re: #228 Kosh’s Shadow

What’s the rest, then? This adds up to 75%
A show on trains said that 60% of the electricity in the US is made by coal.
Maybe not the best source, though.

The other 25% is oil. that, BTW, is down from 1970, as is hydro and nuclear.

Oil-fired power plants accounted for 35% of U.S. electric generation in 1970, and nuclear and hydroelectric were about 12.5% and 15% respectively. Coal, which had been 80% in 1950, was seen as being on its way out, being superseded by “clean” nuclear and hydro, with the oil-fire plants being on call as a backup for emergencies. (I’m serious- U.S. Department of Defense Power Generation Security Program, 1969.)

Then the environmentalists weighed in.

Within a decade, Jimmy Carter had put a freeze on new nuclear plants that remains in force to this day. By the 1990s, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, was ordering hydro dams across the country dismantled at the behest of the Sierra Club, to “Make Rivers Wild Again”. (Said program continued under Bush- G-d only knows why.) And just as no new oil refineries have been built in the U.S. since 1978, no new oil-fire power plants have been either, and as older plants have aged, they have been dismantled. All to please the enviros; never mind that, like the Red Queen, they are essentially impossible to placate.

The punch line is, that our need for electric power continued to increase, as our society went “high-tech”. The consequences for the environment were horrific- as the only way to deal with the greater demands was to build coal-fire powerplants. even some other types of plants were converted- davis-Besse, here in OH, was begun as a nucvlear plant in 1974, but (after what amounted to threats of “we’ll blow it up” from Greenpeace) it was completed as a ‘clean coal” plant a decade later, courtesy of a Democratic governor and som serious arm-twisting by both the enviros- and the UMW.

This is the “alliance that dare not speak its name”. The enviros may dream of a “pristine” world powered by Holy Wind and Sun, but so far they haven’t been able to get it to work. (News flash; they won’t, either. The laws of physics get in the way.) So, to power their toys, the only alternative is coal, which has to be mined, throws crap into the air (or, in a “clean coal” plant with washdown scrubbers like D-B, the nearest river), and also generates serious piles of “tailings” wherever mined. (Fun fact; a typical coal mine tailing pile generates more “released” radiation every year than a typical nuclear power plant, due to radon release from the rock waste. Just thought you should know.)

There’s a reason we still build coal-fired power plants in this country, instead of nuclear or hydroelectric plants; three, really.

Called “politicians’ timidity”, “UMW cupidity”…. and “environmentalist stupidity”.

cheers

eon