This reduced the immediate problem of inhaling soot, but generated the new problem of acid rain over large areas of the industrialized world. Then we began to make our smokestacks taller, so that pollution plumes would be lofted higher and distributed more broadly downwind of power plants. First, we moved away from burning coal inside our homes, concentrating the production of soot into a few large power plants and moving the soot plumes outside of cities. In the developed world, we have been working on ever cleaner ways to burn coal since the first coal-fired generator began running in England back in the late 1800s. Merely injecting CO2 underground is no guarantee that the gas will stay put. Science correspondent Miles O’Brien joins Judy Woodruff to take a closer look at a carbon capture system at one of the largest coal power plants in the country and the obstacles stopping them from collecting more. Throughout the world, many people still burn coal inside their own homes, paying the cost of cooking and heating with coal by breathing in the associated soot and sulfur. When we burn coal, we undo this long-term sequestration, producing soot and volatile gases that pollute our atmosphere alongside the energy. Wetlands are nature’s water filtration systems, so they capture many contaminants - and those ancient wetlands were also quite good at concentrating trace and toxic elements. Unfortunately, those ancient wetland plants and microbes didn’t just concentrate carbon, they also accumulated every kind of element in their tissues. The energy stored in coal was originally captured through plant photosynthesis in the swamps of the Carboniferous period, 300 million years ago. The phrase ‘clean coal’ appears regularly in the news and in the speeches of our politicians, but what does it mean?Ĭoal is basically the fossilized mud of ancient swamps and bogs.
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