eyes?' Might as well learn it!
Energy crisis is by and large not about electric power (there are plenty of power stations that burn coal; some can even switch between coal and oil). It's mostly about fuel used for transportation (gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet fuel). Gasoline can be made from coal (Sasol in South Africa has been doing just that for decades), but it's expensive.
EROEI is too low to be profitable, except where generation plant is close to the coal mine.
The problem with all carbon-based fuels is the EROEI for them drops to uneconomic, once you add scrubbers and other clean-burning technologies.
The ONLY viable primary fuels are nuclear (uranium) and hydropower. All the rest are uneconomic from an EROEI perspective, or from a distribution/installation scale cost perspective (e.g. solar, wind, ocean currents, etc).
We MUST leverage our existing electric transmission lines infrastructure (imagine the huge past energy investment in copper, etc) to replace our carbon machinary with electric machinary. It MUST happen. Economically there is NO OTHER CHOICE. Oil sands, ethanol and other low EROEI pipe-dreams are just political grandstanding. We scientists have studied this, and we know the truth. The truth is being hidden from you by the mass media, because they don't want a global panic.
In future, the excess heat from nuclear plants could possibly be used to produce hydrogen + oxygen from water, in addition to electricity from turbines, and hydrogen is a clean fuel. In other words, nuclear plants can become even more efficient and environmentall-friendly by capturing excess heat.
Read my sources for detailed explanation, including disputing the fear of nuclear waste. Did you know coal waste inserts 1000s times more uranium into the environment than nuclear plants generate?
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Add: in rebuttal to answer will follows about utility rates set higher by regulations, countries which have expensive electricity will fail economically compared to countries which have less expensive electricity. China is switching to nuclear because it must have lowest cost electricity to compete against India and other 3rd world competitors (billions of low-wage workers competing for spending of millions of baby boomers), and coal without scrubbers has made it hard to see the sun in big cities. They want to clean it up before 2008 Olympics.
They are building Coal fired plants part of the problem is that EPA regulations means a considerable amount of the energy produced at a coal fired plant is used for pollution control equipment at the plant.
The other problem is pure economics. Utility companies are government protected monopolies. As such they usually have proceedures, fuel adjustment clauses, that allow them to pass on the cost of fuel directly to the consumer. And with no competition there is no incentive for them to use a cheaper fuel. Especially since they can install smaller less expensive (capital expense) natural gas turbines for generating power.
Why should they care what the fuel cost your going to pay for it anyway.
because they've tried it and get protests because of pollution.
Yes the UK has plenty of coal BUT most of it is uneconomic to extract. Foreign coal even with transport costs is much cheaper. But coal fired powerstations are very environmentally unfriendly and that's the main reason for not building them. There is a lot to be said for building nuclear power stations and some renewable energy power stations.
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