Thread: Coal Ash- No "Clean Coal".

James,

Around me they mainly landfill, their fly ash and slurry their bottom ash/boiler slag to a retention pond where it is reclaimed and used as blasting grit, lightweight concrete block aggregate, highway subbase or ice control.

CB

Would you like to be a Billioniare, find something to make out of FLY ASH!!! I'm thinking really hard right now..

Originally Posted by nnuut

Would you like to be a Billioniare, find something to make out of FLY ASH!!! I'm thinking really hard right now..

Actually the Brits had several companies that made lightweight aggregate out of it and it is used a pozzolan in cement (cement replacement), depending on the chemical characteristics. I spent the first 7 years of my career working with construction companies, highway departments and other assorted entities to develop usages for power plant ash.

CB

from CNN- They've upped the estimate of the size of the spill by five-fold:

"
TVA's initial estimate for the spill was 1.8 million cubic yards or more than 360 million gallons of sludge. By Friday, the estimate reached 5.4 million cubic yards or more than 1 billion gallons -- enough to fill 1,660 Olympic-size swimming pools.


Environmental advocates say the ash contains concentrated levels of mercury and arsenic.


The plant sits on a tributary of the Tennessee River called the Clinch River. At least 300 acres of land has been coated by the sludge, a bigger area than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill."

and

"Video footage showed sludge as high as 6 feet, burying porches and garage doors. The slide also downed nearby power lines, though the TVA said power had been restored to the area. An estimated 78,000 cubic yards, or 15.7 million gallons, of sludge covered local railroad tracks and Swan Pond Road."



That's a lot of ash....


Source: http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/12/26/tennessee.sludge/

Wow, I surely wouldn't like 2 feet of that stuff in my yard!!

Couple positive thoughts..

1. Women Mud wrestling

2. Offroading and muddin with 4X4s

3. No weeds grow (along with anything else)

4. did I mention women Mud Wrestling?

HUBBA HUBBA!!

Honestly, We really need to think globally on this:

There is a menace running rampant in the Southwest. It has been eroding land for years and all we do is gawk at it's destructive presence. The fact is, half of the land in one state has been eroded for years and the best we can do is put a fence up to keep people from falling in.

This is ridiculous.

We need to stop the insanity.

First, we create fly ash bricks to reroute this destructive force away from the dessimated area. Then we can use all that sludge to fill in the years of erosion and stop the needless suffering of these poor people. Take this stuff out of the backyards and put it in the middle of nowhere, where it can cause no harm.

Stupid Colorado River!!!!!!!

Originally Posted by James48843

from CNN- They've upped the estimate of the size of the spill by five-fold:
"TVA's initial estimate for the spill was 1.8 million cubic yards or more than 360 million gallons of sludge. By Friday, the estimate reached 5.4 million cubic yards or more than 1 billion gallons -- enough to fill 1,660 Olympic-size swimming pools.
Environmental advocates say the ash contains concentrated levels of mercury and arsenic.
The plant sits on a tributary of the Tennessee River called the Clinch River. At least 300 acres of land has been coated by the sludge, a bigger area than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill."

and
"Video footage showed sludge as high as 6 feet, burying porches and garage doors. The slide also downed nearby power lines, though the TVA said power had been restored to the area. An estimated 78,000 cubic yards, or 15.7 million gallons, of sludge covered local railroad tracks and Swan Pond Road."

That's a lot of ash....
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/12/26/tennessee.sludge/

Amazing to me are the SENSATIONAL NEWS HEADLINES reporting this ASH spill accident at a coal-burning plant while not too far way, the Oak Ridge, Tennessee NUCLEAR facility escapes attention. (at least so far, in the articles I've read) I hate to see the rivers polluted as much as the next guy, but the fish around that whole area have been thought to "glow in the dark" for years. But, that kind of contamination is not as obvious as the piles of sludge we are seeing in these news story pictures.

Map Oak Ridge area Nuclear.jpg
More than a billion gallons of coal fly ash spilled from a pond at a TVA coal plant, flooding a neighborhood in Harriman and dumping a mix of ash and water in the Emory River, causing residents of nearby Kingston to worry about their drinking water.
http://www.newschannel5.com:80/Global/story.asp?S=9587203&Call=Email&Format=HTML

610x.jpg
Watts Bar Nuclear power plant (TVA’s third), is located on 1,700 acres on the northern end of Chickamauga Reservoir, in east Tennessee. (Located just south of Watts Bar Reservoir on the Tennessee River near Spring City)

The operating unit at Watts Bar is a pressurized water nuclear reactor. It makes electricity by splitting uranium atoms to produce steam. The steam is piped to the main turbine, which spins a generator to produce electricity. Once the steam leaves the turbine it is cooled in an area called a condenser and changes back to water. The water is pumped back to the reactor to begin the process again.
Uranium fuel for the reactor is refined from ore and formed into ceramic pellets about the size of the end of your little finger. The pellets are stacked one on top of the other in long tubes called fuel rods. The fuel rods are bundled together to form a fuel assembly. When the fuel assemblies are placed in the reactor, heat from the splitting uranium atoms raises the temperature of the water surrounding the assemblies to about 580 degrees Fahrenheit. Because this water is under high pressure, it doesn’t boil. The pressurized water goes to tubes in a steam generator. A secondary supply of water passes around the outside of the tubes. This second source of water boils and turns to steam, which is piped to the turbine to drive the generator.

Control rods and borated water are used to control the splitting, or fission, of the uranium atoms. The borated water speeds up or slows down the fission process. The control rods shut down the reactor when they are inserted between the fuel rods.
REACTOR oak ridge.jpg

Originally Posted by Frixxxx

First, we create fly ash bricks to reroute this destructive force away from the dessimated area. Stupid Colorado River!!!!!!!

Great Idea..wrong River..you mean we need to use the Sludge bricks along the Rio Grande

Yeh Budnipper- I hear you on that one.

Nuclear power isn't the problem.

The problem is what to do with all those spent fuel rods.

I know they sit in pools of water on-site. Have been for half-a-century.

No where to go.

Once that problem is solved, then Nuclear is a valid power source.

But until then, what to do? what to do?


And no- I don't think building a wall along the Rio Grande with Fly-Ash bricks, and spent fuel rods for wall reinforcement, is the right answer......