‘Clean’ coal sounds prettier than it smells

Plants not as dirty as before, but still pollute by the ton

When does something dirty become clean?

Is it clean when it is spotless? Or when it’s less dirty than it was before?

Those are questions 9-year-olds ask when told to clean their rooms. They are also questions at the heart of a debate over coal-fired power plants in rural Nevada.
The three plants proposed in Lincoln and White Pine counties will be clean coal plants, producing environmentally safe energy, their developers have said. Plans for those plants include using the best and latest technology, making them cleaner than any plants built in the 1970s and 1980s.

Environmentalists say utilities bandy about the term ” clean coal ” to “green wash” the discussion about fossil fuel-burning power plants.

“It’s an oxymoron, like calling a dump a landfill,” the Sierra Club’s Lydia Ball said. “Dust it off and shine it up and make it pretty.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who opposes the three Nevada plants, agrees. “They say, ‘We’ll use clean coal technology.’ It doesn’t exist,” Reid said at the Nevada Clean Energy Summit a week ago. “There is no such thing as clean coal technology … There is not a coal plant in America that is clean.”

The three plants would emit a combined 31 million tons of carbon dioxide each year for about 50 years. That makes them as bad as the Mohave Generating Station, an early ’70s plant near Reid’s hometown of Searchlight that was branded the dirtiest coal plant in the nation before it was shut down two years ago.

Las Vegas Sun