Word: coal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...present. In Seville, a conservative coalition threw the Expo-promoting Socialists out of city hall last spring. "The state wastes money building pharaonic bridges and highways," says new Mayor Alejandro Rojas Marcos. "But it neglects schools, drug problems and employment." In recent months wildcat strikes shut down Asturias coal mines; an eight-week bus-driver walkout crippled Madrid; Basque steel workers fired homemade rockets at police, and La Mancha farmers blocked the roads with tractors. On May 28, a third of the country's workers joined in a general strike, bringing to 50 million the number of working hours lost...
...also the decade of "los butiful," Spanish jet-setters who made fortunes in banking and speculation. But in 1992 a new sort of hero set a bonfire to those vanities. This spring 470 coal miners arrived in Madrid after marching more than 300 miles from Leon in the north to protest layoffs. Villagers on the harsh Castillian plateau turned out to applaud and even sing to them; television stations filmed the blisters on their feet. "If they import Polish coal, our valley will die," said Eugenio Carpintero, 32, swigging wine from a leather pouch on a blustery afternoon. Outside...
There are some other distant prospects. Poland, a country rich in dirty coal, sent a team to Syracuse in February to explore a deal with Otisca. They took a lot of notes and seemed interested, says Smith, but have yet to follow up. A representative of Pakistan has made inquiries. Markets in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have a lot of potential but not much prospect of immediate payoff. For Smith, who hasn't had a paycheck in two years, that's important...
...that Otisca was born at the wrong time in the wrong place. Other technologies and energy sources may leapfrog over the concept of a precleaned coal slurry. In that case, the Jamesville plant, Doug Keller and Clay Smith will be a brief, forgotten chapter in American industrial and environmental history. That would not be atypical. Nine out of 10 inventors never see a penny from their ideas. Far fewer get to be Henry Fords or Thomas Watsons...
...electric-energy field, regulatory policies have all but stifled creativity. Utilities, says Jack Siegel, the doe's coal expert, "are not rewarded for the successful risks they take, but if they take a risk that fails, they are penalized. It's lose-lose." And yet, according to the Kessler Exchange, a small-business resource based in California, the only federal program specifically oriented toward the needs of independent inventors is the doe's Energy-Related Inventions Program, a product of the 1974 Energy Act. To be sure, energy companies take advantage of the limited governmental incentives to experiment...