Trump seeks to prop up coal (and restart coal fired plants) to feed AI power demand

[Zincwarrior]

The coal-fired plant in Gentry, Arkansas, never stopped using coal.

Arkansas...

 

[Correll]

If we are paying miners $70 per hour, people will cry and complain that's too much and is causing the price to go up. This is america where we say " please work hard but we don't want to pay you".

This makes no sense. Where did you get that number and why do you think people will care what the wages of the workers are?

 

[Stryder50]

Going technical to offset the rampant ignorance here may be futile, but here's a try;

First, there are numerous methods of mining coal and most and more recent are above-ground, pit types.
Excerpt;
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Coal mining is the process of extracting coal from the ground or from a mine. Coal is valued for its energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from iron ore and for cement production. In the United Kingdom and South Africa, a coal mine and its structures are a colliery, a coal mine is called a "pit", and above-ground mining structures are referred to as a "pit head". In Australia, "colliery" generally refers to an underground coal mine.

Coal mining has had many developments in recent years, from the early days of men tunneling, digging, and manually extracting the coal on carts to large open-cut and longwall mines. Mining at this scale requires the use of draglines, trucks, conveyors, hydraulic jacks, and shearers.
....

Coal mining - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

................................
After the environmental impact of the mining methods used, the next major issue with coal use was the sulfur dioxide (SO2) in the smoke~flue from combustion. For over a century now there has been a few methods of removing the sulfur dioxide, SO2, which combines with water vapor in the atmosphere to produce sulfuric acid = 'acid rain'. These methods are referred to as Flue Gas Desulfurization - FGD.
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Flue-gas desulfurization (FGD) is a set of technologies used to remove sulfur dioxide (SO2) from exhaust flue gases of fossil-fuel power plants, and from the emissions of other sulfur oxide emitting processes such as waste incineration, petroleum refineries, cement and lime kilns.

Methods​

Since stringent environmental regulations limiting SO2 emissions have been enacted in many countries, SO2 is being removed from flue gases by a variety of methods. Common methods used:

• Wet scrubbing using a slurry of alkaline sorbent, usually limestone or lime, or seawater to scrub gases;
• Spray-dry scrubbing using similar sorbent slurries;
• Wet sulfuric acid process recovering sulfur in the form of commercial quality sulfuric acid;
• SNOX Flue gas desulfurization removes sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulates from flue gases;
• Dry sorbent injection systems that introduce powdered hydrated lime (or other sorbent material) into exhaust ducts to eliminate SO2 and SO3 from process emissions.
• 
  
• <a href="Flue-gas desulfurization - Wikipedia"><span>[</span>1<span>]</span></a>

For a typical coal-fired power station, flue-gas desulfurization (FGD) may remove 90 per cent or more of the SO2 in the flue gases. (Actually some systems have gotten up to the 97-98% range.)
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Flue-gas desulfurization - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

<a href="Flue-gas desulfurization - Wikipedia"><span>[</span>2<span>]</span></a>

 

[toobfreak]

If the Left would have promoted nuclear, which is the only feasible noncarbon energy source available, these things could have been started 4 years ago, but no because the Left thinks nuclear is yucky.

Nuclear is very safe now. All that can go wrong are two highly improbable mistakes.

1. Allow the pile to superheat through a loss of coolant until you have a meltdown.
2. Stupidly design the control circuitry to be run through the same air shaft duct-work as the primary system, so that in the event of an emergency, a single fire can take out both the primary and backup.

These are exactly the two mistakes we have already made and learned dearly from to be mindful never to allow them to happen again. The second is a matter of simple planning; the former is just a matter of having a modern control system where it is no longer possible to initiate the circumstances which would terminate the cooling of the reactor.

The main issue to me is storage of waste. In the future, I think an ideal disposal would be to launch the waste into the Sun.