10 ms·

I wonder what would happen if we spent the same $/KWh on making coal safe, as we do on nuclear?

• hristov 15y ago
  We spend shitloads of money on trying to make coal safe. If you listen carefully to budget proposals there are always a lot of money allocated on "clean coal" research. Unfortunately, it all goes nowhere because there is no way to make it safe. Burning stuff is an old and well understood process, there is just no way to burn stuff in a radically different way. You can use filters of course but the coal pollutants are so small and the smoke is so much filtering gets too expensive. Coal plants do have filters but they do not catch many of the thousands of pollutants that result from burning coal. And filtering cannot take away the CO2 gas. So our only option is to trap the gas underground, which is pretty much impossible. Thus, safe coal becomes a mirage that is always a couple of years away but you can never get to. It is clear that we spend less money on safe coal than we do on nuclear. Nuclear receives enormous amounts of subsidies. Most of the budget of the DoE is devoted to nuclear in one way or another. But it is pretty clear that even if we spent more money on coal it would not get us anywhere.