Question About Coal Ashes?

[quote="Pacowy"]Do you have an authoritative source for that?

Mike[/quote

I think the damage done by the recent Dan River spillage would be a good start...there's a reason they have to store that ash onsite like that instead of just dumping it wherever. Massively high levels of arsenic after the spill, as well as multiple other dangerous heavy metals.

So you don't have a source, just repetition of media blathering?

When real scientists really look at coal ash, the stuff is pretty benign, even when it comes from power plants. For example, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18246510 says: "There were no detectable As, Cr, Hg, Pb, and Se in the leachates; Cd and Mo were only detected in few leachate samples. The metals constantly detected were Cu, Mn, Ni, and Zn. The total amounts of Cu, Mn, Ni, and Zn leached during the six-month production period...may contribute little to contamination of surface and ground water."

In case you misplaced your chemistry book, As is arsenic, Hg is mercury and Pb is lead. Aren't those the "Big 3" mentioned in all of the fearmongering about coal ash? Too bad they didn't show up in detectable amounts.

AFAIK coal ash has been held in empoundments for decades precisely because there is precious little credible evidence that it is any more hazardous than the soil in your backyard. And for many people it might be less hazardous than that. There are isolated cases where the bad stuff in coal ash appears in slightly higher concentrations - pretty much the same as there is with soil. Overall, I'm not aware of any scientific basis for the hysteria about it. Obviously the empoundments should be secure enough to prevent damaging mudslides and fouling of waterways with foreign material, but I'm not buying into the hazmat hype without actual evidence.

Mike

There is less mercury in the bulb than what would have been emitted into the atmosphere from a coal plant and most of those bulbs will either be safely contained in landfill or recycled. The issue with the bulbs is when you break one inside your house, mercury evaporates. Breaking a bulb is certainly going to expose you to more mercury than anything dispersed into the atmosphere by a coal plant.

That said I wouldn't be concerned about either at least as far as the US goes. US coal plants account for less than 1% of global emissions and most of that is deposited outside of the US. Very few bulbs should get broken, it's a minimal amount of exposure in either case.

It's the huge amount of mercury being spewed into the atmosphere from China, other Asian counties and who knows how much is used in third world gold mining operations that you need to be concerned about. It's a global issue, it's not local.

Pacowy wrote: In case you misplaced your chemistry book, As is arsenic, Hg is mercury and Pb is lead.

Not sure about the others but most if not all of the mercury will be vaporized during the burning process so it should be no surprise it isn't in the ash.

Richard S. wrote:Not sure about the others but most if not all of the mercury will be vaporized during the burning process so it should be no surprise it isn't in the ash.

I just looked it up, and mercury boils at just under 674 degrees F. A coal fire would flash it off for sure, but it seems like it might condense out in the chimney.

I'm pretty sure the total quantity of mercury that goes up the stacks of U.S. coal plants is pretty small, and there are recent EPA requirements that make it even smaller. There wasn't that much bad stuff in the coal to begin with, so it shouldn't be a surprise that the byproducts generally don't contain a lot of bad stuff, either.

Mike

Pacowy wrote:I'm pretty sure the total quantity of mercury that goes up the stacks of U.S. coal plants is pretty small, and there are recent EPA requirements that make it even smaller.

It's less than 1% of the global pool even before the new regulations and again most of that is deposited outside of the US. The new regulations will result in a 1 to10 percent reduction of deposition rates here in the US. They accomplish nothing here and since the emissions are already so low it accomplishes nothing on the global scale either.

lsayre wrote: I just looked it up, and mercury boils at just under 674 degrees F. A coal fire would flash it off for sure, but it seems like it might condense out in the chimney.

Mercury will evaporate at room temperature Larry .

Richard S. wrote:

lsayre wrote: I just looked it up, and mercury boils at just under 674 degrees F. A coal fire would flash it off for sure, but it seems like it might condense out in the chimney.

Mercury will evaporate at room temperature Larry .

All liquids evaporate. But they also condense. Intuitively it seems that some must almost certainly condense given the roughly 400-500 degree lower chimney temp vs. the boiling point. The vapor pressure of mercury at low temperatures is incredibly low. It evaporates at low 'liquid' temps, but hardly.

That said, commercially it must be actively scrubbed to be removed, so perhaps you are right that in a residential chimney it will not condense back out.

For an idea of how dangerous mercury is just read this. The entire school was on lock down, police & hazmat teams responded. This because one kid brought a mercury thermometer to school. One that was not broken and the mercury was fully contained in the glass tube!! Now that must be some bad stuff! Oh BTW, he never took it inside the building. Lock down, police & hazmat for a sealed thermometer that was outside. That must be some really bad stuff!

Meanwhile people infected with ebola, polio, aids & other highly infectious & potentially fatal disease are free to sit right next to your kid in class, play contact sports with your kid, share the locker room & cafeteria with your kids. Well they can so long as they don't have a thermometer in their pocket.

http://archive.wtsp.com/news/local/article/285396 ... hermometer

If we want, we can find pollution almost everywhere, but we can survive to it...
Just one ex. of contamination: the equivalent of 61 million of Advil pills sent in the St-Laurent River from the Montréal City water rejects ( Journal de Montréal, 15 Mars 2008). And that is just the iceberg's point.
Medias can also be a super pollution vehicule, going all around the planet in a few seconds and acting just like a cancer...

Yup! Most of us survived cars with no seat belts and bikes with no helmets and drinking from the garden hose to wash down some dirt. In high school I remember coating copper pennies with Mercury to turn them silver in my bare hands. All the paint in my childhood home was lead based and most of us stuck a bobby pin in an electric outlet at some point. Popping the braker and getting the shock was minor compared to how dad handled such activities. Every home thermostat had a Mercury switch and many still do. Some of us made it through the madness of the past and are still kicking. I never gave my coal stove ashes much thought and still don't. The tree hugging Greenies are able to make a lot of quotes from their base but most are just unsupported blather they learned from the Internet. I have to wonder if any of them could make a phone call from a rotary phone connected to a party line?

Gary L

just put the person out in the shed where the temperature is controlled organically. He'll come around...

Everybody worries about ALL the mercury in a CFL, but the happily march up and down the aisles at Sams, HD, Lowes, etc with those big fluorescent bulbs overhead by the hundreds and high lift fork truck drivers getting down pallets right next to them. CFL'S contain about 4 mg of mercury and those big tubes up there EACH contain up to 70 mg! How many got broken over nite during restocking??????? Right where you are walking today......

Gary L wrote:Yup! Most of us survived cars with no seat belts and bikes with no helmets and drinking from the garden hose to wash down some dirt. In high school I remember coating copper pennies with Mercury to turn them silver in my bare hands. All the paint in my childhood home was lead based and most of us stuck a bobby pin in an electric outlet at some point. Popping the braker and getting the shock was minor compared to how dad handled such activities. Every home thermostat had a Mercury switch and many still do. Some of us made it through the madness of the past and are still kicking. I never gave my coal stove ashes much thought and still don't. The tree hugging Greenies are able to make a lot of quotes from their base but most are just unsupported blather they learned from the Internet. I have to wonder if any of them could make a phone call from a rotary phone connected to a party line?

Gary L