Coal is quite cheap these days/from page eight

Al Lowe
Contributor

How many of you are old enough to remember the coal furnace? Sifting the ashes, ‘fixing the furnace’, how long it took to get the house warm after the fire went out. And your mother’s anger at the coal dust which came with every delivery.
Yet it was coal which sparked the Industrial Revolution, which ran those ships by which Britannia ruled the waves and generally governed our lives for well over a hundred years.
Coal has fallen into disrepute in the past generation or two, having been supplemented by the much more convenient, and often cheaper gas, oil, and electricity. Coal has some very desirable benefits, but it has some heavy drawbacks as well.
Coal comes to us from green plants. These plants lived on earth millions of years ago. Gradually vast quantities of them were buried, and, under extremes of pressure and heat, were transformed into what we now call coal. There are many kinds of coal, but the best is the hard anthracite, black, rocklike and shiny.
What are the advantages of coal? Well, nowadays, one of the major ones is that it is quite cheap, and that is a big plus. A dollar’s worth of coal still provides nearly twice as much energy as a dollar’s worth of oil. The other big plus is that there is an awful lot of it around. A count of U.S. coal reserves is something over 400 billion tons. At the current rate of consumption, this would last several hundred years. The figures for Canada are not available to me right now. But here are some things to help you visualize our coal reserves. Nova Scotia announced some years ago that a new bed had been discovered, which is at least as big as the state of Massachusetts. There is a lot in Alberta, and vast reserves in most of the Maritimes.
Quite awhile ago, president Carter called for a massive program to open new coal mines, employ thousands of new workers, and invest in new types of technology for coal. The cost - 50 to 100 billion dollars.
The disadvantages of coal are great indeed. They are not publicized as much as those (real and imagined) of nuclear power. But they are there, grave problems for both users and producers.
First - sulphur, All coal contains some sulphur. This forms sulphur dioxide when it burns, and this, in turn forms acids in the air. Then we get ‘acid rain’. Thousands of lakes and streams have already been killed, that is, they have been made so acid that nothing can live in there. Sulphur can be partially removed by cleaning the coal, and by ‘scrubbers’ in the burning process. Both of these are complicated and very expensive.
Second - carbon dioxide. Any carbon compound which burned produces carbon dioxide. Scientists all over the world are very worried about the building up of a layer of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The effect of this is the warming of the earth - global warming. If the earth warms up, some of the polar icecaps will melt, coastal cities will face disaster, climate changes will occur all over the world.
Third - radioactivity. Most people do not connect radioactivity with coal, yet a coal plant will give off, in a year, over 100,000 times as much radioactivity as a similar sized nuclear plant. These are the same particles as those from any other source.
Fourth - human hazards. From mining coal - accidental deaths (200 per year in the U.S.),. black-lung disease (4000 deaths per year in the U.S.) Also, the dangers of strip-mining. coal cleaning hazards, and so on.
We may have to depend upon coal, among other things, for a very long time. But it won’t be cheap. it will have to be cleaned a lot. It will never be the easy fuel which used to run our homes, factories and ships.