Clean Energy is Safer, Too
There are some folks out there who are truly opposed to green power. They cite America’s massive coal stocks, and point out that we could power ourselves for the next 10,000 years on what the coal industry has quaintly termed “America’s Power”.
When it’s brought up that no large scale carbon sequestration scheme has yet been devised, let alone tested, to keep the massive amounts of carbon emissions burning that much coal would release out of the atmosphere, the next place clean power opponents turn is nuclear. But a reminder that nukes are no magic bullet, either, arrived today from France.
While I can understand being opposed to the massive outlay of taxpayer dollars that a full conversion to clean energy sources will likely require, the consequence of not converting are infinitely worse. On the one hand, even with so-called clean coal, you have the specter of global warming deal with; on the other, you’ve got solid and consistent record of near-catastrophe, punctuated by occasional disaster.
Adapting clean energy, like any other sweeping change in technology, will involve expenditures of both time and money. But only in the most foolishly optimistic scenarios is any other option acceptable.
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That is not entirely accurate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage#Example_CCS_projects
As of 2007, four industrial-scale storage projects are in operation. Sleipner [7] is the oldest project (1996) and is located in the North Sea where Norway's StatoilHydro strips carbon dioxide from natural gas with amine solvents and disposes of this carbon dioxide in a deep saline aquifer. The carbon dioxide is a waste product of the field's natural gas production and the gas contains more (9% CO2) than is allowed into the natural gas distribution network. Storing it underground avoids this problem and saves Statoil hundreds of millions of euro in avoided carbon taxes. Since 1996, Sleipner has stored about one million tonnes CO2 a year. A second project in the Snøhvit gas field in the Barents Sea stores 700,000 tonnes per year. [13]
The Weyburn project is currently the world's largest carbon capture and storage project.[14] Started in 2000, Weyburn is located on an oil reservoir discovered in 1954 in Weyburn, southeastern Saskatchewan, Canada. The CO2 for this project is captured at the Great Plains Coal Gasification plant in Beulah, North Dakota which has produced methane from coal for more than 30 years. At Weyburn, the CO2 will also be used for enhanced oil recovery with an injection rate of about 1.5 million tonnes per year. The first phase finished in 2004, and demonstrated that CO2 can be stored underground at the site safely and indefinitely. The second phase, expected to last until 2009, is investigating how the technology can be expanded on a larger scale.[15]
The fourth site is In Salah, which like Sleipner and Snøhvit is a natural gas reservoir located in In Salah, Algeria. The CO2 will be separated from the natural gas and re-injected into the subsurface at a rate of about 1.2 million tonnes per year.