Two of America's biggest coal plants closed this month | Hacker News Reader

Two of America's biggest coal plants closed this month

qz.com

302 pointsph0rque176 comments

Coal is an environmental disaster. Burning it releases CO2, sulphur that causes acid rain, and surprising amounts of radioactive uranium and thorium.

In fact, coal power plants cause more radioactive contamination than nuclear power plants, and coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste, says Scientific American.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

Leave the coal in the ground.

> coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste, says Scientific American.

This isn't true in any reasonable sense, and SA retract the claim in a footnote. But nuclear plants produce so much less waste than coal plants that overall, they release less radiation joule for joule.

> This isn't true in any reasonable sense,

> overall, they release less radiation joule for joule.

How is that not a "reasonable sense"? Less radiation joule per joule seems to me like a reasonable measure as "less radioactive overall"

At the point where it's already waste, you don't really care about the energy that was produced from it, possibly years or thousands of years ago.

If one power plant creates 1000t of waste, and another creates 10000t of waste while providing the same amount of electricity, I think we can reasonably say that the second generates 10x more waste.

"Well, if you pick just one ton of waste from either plant it's the same waste!" is technically true, but it's neither here nor there.

(Of course in case of nuclear vs. coal it's a bit more complicated because the waste products are not the same, but I still think we can reasonably compare waste per energy.)

If bill gates venture into power pans out there won’t be nuclear waste at all it seems.

There are already plants that can do what he's proposing, like the CANDU reactor. It looks like they've taken some ideas directly from that reactor, so it looks pretty conspicuous that they never mention it.

I don't know much about this stuff. Just watched that doco on Netflix, inside bills brain. It was the first I had heard of Nuclear power using depleted uranium, and that America apparently has enough depleted uranium to power the US for ~140 years or something.

I don't know why this isn't being pushed harder if it's safer and cleans up some of this waste.

Yeah, I watched the whole thing too. They leave out so much stuff, like that Paul Allen left the company because Bill & Steve Ballmer tried to dilute his shares when he had cancer, or that they actually bought DOS (the doco makes it look like they were working their ass off to build it).

CANDU reactors are Canadian, they use heavy water. They've been around for 50 years, people don't use them because they can't be used to make nuclear weapons. All the reators in Canada are these style.

We just need to find a way, way cheaper source of heavy water.

Wait, what, no!

CANDU is a thermal water moderated reactor, albeit moderated with heavy water rather than light water, allowing it to use natural uranium instead of enriched (as Canada didn't have enrichment capability and didn't want to depend on other nations). And it's a pressure tube design, meaning the high pressure water is kept in a bunch of tubes rather than having one big pressure vessel like most light water reactors (again, because Canada didn't have heavy forges required to produce traditional reactor vessels).

What Bill Gates funded is a company called Terrapower that is making a sodium cooled fast breeder. Very different from CANDU. Fast breeders are a pretty cool concept, but they and the reprocessing technology for closing the fuel cycle isn't as mature as light water reactors.

I wasn't saying that they're the same, I was saying that they solve many of the issues that they were talking about with nuclear power (ie: need to use enriched uranium, no waste etc.). Candu reactors currently produce "waste", but they were designed not to since Canada thought they had little uranium to work with. Once it was found it was abundant in Canada, they stopped the reprocessing step, and just used newly mined uranium.

Sure there will. What do you think will happen to all the maintenance items and discarded scrap?

If the 1000t is radioactive at 5Bq/Kg and the 10000t is radioactive at 2Bq/Kg, it's at best confusing to say the second plant's waste is "more radioactive".

Surely you usually do care, because usually the discussion is about the best way to generate a given amount of energy.

Saying that coal ash is "more radioactive than nuclear waste" is too ambiguous. There are many kinds of nuclear waste with varying degrees of radioactivity. I assume there are also variations in the degree of radioactivity in coal ash. It might be meaningful to say that a particular kind of coal ash is more radioactive than a particular kind of nuclear waste, but without that context it's a meaningless comparison.

The coal is as radioactive as the ash, thus these power plants are not creating any new radioactive waste.

Does that apply also to nuclear fuel? The byproducts of fission with uranium is less radioactive, or has a shorter half life, if I recall.

Short half lives are what make something radioactive. It's not 1:1 but basically take the amount of material / half life > how much radiation is being released.

Uranium 238 is extremely stable with a half life of 4.468 billion years, and the more active uranium 235 still has a half life of 0.7 billion years. Which is why they survived geologic timescales from earths formation.

Strontium-90 by comparison is produced in a nuclear reactor and has a half life of 28.8 years making it vastly more nasty. Further, while nuclear waste is incredibly nasty stuff, high neutron fluxes also turn the walls etc radioactive though to a less extreme extent.

I don't think so either ... and SA should never had put that in print. Anyway, there's no argument, just numbers. The measure of 'more radioactive than' is Bq/kg. (Total radiation? who releases those numbers? where's the transparency?)

According to the following article (and a couple I'm not citing), coal fly ash counts are on the order of 250-1000 Bq/kg. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10967-006-6966-1

Specifically, concentrated (fly ash) measures:

"263 to 950 Bq·kg−1 for 238U, from 142 to 605 Bq·kg−1 for 226Ra, from 133 to 428 Bq·kg−1 for 210Pb, from 27 to 68 Bq·kg−1 for 228Ra and from 204 to 382 Bq·kg−1 for 40K"

Anyone who cares to is welcome to cite the Bq/kg numbers for waste from nuclear plants. Go ahead, pick some. I think you'll find they are higher. And most coal doesn't contain any Pu.

We are not discussing nuclear waste here. It is highly concentrated and disposed of in the end of the fuel cycle. What you should be comparing with is the radioactivity that is released in the environment during the operation of the plant. That is mostly Tritium and isotopes of Xenon, definitely no heavy metals. Tritium is a very low energy beta emitter and is mostly harmless. Xenon is a noble gas and a beta emitter, so again not very harmful.

The WHO guidelines on alpha emitters (all elements you cite that are contained in fly ash) is 1 Bq/l in drinking water. So depending on how and where this ash goes to, you can definitely cause some significant damage with it.

For context, that seems to make coal ash about as radioactive as granite based on these figures for the latter: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S168785071...

I think the real valid point is that nuclear waste is stored in a safe location, while coal waste is stored in the atmosphere and thus partially in our lungs.

> while coal waste is stored in the atmosphere and thus partially in our lungs

can't argue with that

> nuclear waste is stored in a safe location

so, that's part of the reason many people i know are still very suspicious about nuclear power even though they know _intellectually_ that it's (supposed to be) safer than some of the alternatives.

nuclear waste used to be dumped into the ocean, because back then we thought that would be safe. now it's stored in places that are deemed (earthquake-) safe until an earthquake (or a tsunami) hits. next we outsource the storage to private companies as those are cheaper and act suprised when we learn that they were skimping on manpower, maintenance and safety protocols when trying to cut costs and containers are leaking into the ground water.

it's the same as nuclear power plants. they're always perfectly secure until something unforseen happens or they've been secure for so long people get neglient.

Joule for Joule radioactivity seems like the only reasonable sense. Who cares if it's one drop of death or a pool full of lightly toxic waste? You could easily just dilute the drop to arrive at a similar but less toxic pool (if you wanted to, for some reason).

But nuclear plants produce so much less waste than coal plants that overall, they release less radiation joule for joule.

Even that isn't quite accurate. Reactors release more radiation, but mostly in the form of elements that don't bioconcentrate into the food supply, so that the effective exposure of the human population is lower.

I wrote a long comment a couple of years ago discussing the original article that Scientific American paraphrased for this report:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14466887

> coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste, says Scientific American.

Coal is definitely bad, however, coal power producing more radioactive waste than nuclear power is a meme that deserve to die.

Here's where the meme originated. Somewhere towards the end of the SA article there's this paragraph:

"The result: estimated radiation doses ingested by people living near the coal plants were equal to or higher than doses for people living around the nuclear facilities. At one extreme, the scientists estimated fly ash radiation in individuals' bones at around 18 millirems (thousandths of a rem, a unit for measuring doses of ionizing radiation) a year. Doses for the two nuclear plants, by contrast, ranged from between three and six millirems for the same period."

Well, guess what: people living near nuclear power plants have a very reasonable expectation to see zero radioactive releases from those plants, and this expectation is generally met (with a few notable exception that we all know about, like Fukushima). That does not mean nuclear power plants don't produce radioactive waste. They do, and that waste is stored and shielded. After the shielding, the amount of radiation released is zero. Yes, zero.

Let's look at the actual numbers now: 18 millirems/year from coal ash, vs 3-6 in the neighborhood of the nuclear power plants. But how much is normal natural radiation? Per [1] it is about 300 millirems/year. So both 3-6 and 18 are negligible levels compared to the normal radiation background.

How does this all compare to Chernobyl? Per [2] the radiation in the vicinity of the famous Elephant Foot is about 8500 Roentgens/hour. Which corresponds to about 75 billion millirems/year.

So, whenever someone mentions again the fact that coal produces more radioactivity than nuclear, keep these two numbers in mind: 18 units for coal and 75 billion for Chrnobyl. Oh, and the natural background is 300 units.

[1] http://news.mit.edu/1994/safe-0105

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant%27s_Foot_(Chernobyl)#...

Not sure if you noticed before spending all that time into apples to oranges comparisons: SA article was about ingested sources of radiation.

Elephant Foot and natural background radiation are outside of your body. Coal ash gets inside. There is profound difference in effect - skin and outer layers of body cannot shield the rest.

Also, the Elephant Foot is rather easy to avoid; just don't go standing next to it. Avoiding fossil fuel pollution, OTOH, is something most humans can't realistically do.

Unless it had melted through the floor and made its way to ground water.

Then we get back to discussion that inhaling radioactive particles is harmful.

> Elephant Foot and natural background radiation are outside of your body

Have you heard of Carbon-14 dating? Of course you did. All things containing carbon that we interact with contain a bit of C14 ( * ) . Including the things we eat. Yes, we ingest every single day, and we inhale every single second radioactive things. If you eat one banana a day you get a yearly dose of 2.6 millirems [1]. That one comes from Potasium-40, but it's the same idea.

So the dose SA was talking about, 18 millirems/year, was equivalent to 7 bananas a day.

Here's a more scientific study than the SA articles [2].

"The radiation hazard from airborne emissions of coal-fired power plants was evaluated in a series of studies conducted from 1975–1985. These studies concluded that the maximum radiation dose to an individual living within 1 km of a modern power plant is equivalent to a minor, perhaps 1 to 5 percent, increase above the radiation from the natural environment. For the average citizen, the radiation dose from coal burning is considerably less."

( * ) Fun fact: fossil fuels contain essentially no C14 (the half-life of C14 of about 6000 years is many times smaller than the age of the fossil fuels). This is used in testing alcoholic beverages. Natural alcohol (obtained via fermentation) has the usual ratio of C14/C12 and emits a recognizable radiation spectrum. Alcohol industrially produced from petroleum is much cheaper. It does not have C14, so this is how you can detect if an unscrupulous producer uses synthetic ethyl alcohol (which is a dangerous because it has traces of methanol and benzene).

[1] https://newatlas.com/radiation-explained-food-sources-danger...

[2]https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html

So I'll break news to you: C14 and K40 do not accumulate in your body up same way like radium/uranium/heavy metals do.

"Even at low levels, these isotopes represent health hazards as they can accumulate in the human body (eg, in lungs), gradually enter the blood circulation, and deposit in bones and teeth to remain for life."

http://www.ncmedicaljournal.com/content/79/5/289.full

So there are three things that you really miss: doses are essentially permament (due to half-life), cumulative and localized in small areas of body.

And you miss problem of coal ash waste which needs to be stored and there is plenty of it.

Are there people living next to the elephants foot thinking the power plant is a good thing?

Don't forget the Mercury. Coal is the reason why we have to be careful eating tuna.

> Leave the coal in the ground.

More actionable: conserve power.

Whether using coal or other: dress to avoid heating and a/c, carpool, fly less, turn things off when not using, buy less stuff, avoid packaged food, etc.

You'll probably end up simplifying your life, living closer to nature, saving money, connecting with people more, and generally liking life more.

That's a stretch. I enjoy creature comforts. Hot high flow showers, A/C, a muscle car. My life is better with these features. It's not practical to advocate abstaining from these things.

What you're really saying is that you don't pay the external costs of these things, and you don't care that anyone else has to either - people in poorer countries who will be affected by new and dangerous weather, or even your own children.

You can say you life is good with these features, but how can you say it's better? How did you compare?

Here's another question. Is practicality the adequate criteria to judge the ethical implication of some behaviour?

You're employing a fallacy that corporations are only too happy to indulge, shifting the blame to consumers. Whereas the vast majority of power consumption (and pollution) is caused by big industries.

Suggesting ways to pollute less and improve their lives and environment != blame

>> It’s not climate regulations. It’s economics.

In a simplified view this is true, but they are also irreducible; We'll never reach any meaningful action if we don't make it economically advantageous to pursue alternatives that "just so happen" to be climate positive. That would be akin to getting someone to exercise solely because "it's good for you".

This is largely if not almost entirely caused by natural gas prices that make variable cost close to zero; it's essentially a waste product in producing oil for much of the country. The challenge is getting it from wellhead to consumer, but power plants are different than individual consumers. It powers more than a 1/3 currently (vs < 10% wind/solar) and for much of current coal is a very easy substitute. If we could ever get to on-site electricity generation (with the byproduct of heating homes and businesses) we could make huge reductions in pollution and gains in efficiency. Increased nuclear would be a big win for the environment as well but is a social-political untouchable for a variety of real and made-up reasons.

> Increased nuclear would be a big win for the environment as well but is a social-political untouchable for a variety of real and made-up reasons.

When more and more people will start to take the actuality of climate change seriously, either through education or – increasingly – from personal experience, nuclear will become more touchable.

I think the touchability of nuclear energy was quite negatively impacted by Fukushima, and it's just going to take a while to get reasonable people on board with the idea that that model of reactor was far out of date.

There are the folks that just shout "No nukes ever" and they can't be won over, but we're got flat earthers and anti-vaxers, so not everybody can be reasonable.

Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. They are rare but high impact ("black swan") events.

Just like terrorism, it causes a strong imprint on the minds of some people which seemingly overpowers their ability to rationally weigh observed statistics and make balanced choices.

I want to know why we can't even seem to build the few (2-3) which have started construction, but the projects are so massive that they constantly run over budget and behind timelines[1]. Until we fix that issue, I don't want the precious resources of PG&E's corpse to make risky bets on massive nuclear infra projects. It just seems like throwing lots of money at contractors who no longer know how to make massive projects on time or built to architectural spec.

I would, however, like to see a lot more R&D on small, lower-temperature reactors, possibly ones that reuse spent fuel rods from larger traditional nuclear power reactors.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/climate/nuclear-power-pro...

"black swan" events - avoid this term as it is super confusing.

Black swans were thought to be rare, then they discovered that they were common in the Southern hemisphere.

Black swans are definitely not rare (there are many hundreds within a few kilometres of my home).

The term "Black Swan" comes from the Taleb book and it refers to something previously thought to be impossible.

Black swans were thought to be impossible (they had never been seen in the northern hemisphere), then they were discovered. The fail-safes for nuclear reactors were all thought to be invulnerable until they weren't.

If nuclear could be bought online with the same kind of investment profile as solar and wind I doubt the political aspect would be anywhere near as big a factor.

Even without the politics someone building nuclear is being forced to make a very big and long term bet with a lot of uncertainty on how it will perform across its lifetime compared with future innovation in renewables.

People always bring up that it was out of date reactors that had issues. But a large number of the operating reactors in the world are these out of date models, and newer safer models are prohibitively expensive to build, are still unlikely to be 100% safe (what have humans ever built that never fails), and leaves the problem of nuclear waste.

It might be that nuclear power is a sensible choice (at least short term) in the face of climate change, but there are real risks and the claim that opposing nuclear power is akin to being a flat-earther is massive stretch.

I'd be interested in whether your position is that there will be no further nuclear accidents, or that the occurrence of future nuclear accidents is worth it.

Oh my position is that continuing to use tech that was pioneered in the 1960s and has notable safety shortcomings has the possibility to poison the well on a safe and green energy source forever.

I think the solution to this is the deployment of small scale reactors in areas like the midwest where power loss due to distance traveled is a serious matter - close down the gigantic old chimney reactors since people look at those and instantly think Chernobyl. And, before another Fukushima happens, let's get a big ol' pile of new regulations on these aging reactors or possibly just nationalize them and shut them down. It's really just a matter of time until another nationally noticeable accident happens, and more local ones aren't infrequent, especially runoff and watersource pollution. Vermont Yankee[1] got into big trouble for this a while back (specifically tritium leaks) and the decommissioning trust had, of course, been underfunded.

Our old gen nukes and operators cutting corners on safety are the biggest obstacles to having new gen nukes.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_Yankee_Nuclear_Power_P...

The problem is that it's way too late to start a nuclear buildout if we want to stay below 1.5° (probably even for 2°). Nuclear power plants take a decade to build at least. Our emission budget won't last that long.

That's certainly a problem, but whatever we start doing now is going to take a decade plus to start making a difference. That's no reason to sit on our hands. It's not as though if we can't keep warming below 2 degrees we should just give up.

The benefit of wind and solar is that they allow for a linear reduction in CO2 starting pretty much immediately. Nuclear otoh doesn't do anything for us until the plants are online. It's probably good to start building nuclear plants now, but one must be very careful not to advocate for them as replacements for an ambitious rollout of wind and solar.

Oh I agree completely, but I think we are still going to need the base load Nuclear can provide in 10 years. We’re not going to phase out coal and gas in that time frame anyway.

Noob question but why the heck does it take so long to build a nuclear plant even in 2019? That’s longer than some FDA drug development

Sometimes they are never completed https://static.theintercept.com/amp/south-caroline-green-new...

Lived there for about 2 years while that was going down. Constructions cost was offloaded to consumers in the from of energy cost increases. It was very controversial. I dont recall the details of why it failed, but iirc, it was also around the same time as the Westinghouse bankruptcy and it ended in the only F500 company headquartered in the Columbia area being bought. I knew a few people working there as contractors who lost a job.

It's kinda sad we cant seem to finish projects like this. Nuclear energy seems one of the best bets at transitioning to renewable.

> Noob question but why the heck does it take so long to build a nuclear plant even in 2019?

China and Korea have been building plants, some even in under 5 years. It only takes 10 years in the Western countries.

> The problem is that it's way too late to start a nuclear buildout if we want to stay below 1.5°

People will probably take nuclear energy seriously only after that 1.5° warming has happened.

Cost cost cost. Give me an example of new build nuclear that is even close to the cost of solar plus storage or natural gas. The only place it can happen is China, which forces through infrastructure projects that are capitally intensive.

I'm not sure it's climate regulations or economics that lead to this so much as it is fracking. While fracking has brought down natural gas prices in the US, as I understand it the big problem with switching from coal to gas absent fracking and horizontal drilling isn't just the price but the fact that there just wouldn't be enough of it.

That's essentially correct, regarding the necessity of fracking to make natural gas able to have the impact that it has for the US.

US natural gas production had not net moved higher from 1976 to 2006.

Here's the boom from 2000 to 2013:

https://i.imgur.com/S8Ky983.png

You can see that it doesn't really move until 2007, when the fracking lift-off begins. Primarily Texas and Marcellus.

From mid 2000 to 2009, natural gas prices in the US averaged around 100% to 150% higher than they are now. From 2003 to 2009, prices were essentially a minimum of 100% higher the entire time than they are right now. There simply wasn't enough supply to tame the demand impact, so prices got really crazy during the commodity bubble years in there.

The long-term global NG demand chart is remarkable:

https://i.imgur.com/0KLGshU.jpg

Russian natural gas production is now well over twice what it was in the mid 1970s. And Middle East natural gas production is something like seven times higher than it was just 25 years ago.

The efficiency of natural gas fired power plants gas also increased greatly since 1976:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EUfITI3EGIE/UU-FK6Ise0I/AAAAAAAAAW...

Okay, looked at the graph: Copied it to my system clipboard, read it into an old copy of Microsoft Photodraw, magnified it by 400% and THEN could read the axis annotation!!!

The horizontal axis is time and goes from 1965 to 2017. The vertical axis is "global" natural gas volume demand in units of a billion cubic feet per day (at standard temperature and pressure, likely, hopefully).

In 1965 the volume was about 60. In 2017 the volume was about 370. Between these two points, the graph went "up and to the right"! So, since 1965, the volume is up by a factor of about 6. Not wildly surprising.

I grew up in west Tennessee, and the winter heat was from natural gas. Recently I returned to Tennessee, east Tennessee, and again the winter heat is from natural gas. Cozy!!! Between the two, I was long in NY with winter heat from fuel oil: Messy, had to have the furnace cleaned, and the oil was from a delivery truck -- botheration.

Tennessee seems to do well on energy: There's the natural gas -- I have no idea where it comes from. There's TVA with hydropower from the Tennessee River. When demand for electric power grew, IIRC they used nuclear fission and coal. Maybe now they are using natural gas. Of course, in east Tennessee is Oak Ridge with a long history in energy generation and now supercomputers. I like Tennessee!

What you just described is economics. Fracking is leading to a huge supply at a lower cost. Supply and demand curves are economics. Plants changing to gas to compete are economics.

Good riddance to the Navajo plant. While it may have been providing some decent wage jobs on the reservation, it was otherwise despoiling the environment around a remarkable corner of the world.[0]

[0]https://www.pagearizona.com/

So great and all that, but what about the jobs? And "despoiling", I've been there, it was fine. Beautiful.

So was it really worth killing even more of our careers?

Bet the earth "as a whole" is better now that Chinese coal and hydro plants are supplying the power to build our shiny new cheap solar panels.

Are you seriously saying that burning coal to build solar panels is not better than continuing to burn coal forever?

I'm seriously saying that burning coal isn't that much worse and not that much difference. People who think that solar is better are just fooling themselves. There is no free lunch and those solar panels are going to wear out, so it's not "forever" at all. And big ugly solar farms in the desert are just a different kind of "blight".

It takes conservatively 4 years for a panel to generate as much energy as it took to manufacture. It takes even more for that container ship to move them here. They're supposed to last 20 years, but really can be as poor as 15 and they loose efficiency each year. So 1/3 to 1/2 of their lifetime is just plain wasted already which means the stated efficiency and economics are grossly overestimated.

So yeah, I wouldn't build more coal plants either. Natural gas is like 1/3 the price of either solar or coal. But to applaud destroying existing infrastructure? And to shore that up with propaganda like "blight the landscape". That is naive and won't do anything to fix the basic problem.

If we choose to be wasteful materialistic energy hogs, then we have to pay for it. So give up your house AC and your car and everything else that uses so much electricity first - then play that moral high road card. The problem isn't the supply source or even the choice of raw material. It's wanton greed and wastefulness of the consumers.

Compilers are eventually self-compiling. Computers are used to design more powerful computers. Solar panels will eventually be made with panel-generated electricity.

Good argument, but counter:

No they won't because china doesn't give a crap about the environment. If coal or hydro or whatever is cheaper they will use it first.

China builds a lot of renewables and nuclear. More than most other nations.

Still doesn't make 'em cheaper.

> And the coal plants still left in the US, many in places like Georgia and Indiana, have advantages ranging from a huge scale (a third larger than those shut down this month) to relatively recent design.

Where in Indiana?

https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2019/10/26/nipsco-announces-...

> The Northern Indiana Public Service Co. plans to help add another wind farm to White County as part of its plan to move off coal by 2028, the company said Thursday.

> It is the fourth wind farm NIPSCO announced this year.

> Last year, NIPSCO announced that plan to accelerate the retirement of its remaining coal-fired generating facilities and replace them with less costly renewable energy sources, a move that could result in up to $4 billion in savings, it said.

> It would also retire the R.M. Schahfer Generating Station (Units 14, 15, 17 and 18) in Wheatfield by 2023 and its Michigan City Generating Station (Unit 12) by 2028. It plans to retire all coal within the next 9 years.

One should expect those retirement dates to move up as renewable penetration in Indiana/MISO grid continues.

https://www.pv-tech.org/news/indiana-utility-eyes-2.6gw-of-w... (Indiana utility eyes 2.6GW of wind-solar-storage for coal retirements)

The coal plant near where I was raised is being phased out around 2030. To be honest I've always been awed by it's size and presence. Such a huge chunk of concrete and steam.

My grandpa helped built it back in the 80s. My grandma's front porch is supposedly made from the excess concrete. I got to take a tour of the outside 20 years ago and I was amazed by how massive everything looked.

On the one hand I'm glad it won't be polluting anymore but it holds a special place in my childhood.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Power_Plant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Indi...

1) Surprising to the mainstream view even as recently as 2007, coal use globally has actually decreased in recent years, and mostly not due to any environmental regulation, but simply cost. 2) ...but surely, this cannot continue, and further decrease in coal will require environmental regulation.

Uh, someone is not learning from what just happened. Renewables are on a decades long, Moore's Law-like exponential decline in cost per kilowatt-hour. Fracking has caused natural gas to decline in cost dramatically, and since the drop in oil prices has shown an ability to continually improve its cost structure; not so long ago it was thought that you needed $100/barrel oil for fracking to continue.

There is no good reason to expect these trends to stop, especially the one for wind and solar, which have been going on for decades. We have, globally, passed Peak Coal, a few years back.

It does show how insignificant electric cars are in the mix of things, and counter productive (unless recharged off-grid) compared to putting Gov rebates and incentives into alternate generation that gets these plants offline as quickly as possible.

Tesla (and other electric manufacturers) are years away from building 3.5 million cars for the US.

EVs (including PHEVs) provide an instantly switchable dynamic demand, along the lines of 20% of total electricity use if the entire fleet were replaced.

Then if you add on V2G, all of a sudden you can swing electricity demand +/- 20%. Combined with overprovisioning, this greatly mitigates the disadvantages of intermittent renewables.

I don't really see how we get to 100% renewables without it, and it makes sense to pursue both simultaneously.

Yes, definitely pursue both.

My point was more as far as where Gov funding should be prioritised given their relutance to throw funding at new generation and rely on market investment while providing incentives to buy electric vehicles - though for Telsa that will be gone soon enough.

2b would pay for ~3.4GW* of hydro, ~1.2GW* wind or ~700MW solar* but only subsidise 400k EVs (avg 5k tax credit per vehicle).

* https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=31912

I work with electric utilities, and every time we talk with car manufacturers (including recently Tesla) they say vehicle-to-grid (v2g) isn't on the roadmap.

On the other hand, almost all charging happens at night, which is a time of low demand on the grid. And delayed charging (combined with time-of-use rates) to move off of the 7 PM winter peaks is widely available. So even without v2g, vehicle electrification has worked out great on the grid so far.

Governments generally run electricity grids though. If V2G is wanted, it could simply be mandated.

It's definitely on the roadmap in Europe: https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/03/groupe-renault-laun...

I worked on a software design project a year or two ago that was exploring the user interface and incentive mechanisms for the consumer side of such a scheme.

This was for one of the big-3 German automakers and the company running a significant portion of Europe's energy grid.

It's still a while off, but it is a serious project with the intend to get to market. I'm no expert on the grid side, but if I'm not mistaken, the need just isn't quite there yet because the grid have been able to accommodate current renewable production levels.

Electric cars are an energy-source-agnostic vehicle. Whether their energy comes from coal or nuclear or wind or solar, they are unaffected. Because of this you can gradually swap out pieces of the energy production backbone to renewables, and see a reflective immediate payoff in personal transportation CO2 emissions.

If the vehicle is tightly coupled to burning petrol, that can't happen. Electric cars are merely an exercise in uncoupling energy source and energy use.

Also fuels burned in a power plant are much more efficient than fuels burned in a car that is constantly slowing/speeding up/idling.

Absolutely. Internal combustion engines are extremely inefficient. The idea of hybrids like the Prius is that they try to run the engine as much as possible at its most efficient level (or least inefficient, more accurately) to reduce that waste, but offloading it to more optimised power plants will do much more.

I keep hearing about the impending demise of coal. How does anyone explain this.

https://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/pdf/t1p01p1.pd...

The production is actually slightly up.

Exports.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/imports-and-exports...

Yep. California stopped buying the electricity generated by the coal mines and coal power plants owned by the Navajo Nation in Arizona and New Mexico. The power plant shut down, but it's actually expanding its financial dependence on coal. It recently bought two huge coal companies in Wyoming to send the coal to Asia.

> It recently bought two huge coal companies in Wyoming to send the coal to Asia.

Wow! Fascinating. What has any of this got to do with governing the state of California?

Your link shows coal production dropping 25% in the last 6 years. How is that slightly up?

I am using 2016 as my baseline since it's reasonably recent.

Production now is below 2016, and falling:

https://ieefa.org/eia-u-s-coal-production-to-fall-to-40-year...

The production in Jan-Mar of 2013 was 244,000 according to your own link.

Over the same three months in 2019 it was down to 179,000 according to your own link.

I'm not sure what you think needs to be explained. Coal production is down substantially.

It's steady to slightly up since 2016.

This is an industry where 'quick' means happens in in 6 months and 'medium term' is about 5 years. Just because there was a worse low in 2016 than 2019 doesn't mean much. The more relevant perspective is that production is down more than 20% from 2013/2014 and comparable to 2016.

The better baseline is about 5 years ago, because the strategic decisions made then are appearing today.

> I keep hearing about the impending demise of coal.

Repeating 'coal is dead anyways, we don't need to take radical action' is a great way to prevent actionable change, like carbon taxes.

Coal is far from dead, and its world-wide usage is slowly growing. Natural gas growth is exponential, as well - so its not displacing coal - its adding to it.

Natural Gas is replacing coal, and emits less than half of the CO2 per kilowatt hour. So while it's merely a bridge to a cleaner future, it is a very good bridge.

It's not replacing coal. It's adding even more CO2 pollution, on top of coal.

Coal consumption is not going down.

Coal consumption in the US is down about 50 percent from its peak in 2008.

What about production? One of the comments mentioned that the coal industry exports lots of coal.

While exports have skyrocketed, total coal production has still fallen over 30 percent in the past decade.

Which has driven the price of coal down, making it more attractive in non-US markets.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggO61EzqTHk (impressive unloading in some chinese plant)

[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlekraftwerk_Moorburg (there is no .en) [3] https://powerplants.vattenfall.com/en/moorburg [4] https://vtc.view3.com/de/vt/Vattenfall-Kraftwerk-Moorburg/d/... (virtual explorer) [5] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraftwerk_Datteln (there is no .en) [6] https://www.uniper.energy/de/datteln-4 (there is no .en)

Vee häff ze munchies for some hard crunchies! So progressive, defies belief. Has to be seen, everything so green!

Coal production peaked at around 1.2B tons years earlier than your source shows. So it's down over 40%. The decline is predicted to continue with many more plants slated to close.

EIA: U.S. coal production to fall to 40-year low in 2019

https://ieefa.org/eia-u-s-coal-production-to-fall-to-40-year...

While I think it's great that these big coal-fired power plants are going away, i never see anyone talking about the millions of homes in the United States (mostly in the northeast) that are heated by individual coal stoves and coal and oil furnaces.

Individual coal burning is a huge problem because homes don't have the same environmental regulations or efficiency of a coal power plant. One of the environmental advantages of electric cars and other machines is a reduction in "point source" pollution. You can put huge scrubbers on a power plant that you can't on a million stoves or lawn mowers or whatever.

Even when all of the coal power plants are gone, there's still another huge coal burning problem waiting to be tackled.

You’re talking about it. There, now “someone” is!

Coal stoves in the Northeast -- how many of those are there? I know of quite a few places in RI and MA with oil heaters, though I'd wager natural gas is on in probably 50% of my network's residences.

Coal furnaces are common in rural areas where you might not even have a natural gas line.

I looked this up and all I could find was [0], saying there are a small number of households using it in Pennsylvania. As for the rest of PA and New England, natural gas is the norm and I haven't heard of anyone using coal. Houses that don't have natural gas lines use storage tanks in the yard that are topped off by a delivery truck every couple months.

[0]: https://www.npr.org/2019/03/03/699325560/for-the-few-who-hea...

Fuel oil is pretty common as well, and the delivery method is the same, a truck comes round and tops of your tank periodically -- usually every few weeks or once a month in the winter, depending on how much heat your house leaks.

How common? It seems like it would be cheaper for most parts of the country to install electric baseboards than to ship in the coal you'd need for the winter.

You’ve clearly never paid the electric bill for a house that used electric baseboards for heat in the winter. 5k cad/yr in BC for a 3000 sq ft house with 6 occupants. Bill for June and July is only $100, it’s all winter heating load. Comparitively natural gas bills are about $200 for two months in the winter. Many people heat with wood and the air quality goes to shit.

Living in and heating a 3000 sq ft house is a massive luxury.

> Bill for June and July is only $100

Holy hell $100 in the mild BC summer?! According to Google Vancouver varies between 14 and 22 degrees Celsius in June and July. That's t-shirt weather - don't even need heating at night if you've got good insulation.

I think your problem might be your general usage patterns (running clothes dryer, dishwasher too much or at peak times, inefficient lighting or leaving lights on everywhere, zombie draw from electronics) and the efficiency of your insulation, not merely the cost of electric baseboards. Or maybe power is just crazy expensive up there, I dunno.

In BC or Ontario, sure, but in QC most places are electric resistive heating because electricity there is like 4 cents a kwh. Cheap.

Not really. Rural areas tend to go wood.

Or propane or fuel oil.

(depends on local prices and availability of course)

I grew up in rural Montana. We had electric base boards, but it was far more economical to utilize the 2 wood stoves. We typically had 8 cords of wood on hand for the winter.

We were far outside of anywhere NG lines were run, and while some of our newer neighbors had Propane tanks, we didnt have any sort of central air, so propane wasnt really any option without a very expensive remodel. House burned a few years ago in a wildfire, so kind of a moot point now.

Edit: Relative to coal. I guess I shouldn't have taken it for granted that people would know most people in areas too rural for gas mains use propane or oil (because those are orders of magnitude more convenient than anything that requires you to move the fuel yourself.

You’re probably conflating wood furnaces with coal furnaces. Lots of people use wood stoves which are much cleaner than coal and a renewable resource.

Unless you live next to a coal mine you wouldn’t even be able to purchase coal in the US.

No, I’m not. I lived in a house with a coal furnace in rural NY.

I live in NY, and I'm aware that people who don't have gas service use oil furnaces, but I've never heard of or seen coal furnaces being used. I would have assumed that was limited to a small population maybe in rural PA or WV that are near coal mines where it's particularly cheap. Where are the statistics for "millions"?

Millions is off by an order of magnitude.

In 2015 it was estimated that around 127k homes still used coal heating.

Source, found on a ddg search: https://forgreenheat.blogspot.com/2017/06/trends-in-heating-...

Other sources give comparable numbers, in no case more than ~150k

Do you have numbers on people in the northeastern US using coal stoves for heating? I'm not necessarily doubting you, but I lived in New Hampshire for a long time and still go back regularly to see family and friends, and I don't think I've ever seen a coal stove. IME most houses use either natural gas or wood pellet stoves for heating. Which aren't ideal but they're leaps and bounds better than coal.

I did some searching, and it appears that the number of households using coal stoves is roughly 130,000 (a far, far cry from the "millions of home" cited in OP).

https://forgreenheat.blogspot.com/2017/06/trends-in-heating-... is the link that seems to have the most detailed information.

> Individual coal burning is a huge problem because homes don't have the same environmental regulations or efficiency of a coal power plant.

Maybe a huge problem for those with coal burning stoves, but overall this is 0.1% of houses, and 50% of those are in Pennsylvania.

Compared to the huge amount of coal burned for electricity, that's a drop in the bucket, and most likely used because or the homeowner loves coal for some reason, or doesn't want to, or cant upgrade to a fuel like natural gas, propane, or wood pellets.

https://forgreenheat.blogspot.com/2017/06/trends-in-heating-...

For new construction in Berkeley, you can't use natural gas. It was banned. Oh well, coal works. Unintended consequence?

Where would you get the coal though? An electric heat pump is gonna be way more cost efficient than burning coal. This is a coastal California climate we're taking about here, not Winnipeg.

One of the local businesses, right there in coastal California, is Koch Carbon. I like how the name is so honest and descriptive, despite not mentioning coal. You get carbon from the Koch brothers.

Electric heat pumps work fine in cold climates down to -20C as well. Below that they switch to resistive heating, so if it only drops below that for a few days a year it's still cost effective.

Berkeley is the kind of place where your furnace shuts off sometime in March and doesn't come on again until October.

No, because new construction in Berkeley uses electric. Coal is too foul to want to use in your own house.

Natural gas is ban so now they have to use coal.

That's a weird logic statement.

Coal is an option out of many options out there. Why are you so sure those new constructions in Berkeley will be using coal?

Do you have any source of that? From my experiences, Northern California is very environmentally conscious so I don't think they'll ban natural gas just to replace it with coal.

New construction in Berkeley is also for most practical purposes banned, so this is largely a hypothetical rule :)

Doubt it's actually huge, probably insignificant compared to corporate polluters using other sources of energy. Would be interesting to see the comparison in pollutants released by coal homes and corporate polluters.

It's huge. Big reason why China has polluted air. There's a world of difference between summers and winters due to heating. You can literally see when they switch off heating in Beijing.

I was once in Beijing for work when there was a big communist nation powow there at the same time, in early March. Laos, NK, etc in attendance.

The sky was clear during the meeting, and after, visibility quickly dropped to 100 ft

This[0] shows that coal fueled energy production produces about 65% of CO2 emissions related to energy production in the US. This[1] shows that energy production makes up 92.6% of all coal consumption in the US and residential is at most 1% of that, so it's pretty insignificant in CO2 emissions compared to the other sources of energy production, namely natural gas which produces 33% of all CO2 emissions related to energy production. However, like you say, it'd be significant in places where coal heated homes are more common. And the other pollutants that cause smog and acid rain and other issues definitely cause local problems. But emissions caused by energy production are a much larger problem on a nation wide scale.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=77&t=11 [1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/use-of-coal.php

This is not a problem in a rich country, in fact I don't understand why America is still on coal. Perhaps fund some modern-age infrastructure improvements as a part of fiscal stimulus in the next economic downturn?

Think about developing countries where people could not afford to improve their infrastructure. That's the real deal.

Germany is still on coal too. They’re planning to shut them down by 2038...

Rich country or not, people want cheap electricity and until fracking unlocked cheap natural gas in the US, coal was the cheap option.

Germany is using brown coal or lignite, too, which is a lot nastier in every respect than the black coal we more usually think of. It produces more air pollution of every kind including CO2 to generate the same amount of power. They're also gradually destroying one of their few remaining ancient forests to strip-mine the land beneath it for lignite.

The original sin for why they are still trying coal is likely the attempt at confederation in doing this state level - which has the end result of vastly disproportionate power to parochial interests which under any sane system would be told to piss off and get a sense of priorities. I am no expert in Australian politics beyond the mindbogglingly stupid IT decisions but I have heard of similar reasons behind their own bad decisions.

The main reason they infrastructure is currently on coal is ironically because they did invest in infrastructure in the past and those decisions are usually best done in advance as funding is spread out over vast periods of time. Needless to say the infastructure became outdated and the advancement wasn't quite as graceful like telecom companies who could make an outright profit during an upgrade by laying down some fiber and ripping out and selling all of their old copper. They do have a counterpart in many cases of 'burn natural gas instead to save money and do it cleaner'.

Australia's doubling down on coal production, with a new mine approved in the Galilee Basin. Go figure.

https://www.channel4.com/news/how-coal-mining-threatens-aust...

Ironically outcomes like this mostly vindicate the regressives. Any society who listened to the environmentalists; phased out fossil fuels and committed to renewables in the late 90s or 2000s would have shot themselves in the foot for nothing. The further renewables prices drop, the more foolish committing to them early looks.

Gas prices is a different issue to that though.

We might have prevented a fair bit of environmental damage in that time, even if we're just talking spills from deep water rigs.

Price drops come from scale so if we scaled sooner the prices might have dropped sooner. It's impossible to say for sure though.

Wrong. People commiting to renewables early drive and support the market, which overtime drives down prices due to more and more people improving the tech and manufacturing process, which is what leads to the prices to come down.

Possibly that could have been done in a controlled and experimental fashion rather than condemning the infrastructure of entire countries to costing twice, thrice or more?

Anyway the point stands. It isn't fair but the people who avoided being involved are going to be much, much better off than those that did.

>infrastructure of entire countries to costing twice, thrice or more

Citation needed.

>the people who avoided being involved are going to be much, much better off than those that did

Even if this was true, it does not "vindicate the regressives". We can't all expect to be able to mooch off someone else all the time.

It does vindicate those people who were calling for a tax on the externalities of fossil fuels though.

This was on the front page of HN just the other day - https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/11/france-spent-less-on-n... . And nuclear isn't even as cheap to set up as a fossil fuel supply chain.

> We can't all expect to be able to mooch off someone else all the time.

For technological improvements we actually can. In a way it is the norm. Most technologies start small somewhere, get economic, then scale up (albeit because they had no other choice).

> It does vindicate those people who were calling for a tax on the externalities of fossil fuels though.

Are these plants closing because of a tax on externalities? The article suggests the alternatives are cheaper in their own right. If coal plants become uneconomic without a somewhat artificial sin tax then the sin tax proponents aren't vindicated. They would be making an inevitable transition more expensive.

Prices for renewables are dropping today precisely because there was a push for them in the 90s and 2000s. These shifts don't happen overnight.

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