Everyone hates coal but can't quit it. Even if (like me) you don't consider Carbon Dioxide a pollutant, the ash is assuredly a pollutant. Most of the carbon had got oxidised - that is, burned. What's left over is... well, a lot of it is heavy-metals, which you don't want in your water-table.
We do want many those metals in other industrial contexts. So, treat the ash with acid! - say the chemists. Uh...
Glenn Reynolds brings the good news: we can use citric acid. (Or maybe uric. Sweet lemonade, sweet sweet lemonade.) Much less dangerous, and the twice-used ash is now just dirt. Ship it somewhere where they had an erosion or salination problem.
The reaction worked at 70 C and 70 bar. I bet the purification factory won't need much energy to run. It literally would be running itself - not as a coal powerplant anymore, but as a coal processor.
UPDATE 2/9/22: Heat pulses on fly-ash. That looks good for the residue after the dirt is liberated from the now VERY toxic remnant.
I want to be running our grid on nuclear power anyway, including the coal mines themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment