Word: smokestacks
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...tall smokestack and the industrial clanking of conveyors in Moscow, Idaho, may look and sound ominously anti-ecological, but visitors' senses are quickly jolted by a fresh aroma reminiscent of a walk-in cedar closet. It is indeed red cedar: tons of chips discarded by a timber mill and trucked in to fuel the University of Idaho's steam plant in the town of Moscow (population roughly 23,000). Thermal biomass provides over 80% of heat and hot water to the campus of nearly 11,000 students. Wood-fueled steam also powers five of the eight chiller units that cool...
...December 22, 2008, a retaining wall at a landfill that stored fly ash from a Kingston, Tennessee, coal-fired power plant ruptured. Fly ash, a toxic byproduct of the coal-burning process, is separated from emissions by smokestack scrubbers, mixed with water, and stored in landfills. Enough slurry to fill 1,700 Olympic-sized swimming pools was dumped onto nearby homes and in tributaries of the Tennessee River. The accident killed millions of fish, destroyed 300 acres of property, and badly contaminated local water sources. The Tennessee Valley Authority estimates that the spill will require a multi-year, billion-dollar...
...Admittedly, there are reasonable arguments to be made in favor of the continued use of coal. It is cheap, abundant, and domestically produced. Smokestack scrubbers remove most of the pollutants in coal before they can be emitted into the atmosphere. The federal government requires mining companies to restore exhausted mines to their former natural state. Electric utilities also claim that discoveries in coal gasification (the production of synthetic natural gas from coal) and carbon sequestration will dramatically reduce resultant greenhouse- gas emissions, rendering coal an ideal fuel for a post-cap-and-trade future...
Dead zones are created when excess nitrogen and other pollutants in ocean water promote large blooms of algae and phytoplankton on the surface. The nitrogen gets there in a couple of ways: through river water filled with fertilizer from farm runoff and from air polluted with tailpipe and smokestack emissions. When the algae die and sink to the ocean floor, bacteria there break them down, while consuming pretty much all of the available oxygen in the water. The bacteria also proliferate wildly, taking over the ecosystem and exacerbating the oxygen depletion. If conditions like strong currents, which are common...
...therefore need a global agreement on new rules of the game to take carbon emissions out of our energy system. Part of the answer will be akin to the smokestack scrubbers. Engineers have shown that it is possible to capture the carbon dioxide before it is emitted from a coal-fired power plant, and to transport it to long-term underground storage, in a process known as "carbon capture and sequestration." They've also dramatically reduced the costs of non-fossil-fuel electricity from wind, solar power and geothermal power, with further savings achievable based on experience and more research...