William – All good points and I am glad to here that the RR has taken steps to mitigate the loss of coal dust in loading. I mistakenly assumed the RR delievered to an AES facility at the port where the loading took place.

I am going to go out on a limb here and answer rebekkah’s last question. We do have such a source of energy and that is nuclear. Take a look at France, more than half of their total electrical generation is nuclear and they have never had a serious accident. Do some research into the relative volumes of nuclear waste materials versus coal, oil and gas. The main effluent from the combustion of the latter three materials is – CO2. What does France do with its nuclear waste? It recycles a significant portion of it as nuclear fuel and that portion that cannot be recycled is easy to contain even in a densley populated country with no vast empty deserts. Nuclear power is not cheap enough? First of all, think of the externalization of costs, when the consequences of burning billions of tons of coal are all tallied up and charged off in terms of lowering the standard of living of the average citizen and enriching the very very rich, nuclear power could well be a huge bargain.

I know that the common place impression of nuclear power is that it is very dangerous and this exotic thing called radiation will turn us all into mutants. Well we all are already mutants. And we are all already living in a sea of radiation from different natural and un-natural sources. One of those sources is coal. Coal contains small amounts of radiogenic potassium, thorium and uranium. The point is that these elements exist in very small quatities, parts per billion. But if you burn 25 billion tons of coal per year at high enough temperatures it emits into the atmosphere so many tons of radioctive postassium, thorium and uranium. It is more complicated than this but the upshot is that far more “unnatural radiation” is released into the environment by the burning of coal than by nuclear generation of power.

So that is what you might call the short term solution. Longer term the obvious choice is space based solar power. But that is a very complex and expensive technology that with our present primitive capabilities would take most of a century to develop, if not more.

Bubbles,

Mining for those who actually do the work is a dangerous, dirty, exacting and vital business. They get little credit for their immense sacrifice.

Pat Washington State – Get a shoe scrubber and rinse them off before you go inside. Do a Raydon test on your house, I am just guessing but I think that might be the biggest risk. Next on my list would be mercury. Are you sure you are within the plume of downwind pollution? Find the basis for the things being claimed. We are all easily and naturally somewhat intimidated by the unknown. The resolution to that intimidation is to acquire knowledge.

All this reminds me of the ASARCO copper smelting plant that was on Commencement Bay in Tacoma. It was actually closed down a few years before we moved here, then the whole area was “cleaned up”. Problem is, nothing but the horsetails will grow there. The earth is dead. Just this past year there was a news story that they are now telling people who live within a certain range that they should always remove their shoes to go inside so they don’t track in any of the poisonous stuff from the ASARCO days. Um, the problem is, we’ve been living here since 1980. Seems a bit late to tell us that it’s still a problem, considering we’ve been wearing our shoes inside for the past 29 years. (We live about 5 or 6 miles, as the crow (or polluted air) flies.)

I do wonder about the comment from Emma – was the coal company willing to talk, or have there already been talks and they are now just stalling for more time?

Even if most of the coal is burnt in China, Alaska will get its fair share back eventually in the form of CO2 and particulates.

The simple fact is that this is just another instance of externalizing costs. In part it occurs because people in general are not aware of or paying attention to such arcane issues and in part it occurs because those doing the externalizing can take advantage of that inattention and increase their profits.

I have been hearing a lot about green jobs initiatives and energy independence and such for the last few months. Mostly people think of employment being a private sector matter. Let’s think of it in terms of sport. Almost everyone can identify with sports, I am not that familiar with most but can I think still make the analogy. Take tennis for example, you have two or four players. You have two line judges, a net judge, and a court judge, so the ratio of officialsto players is either 2:1 or 1:1. In baseball or football or cricket or rugby or curling you would have different ratios. Go to your state’s web site and see how many environmental protection employees there are compared to just the number of incorporated entities. Food inspectors and food processing companys? Take your pick, I think anything you look at you will see much higher ratios, on the order of hundreds if not thousands to one.

So my simple minded idea is to take a fair sized chunk of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent each year on wars and hardware for wars that can never be fought and instead create a vast pool of “referees”. People whose job it is to know the rules and enforce them. If we just decreased the true defense budget to only double what every other country in the world is spending on defense and used that money to hire referees at say $45k/yr.
It would create 20 million “green jobs” that cannot be sent off shore. But that would be “big government”.

I’ll not go on any further. I do want to combine a comment here though about the conservation meeting. AKM spins a nice tale in her account of it. Considering the way the proceedings were conducted it does seem pretty haphazard if not intrinsically corrupt. So what are the local progressives going to do about it? You have to get organized and motivate your much greater numbers to drown out the jeering zealots. It is a difficult task.

It is all the same game though.

The fuel costs are also considerable as the RR has to use extra locomotives to climb the steep grades around Spencer and Grandview Glaciers. Bids are currently being accepted to build a new spur line to Pt. McKenzie and create a new coal facility there. But new rail costs around $1 million a mile, so it’s all a matter of money.

That being said, the RR has upgraded the site, installing sprinklers, covered the belts which carry coal, and does not dump when winds are extreme.

http://wamu.org/programs/dr/10/01/07.php#31354

Funny that coal pollution is finally getting some attention …