“delivering cheap and affordable and reliable energy to more and more Americans.” But, but, but isn’t coal cheap? Can’t it be burned cleanly with modern scrubbers? Isn’t solar expensive? Don’t acres and acres of solar panels take up valuable farm land? Don’t windmills kill birds? Don’t windmills require a lot of costly maintenance? And last but not least, by forcing so-called “alternative” energy sources down our throats, you are in fact shutting down the coal and petroleum industry, and speak with forked tongue.
“Reliable” — sure. My solar cells generate a lot of power in the full moon.
Scrubbers are not going to clean coal stack gasses to the level of what a gas turbine puts out with out using scrubbers. Scrubbers are also $100 million or more for a typical sized coal plant. It’s cheaper to switch your fuel.
There is no safe limits of lead or mercury zero is always better than even ppm levels. If you have the technology to make power without those real pollutants then the EPA has a charter from Congress to do so. The technology exists today you can switch to clean natural gas with zero PM2.5 , zero mercury, and near zero NOx. Or you can use very expensive scrubbers to try to get close to ppm levels mercury cannot be scrubbed from flue gas to zero it’s in vapor form with no means of absorption even on active charcoal to zero. The cleanest way is to use gasification plant tech turn the coal to syngas then use a six stage plus gas clean up train to get the preburner gas as clean as possible then burn that in low NOx burners so atmospheric nitrogen doesn’t just form more NOx. Gasification plant tech is hundreds of millions of dollars as well. Coal is never going to be allowed to be burnt directly to the sky ever again in the USA the days of unfiltered coal ash gasses going up a stack are over and most are happy about that. Especially those whose watersheds were on the receiving end of that ash fall for years from unfiltered stack emissions. You can burn coal but you have to hit ppm level of clean , natural gas gets there with ease or you add building sized scrubbers and get close but not equal for a while the EPA will allow you to get close but at some point everyone is held to the same standard. Gas gets there, nuclear is the cleanest of all its only atmospheric output is trace amounts of noble gasses that are instantly diluted to ppt levels in the atmosphere none of which are biologically active. I would rather live next door to a 4 gigawatt four reactor pad plant than a equal sized coal or gas plant any day of the week. Pay me yearly and you can store dry cask spent fuel on gravel pads behind the house on the acreage the goats won’t care about the inert concrete silos and nor would I. You could sleep next to one of the silos and be fine. In fact the dose standing next to one touching it is less on an hour for hour basis than flying across the Atlantic. At 10 meters distance sunlight has more rads so yeah for $$$$$ per month store all you want on my back 40.