Nuke Tsunami Makes Clean Coal Look Better

Yes, coal and nuclear is needed and gas for peak periods. The knee-jerk reactions to nuclear accidents, while understandable, isn’t warranted. Does anyone really believe that nuclear power will go through eternity without a very serious disaster or two? You live (most of us) and you learn. To everything, there is a cost. When things like Fukushima occur, we figure out what went wrong and why. (I don’t believe we’re getting very good information from there, yet.) And then you takes steps to correct it. I fully expect this to be the path the Japanese will take. If we’re wise, we’ll learn through others’ mistakes without having to repeat them here.

Seriously? Re-evaluating? Antiquated nuclear plants in the way of an unprecedented catastrophy and here we are a week later worried about tiny radiation leaks? Yes the public paranoia caused them to try to vent the plants in a stupid manner, but the fact that 3/4 of the nuclear plants, the newer ones, are still running doesn’t tell you anything? which of the other power sources you site would do as well? would a “clean coal” plant have survived? Would the operators still be alive?
Like three mile island this incident is actually evidence of nuclear safety. The very slow nature of a nuclear accident allows the media to scream for weeks taking advantage of irrational fears. In a fossil fuel plant, the plants destruction kills everyone around instantly, a much less enduring story.
We have what? 25,000 dead? and millions homeless and all we are doing is talking about tiny radiation doses and doing our best to scare people
Wikipedia is once again a less than reliable source.

In my opinion we don’t have a lack of options with regard to electric energy sources. What we have is a lack of resolve to do anything. My suggestion is to shut down all electricity generating plants for 1 week next January. After shivering in the dark for a week people will be demanding new power plants of any and all types.
Well I wouldn’t really do that but I think it would take something like that to get the ball rolling.

Sorry Ira, I am not disagreeing with your points, but rather with giving in to the publics misunderstandings.

You gotta read this:
High Efficiency Nuclear Power Plants Using Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor Technology
http://embeddedlab.csuohio.edu/PowerGroup/Papers/Liquid%20Fluoride%20Thorium%20Reactor%20Technology.pdf
In theory they can get 50% conversion of thermal energy to electricity. 50%! And the fuel is ordinary old Thorium, of which there is enough to power reactors for thousands of years, and it’s a waste product of all kinds of mining opperations. Compared to traditional nuclear a tiny amount of waste is produced and it’s only dangerous for 300 years, not 10,000. It is physically impossible for the plant to melt down, “negative temperature coefficient of reactivity,” basically means that if the power goes out the system naturally cools off.
Seriously, LFTR’s are Mr. Fusion.

“With the benefit of 20:20 hindsight, it is clear that the backup generators should have been sited above above the maximum flooding level or otherwise protected from water damage. ”
Exactly right. The backup systems and even the used fuel storage needs to be hardened against outage. This is something that can and should be done right now.
Further we should replace reactors that are nearing EOL with gen III and gen III+ reactors. We need leadership to make this happen. Sadly we have virtually no pro nuclear power leadership in government.

I recommend the daily coverage of Fukushima by Lewis Page.
I wonder what the typical AGW alarmist is saying about the “meltdown”?
http://search.theregister.co.uk/?author=Lewis%20Page

The tsunami is most dangerous

“Jeremy says:
March 18, 2011 at 7:38 am
Actually, this Nuclear problem in Japan as a result of the earthquake makes me feel a lot better about Nuclear.”
I agree with jeremy – in fact it is quite amazing how well the 1960s reactors at Fukushima have stood up.
This “nuclear disaster” will most likely underwhelm the fearmongering hype – and never be reported as underwhelming…
Tsunami dead = thousands, fukushima dead = 0.

I would like people to stop and think about the consequences of half a dozen nutcases, with no regard for their own or other peoples lives, gaining control of a nuclear power plant.
A number of these plants are run by private companies where the profit motive rules.
Where does security and safety feature in this set up?
You might say that the site could be highly regulated.
Will the company do the minimum to pass these regulations or spend at a higher level than the minimum requires.
Going by past example will only reassure the most complacent and wishful thinkers .

The Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear incident was due to a CATASTROPIC NATURAL DISASTER. I doubt that any major utility based on Japan’s shoreline is Tsunami proof.
What we are clearly dealing with is the FEAR OF RADIATION, not the actual radiation exposure itself. That is a human failing not a system engineering failure.
Nuclear has to be part of the energy mix, simply has to. We have to accept that risk, and attempt to minimise it.

Regarding comments in the article about the nuclear waste problem, GE has a
new generation of reactor called PRISM (a molten salt type of reactor) which can be fueled by the plutonium waste we are now producing at older generation plants, and it produces very little waste of its own. As an MSR reactor, it also addresses many of the nuclear reactor safety problems that everyone is so hyper about (like LFTR).
As I understand it, GE is currently in the process of trying to get the PRISM licenced with the NRC. The sooner it does this, the better. The LFTR and PRISM reactors are the types we should be focusing on building in the future.
http://nuclearstreet.com/nuclear_power_industry_news/b/nuclear_power_news/archive/2010/01/20/under-the-hood-with-duncan-williams-ge-hitachi-prism-reactor-01201.aspx

Quote ‘In Fukushima, there has been a partial meltdown of some of the cores, release of some radioactive gases into the atmosphere, and there remains a real risk of further radioactive material spewing over the surrounding countryside’
Am I missing something? The only meltdown, partial or otherwise, that I am aware of was in the reporting from an hysterical MSM media, which I quickly learned was not the best source for considered rational information.
As others above have commented, the planned safety controls worked effectively considering the exceptional circumstances.

“A 30 ft tsunami should make it clear that there is no such a thing as a maximum flooding level.”
There is if you build inland. They put these plants near the ocean because of the water availability. In hindsight it might have been better to build them inland, behind large berms and pipe in the water.

Fred from Canuckistan says:
March 18, 2011 at 8:29 am
“The idea of using the warmed water and CO2 from burning coal to generate electricity as the inputs to industrial scale green houses growing massive amounts of food is so much more appealing than using massive amounts of energy to grow food so that this can be turned into inferior quality fuel for automobiles. Real sustainability.”
Hear here!!! Perhaps there is such a thing as a free lunch.
I can’t understand why we let so much low grade heat escape to space when, with a bit of joined-up thinking and good planning, it can be put to so many productive uses – food production included. Perhaps as energy costs continue to escalate this will start to happen.

Well, I am not really taken in by this ‘clean’ coal thingy. All I know is that coal is much safer than nukes and that, although we have plants and organisms that thrive on CO2, mother nature hasn’t come up with anything that would chew on radioactive waste that will remain stored some place on the face of the planet for a thousand generations. Coal is also a much cheaper source of energy than nukes.

For a different perspective.
Interesting reading, but at least scroll down to the table showing mining deaths & injuries in the US over the years. For 2006-2007, 69 deaths and 11,800 injuries.
And last month a gas line explosion in Allentown, PA killed 5 people.
Life is dangerous. And so far, nuclear seems to be less dangerous than most forms of energy.

Many postings and links
on nukes now arise from
cloaked, dubious
shill sources.
http://geniusnow.com/2011/03/15/the-strange-case-of-josef-oehmen/

Bryan says:
March 18, 2011 at 8:45 am
I would like people to stop and think about the consequences of half a dozen nutcases, with no regard for their own or other peoples lives, gaining control of a nuclear power plant.
A friend of mine got a job as a security guard at a nuclear plant. He’s a combat decorated ex-marine. It took him 6 months to clear the screening process. Your hypothetical 1/2 dozen nutcases will all die from a single gunshot wound to the head.

While the game is not over, the score at the moment appears to be Hysteria 14, Nuclear: 0 as 14 patients die when their staff abandons them at a hospital. The story is available at The Age, which is a newspaper in Australia.

ShrNfr says:
March 18, 2011 at 10:57 am

found it…
http://www.theage.com.au/world/elderly-left-to-die-in-hospital-20110318-1c0nd.html
Very sad, very much the media’s fault, imo. Japanese media may not be over-hyping it as the world media is, but as far as I can see they’re not doing any better job presenting worthwhile facts to the public.

Alec Rawls says:
March 18, 2011 at 11:06 am
In the eco-leftist newspeak that spawned it, “clean coal” means that the CO2 is not exhausted into the atmosphere.
Clean coal is a term coined by the coal industry to describe coal fired plants that have few emissions other the CO2 and reduced CO2 emissions per MWh due to higher efficiencies.

Tom T
“Maybe power plants can be made to withstand a 10 earthquake and 50 ft tsunami, but no matter what something bigger, unforeseen could come along.”
How do you ever bring youself to drive across a bridge?

Well, I’ll say this. Irrational fear has certainly improved the bottom line of those selling anti-rad suits, counters, gas masks, and iodide on the Left Coast of the USA. Even the drug dealers are getting into the business and selling iodide? on the street. Probably took a page from the days of LSD and are doping sugar cubes with iodine.

@Phil’s Dad It was my understanding that they had a non-nuclear fatality in one of the explosions, but with the quality and quantity of news, I could be wrong. They certainly had deaths earlier that were related to nuclear when the idiots sent guys to mix fuel by hand, and then covered it up.

After the hysteria about Japan has died down, I think the incident will actually be good for nuclear’s reputation. One of the worst conceivable accidents will have happened, but (probably) only a handful of people will have died, a few more will have got radiation related illnesses, but there will have been no great disaster.

Ira –
(1) Correction required, I suspect. You say “Of course, at 8.9 or 9.1, this was over 100 times more powerful an earthquake than the 7.0 for which the system was apparently designed.” However, each order of magnitude for quakes represents an increase of 32. A magnitude 8.0 is 32 times a 7.0, and a magnitude 9.0 is 32 times an 8.0. Therefore a 9.0 is 1,000 times a 7.0 (or more precisely 1,024 times), not 100 times.
(2) Tsunami risk is generally underestimated in the world, probably because of the long time between major tsunamis. For example, the great Lisbon quake in 1755 was somewhere offshore (similar to the recent Japan quake) and produced a tsunami which was perhaps 10m high in Portugal and possibly as high as 20m in North Africa. How many countries affected by that tsunami now take any form of precaution?

Those promoting either nuclear power or clean coal are doing it with the thought that this will reduce the carbon dioxide “pollution” of our atmosphere which is sure to lead to climate catastrophe. That is asinine because carbon dioxide is not causing any warming and has not been responsible for any at anytime for the last century. If you look at the temperature history of the last 100 years you will see this: from 1910 to 1940 there was a steady temperature increase that came to an end with World War II. Bjorn Lomborg of all people, a believer in anthropogenic global warming, demonstrated that it can be attributed to sunspot cycle influence which is part of coming out of the Little Ice Age (see his figure 146 in the Skeptical Environmentalist). This is just one reason why the warmists hate him. The other reason is that he advocates a moderate, common-sense approach to global warming that is anathema to the alarmist crowd. But this early twentieth century warming was followed by very slight cooling that is recorded from the forties to the seventies. This, too, follows from his graph of sunspot cycle influences. Where his graph and current temperature part company is in the eighties and nineties where the temperature shoots up but his graph is still horizontal. But it turns out that this sudden upsurge of warming in the eighties and nineties is faked and the graph’s predictions are right. Satellites that have been recording global temperature for the last thirty one years simply cannot see this so-called “late twentieth century warming.“ What they do see in this time slot is a temperature oscillation, up and down by half a degree for almost twenty years while the mean temperature remains unchanged. And these temperature oscillations correlate with real events – the alternation of warm El Nino and cool La Nina periods in the Pacific that have a global climate influence. Comparing these satellite temperatures with temperatures reported by NASA, NOAA, and the Met Office shows that all three have been falsified to show a non-existent warming. If you look at the entire thirty one year record of satellite measurements you realize that this lack of warming is not an exception but the rule. It turns out that the only global warming during this entire period was a short stretch that started with the 1998 super El Nino, raised global temperature by a third of a degree, and then came to a stop in 2002. The cause of this step change was oceanic, a super El Nino and its aftermath, and not anthropogenic. What followed was a six year warm period I call the twenty-first century high that ended with the 2008 La Nina cooling. A third of a degree does not sound like much but it is fully half of what has been attributed to the entire twentieth century. This, and not some greenhouse effect is the cause of the very warm first decade of our century. The oscillatory temperatures that were interrupted by the 1998 super El Nino returned with the 2008 La Nina and will be our climate future. The 2008 La Nina has already been followed by the 2010 El Nino and we are now half way through the next La Nina that came after that. The El Nino phenomenon has been with us since the Panamanian Seaway closed and is likely to outlast the human race. Before closing I also want to mention Arctic warming. First, it is real. Second, it is not global. Third, it is not a greenhouse warming but is caused by warm Atlantic currents that have been entering the Arctic for more than a hundred years. The absence of any carbon dioxide warming in this entire climate sequence we reviewed is what one would expect from the work of Ferenc Miskolczi. Using the NOAA weather balloon database that goes back to 1948 he determined that the global annual infrared optical thickness of the atmosphere has remained unchanged for 61 years, with a value of 1.87. This means that the transparency of the atmosphere to heat radiation that carbon dioxide absorbs has not changed despite constant addition of carbon dioxide through all these years. To put it in other words: the greenhouse absorption signature of the added carbon dioxide is simply missing. This is a simple empirical observation that tells us how the real world is and and overrides any calculations from theory. It is in full accord with the absence of any greenhouse warming in the satellite record. No absorption, no greenhouse effect, case closed. To learn the full story read “What Warming?” available on Amazon.com.

If this Bloomberg article is correct, then Japan largely has only itself to blame for the current nuclear plant crisis. Very interesting reading:
http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aFWC3RYALjeI&pos=12

“Hager says:
March 18, 2011 at 11:18 am
As the Ira hinted the probability that all four plants, all four backup generators and the national grid would go down at the same time produces a failure scenario with an extremely low almost non existent probability.”
Don’t forget they had battery backups that ran for 8 hrs. It took 3 strikes.
1)The earthquake triggered and automatic shutdown and knocked out off-site power.
2)The tsunami was higher than the 6 m wall protecting the diesel generators that had been working, so they were knocked out when it hit. Switch to battery backup…
3)Infrastructure damage and general chaos prevented the timely restoration of off-site power or the repair/replacement of on-site power within the 8 hrs the battery backups were running.
They had a 3-layered “defense”, but all three lines were broken.

Ira, The Register has the right take on foolishness like your post:

Nothing else in the quake-stricken area has come through anything like as well as the nuclear power stations, or with so little harm to the population. All other forms of infrastructure – transport, housing, industries – have failed the people in and around them comprehensively, leading to deaths most probably in the tens of thousands. Fires, explosions and tank/pipeline ruptures all across the region will have done incalculably more environmental damage, distributed hugely greater amounts of carcinogens than Fukushima Daiichi – which has so far emitted almost nothing but radioactive steam (which becomes non-radioactive within minutes of being generated).
And yet nobody will say after this: “don’t build roads; don’t build towns; don’t build ships or chemical plants or oil refineries or railways”. That would be ridiculous, of course, even though having all those things has actually led to terrible loss of life, destruction and pollution in the quake’s wake.
But far and away more ridiculously, a lot of people are already saying that Fukushima with its probable zero consequences means that no new nuclear powerplants should ever be built again. ®
Personal bootnote
As one who earns his living in the media these days, I can only apologise on behalf of my profession for the unbelievable levels of fear and misinformation purveyed this week. I have never been so ashamed to call myself a journalist.

The pros and cons should include the process of extraction for each. There are the theoretical health risks, and then there’s what occurs in practice. Every mine can be constructed to pose a theoretically minimal level of health risks, but how often does that actually happen?
I think this would tip the evaluation towards a preference for coal in the modern era. With more development and education nuclear would eventually win out, but I don’t think we’re there yet.

Stories of ‘remote control’ of electricity consumption on a need-to-use basis might prove useful if they used it to switch OFF the electricity supply of anyone that actively objected to methods of production.

Is there any real problem with dropping solid radioactive waste (appropriately encased) into a deep Pacific trench? This would leave it far out of the food chain and well shielded from the surface, and eventually subduction currents would actually draw it into the earth’s interior.
(Even if perfectly safe, the Japan trench might be too politically sensitive, but why not the Marianas Trench, for example?)

The 1979 movie The China Syndrome dramatized a hypothetical, catastrophic core meltdown, where the molten material burns through the bottom of the containment vessel and melts partway through the crust of the earth.

In Japan and China, they call this the America Syndrome! 😉
A few weeks ago, Mike Smith called for thorium reactors as being safer than conventional ones. I’d like to see a post on them some day.

To answer my own question above, trench disposal has been proposed and apparently makes sense, but is currently prohibited by international agreements:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_Deep
Perhaps the current crisis might prompt re-evaluation of these agreements.

What we need to do is get these old plants decommissioned and replaced with new ones. It is like looking at head on collision with a Corvair and saying we need to stop producing cars. Maybe you just need to get the unsafe ones out of operation.

1. Energy drives the economy.
2. Fossil fuels are cheapest source of energy.
3. CO2 is an unproven danger.
4. Nuclear energy is complicated with known risks.
5. The world economy is in a severe recession and needs cheap energy to recover.
The problem is simple. All we need are politicians who can do simple problems.
I care not what party they subscribe to. I care not what they “believe in”. Until they understand, I will reserve my support and my vote at election time.

The only thing we’ve learned from the Japanese reactor problems is that you should not build below the water line, and you should not under-estimate where that water line will be over the life of the installation.
Simple questions, simple answers:
1) What can create a cooling failure
* If you lose power to the pumps the reactors and spent fuel pools will melt.
2) What can cause loss of power to the pumps?
* A tsunami.
3) Is a tsunami a realistic threat?
* Trick question? No sh*t, Sherlock, this isn’t Kansas!
4) The fuel rods in the spent fuel pools are placed with great care to maximize storage and to minimize nuclear reaction. Is it possible in a large earthquake for these rods to be displaced in such a way that increased reaction is likely? The water in the pool is purified. Is it possible for contaminated water – sea water, specifically, to increase reactive activity?
* What’s that siren? Whoa – gotta go, bud!

Precautionary principle logic fail number… 192094810381. Or so.

*edit – “weather extremes” should read “tectonic extremes”.

If CO2 is responsible for global warming and if that warming imposes net costs on society, then imposing a Pigovian tax at a rate per ton that is equal to the harm per ton is the economically efficient solution to the problem.
If it is eventually proven that CO2 is not causing significant warming, or if the warming it causes generates a net benefit to society the same rules of logic apply. This leaves only the positive component of the CO2 emmisions.
If, at the margin, CO2 emissions contribute positively to agricultural productivity then the economically efficient solution would be Pigovian tax calculated exactly the same way as it would be in the case where CO2 emissions were assumed to be harmful. This, of course yields a negative tax, or subsidy. We may be saying goodbye to all the chatter about “Cap and Trade”, and fighting over the design of a new “Burn and Earn” program. The Chinese would be selling turnkey coal fired plants like hotcakes. I wonder if they still make coal furnaces for home use.

I have 2 main concerns about nuclear reactors/sites:
1.) The regulatory agencies seem to bend over backwards over repeated safety violations. There, there…no need to worry…we’ll just be back in 6 months and everything will be fine & dandy.
2.) Spent fuel rods lying about the globe in pools of water. Accidents looking for a place to happen.
Clean up the act, and nuclear could be the golden boy of energy. Keep shoving the problem down the road and there will be more accidents and uninhabitable lands.

My two cents: nuclear power is too expensive, too dangerous, and creates a toxic spent fuel legacy for future generations to deal with. They will not thank us for this. We knew better, as a civilization, and we did not do better.
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/reconsider-nuclear-power-is-it-ever.html
No earthquake has EVER caused a fossil fuel power plant to emit dangerous radioactivity. Floods put their fires out. Tsunamis do also.
Natural gas power plants beat all others, hands down, every time. The power produced for the dollar spent to build is far better, and the power produced per unit of fuel consumed is far, far better (59 percent for natural gas, vs 33 percent for nukes).
Nukes also use far more cooling water (that’s a river, mostly), even when located on the coast (like South Texas Nuclear Power Plant in Texas) which uses Colorado River water (and people upstream CANNOT take it) even though it is right on the coast.
For every unit of power produced, a nuke requires at least two units of cooling. So, for 1000 MW of electricity, 2000 MW of heat goes into the river. Or into a cooling tower. But, for a natural gas fired plant of 1000 MW, only about 800 MW of heat goes into the river or cooling tower. That’s about 2.5-to-1 ratio. Saves river water for more productive uses, like drinking or farming.

From this NHK report, it looks like the fuel for the diesel generators was in tanks at the waterfront. The tanks were displaced some 300 metres inland by the tsunami.
A similar fate may have been suffered by the hydrogen burner. This (according to several reports that I’ve read) was gas-fired (CNG or LPG). A flame is used to ignite hydrogen to burn it continuously. The alternative is to use e.g. a spark plug to ignite hydrogen gas collecting in a holding tube (aka “cannon”), but that results in noisy, energetic explosions on a frequent basis. And the mutant turtles in the cooling ponds wouldn’t be able to sleep at all. 😉
Diesel engines can operate submerged. They only need to be able to breathe air, get fuel and to exhaust combustion products. Fresh air can be supplied by a tall “snorkel” and the exhaust vented through a stack.
Having provisions for an off-site generator to be shipped in as needed, relies on the necessary infrastructure still being intact. The tsunami left no roads or rail intact. Bringing one in by ship would be very risky because a tsunami from an after-shock, especially once it’s docked.
A stationary off-site generator requires substantial infrastructure and the transmission line is the most-volnerable. Towers are vulnerable to both earthquake and tsunami. Buried lines are directly susceptible to the geophysical dislocation that is usual in an earthquake.
IAEA, NISA, TEPCO and every other serious party are concerned with improving the resilience of existing and future plant under such extreme events. But right now, the focus is on management of the crisis to make it controllable. That, in a background of surrounding infrastructure having been utterly devatated by the tsunami, displacing hundreds of thousands of people, leaving them with little shelter, clean water, food or warmth.
I have enough patience to wait until those people at real risk from the environment are suitably accommodated and employed while they clean up the big mess of the tsunami and to rebuild the region; before actions are taken at other nuclear plants to make them more resilient, should there be a plausible risk. But to determine those actions, the situation must first be controllable so that investigators can collect data and determine what actually failed and why it failed.
Suggestions that the reactors shouldn’t be built in an earthquake-prone zone don’t take into account that the energy-hungry nation of Japan is entirely in such a zone; or perhaps they do take it into account, wishing for the Japanese to go back to living in paper houses and lighting their lives with lanterns; whilst whittling away on pieces of wood to make trinkets to sell to passing traders.
The reality is that Japan is a small country, with a large population whose life depends on consuming energy of high quality; i.e. density, availability and security.
Those suggesting that the plants be constructed inland need to look at the practicalities and the consequences if a tsunami struck. The nature of the pipeline to supply and to return water from the heat exchangers requires large amounts of complex machinery and operational energy that increases sharply with the distance and the altitude.
Regarding the evacuation of US citizens: I was gobsmacked when I saw the report on TV … evacuation from Japan to … Taiwan. To what end? To avoid the inconvenience of rolling blackouts until enough generating capacity can be brought back online?

John R;
For those who don’t know the significance of the heavy water moderation comment:
“moderation” slows emitted neutrons enough to allow capture and thus cause further fission of the fuel. If the containment breaks and the H.W. drains out, the reaction stops because the fast neutrons go right past the fuel, and the system is “shut down”.
That said, all liquid-cooled and moderated reactors have plumbing issues. The temptation to run them past their “due date” should be resisted vigorously, as degraded pipes are no joke.

Oak Ridge National Laboratories has an analysis of coal burning. U and Th are significant constitutents of coal. The estimate that each coal-fired plant burns 5 tons of U and 13 tons of Th each year. We have spread the equivalent of several reactor loads of radioactive isotopes all over the world simply by burning coal.
Five percent of ash goes right out the stack as fly-ash. This glassy material is quite radioactive. It is in the 6 to 10 µm range, exactly the right size to be breathed deeply into the lungs and stay there. That is the preferred size of pharmaceutical aerosol droplets. Ordinarily there is little risk from alpha radiation since the skin is sufficient protection. When the ash particles sit directly on the epithelium, this sensitive tissue is diretly irradiated with short range, but powerful radiation.
About 50% of ash is collected and used in paint, wallboard and metal fabrication. These radionuclides and their decay products are potentially a significant source of domestic irradiation, since radon is a product of the decay series, and a significant cause of lung cancer. The recent discovery of radioactive chinese wallboard illustrates the severity of the problem.
The remaining ash goes into landfills and can contaminate groundwater. Coal is known to be a source of sulfur, that when burnt, becomes SO2 which transforms under the action of sunlight, ozone and water to produce H2SO4. It falls as acid rain. Coal also is the source of about 40% of mercury contamination.
Clean coal? I don’t think so. I’ll take nuclear power any day.

FYI: The clean coal plant SoCo is building in Ms has green groups suing to stop it. It’s not about the environment. It’s about socialists seizing a mantra to try and enslave the world.