Thursday, November 01, 2007

Karl anti-coal

It's not that I'm pro-nuclear power, I'm just anti-coal power for our base power needs. If such a thing as "clean coal" was feasible, I'd be all for it. However, Dr Karl thinks "clean coal" is a furphy:

Scientific commentator and broadcaster Karl Kruszelnicki, who is running for the Senate on the Climate Change Coalition ticket, today said clean coal technology was physically impossible.

Dr Kruszelnicki said the major parties were lying to the Australian people when they claimed carbon dioxide could be removed from the burning of coal and then compressed and stored underground or underwater.

He said this would require one cubic kilometre of compressed carbon dioxide to be stored every day.

"That is the volume of compressed carbon dioxide that we have to get rid of - not every 10 years, not every year, but every single day," Dr Kruszelnicki said.

"It's just not technologically possible.

"It is simply a furphy, it's a porky pie to cover up the fact that there is no such thing as clean coal."

Underground thermal energy accessed in South Australia could provide 100 per cent of Australia's baseload electricity for the next 75 years and then be supplemented by other renewables, he told reporters.

"If we tried really hard we could have all of the electricity in Australia made without carbon by 2020 using a mixture of renewable energies including hot rocks and the wind and the waves and the sun."


There you have it. According to Dr Karl "clean coal" is a fool's dream. But hot rocks? Intriguing, but feasible? All the electricity in Australia originating from one source? That's a lot of energy wasted (as heat radiating from powerlines). Time will tell.