If the nuclear industry had to account for all the mining contamination that comes, it would not be so cheap either.

But, you will have to replace a bunch of Congress Critters to make either coal or nuclear do that.

Wes Rolley CoChair - EcoAction Committee Green Party US

    Millions of taxpayer dollars have already been spent in Southern Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and West Virginia for reclamation of abandoned mine property that was destroyed before the 1977 surface Mine Act. Actually the reclamation and in most cases just stabilization projects cover all forms of mining activity that threaten communities in the above mentioned states. The problem is since we allowed the 1977 Surface Mine Act to be weakened to allow Mountain Top Removal we are creating more unstable mountainous areas that will pose a threat in the future and the water leeching from the Hollow Fills will be so laden with heavy metals expensive fixes will have to be applied to get the water quality back up to acceptable standards.
    The pre 1977 environmental damage was thrown back on the tax payers. The rest of the country pays for the clean up and reclamation down here now for the most part. You can rest assured your cost will be increasing  when and if the sludge ponds are ever listed on the EPA's Hazardous list. The ponds containing a host of heavy metals and chemicals identified individually by the EPA guarantee's there inclusion at some point. Although after 1977 large bonds are supposed to be posted for coal strip job area's and it takes 20 years to get out from under a bond having been released in stages after certain reclamation criteria have been met. In reality the rules and regulations of the 1977 Surface Mine Act have been weakened so as to make the Act useless in regards to environmental protection. The absence of a viable clean water act and the further corrosion of what little we had by George Bush's midnight regulation changes to EPA will ensure that the U.S. tax payer will be getting a bill that will be massive and long lasting at some point.
     Following the same plan as the Wall Street bailout that was thrown over on the American tax payer by the Corporately connected the reclamation and clean up after the coal corporations will fall primarily on the American tax payer. This may create some good WPA or CCC style government jobs for somebody's economic rescue package or new deal. I would rather see the money spent on alternative energy development and mass transit. So as you debate the cost of clean coal and the price of cleaning it up keep an eye on the future environmental damage caused by MTR and coal preparation sludge ponds. We have several pre 77 projects ongoing and more listed each year. With MTR and coal sludge we will be assured our growth industry in reclamation will have ongoing security for years to come. We actually need the work and we are glad we have the suckers called tax payers to fund it.

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

We call a Corps of Engineer so called flood Control Project SHERWOOD Forest. Fishtrap Dam has become a strip mining operation with the watershed being stripped and the water polluted by the dumping of coal chemical waste water by Consol Coal Corporation and the run off from the Mountain Top Removal strip jobs. The miles of gas well roads cut in without an environmental impact study lead to gas wells leaking oil. Kentucky Fish & Wildlife collaborates with the Corps and the mining corporations to keep the area locked down. Thousands of acres are not accessable to the general public. You can boat on the water but but unless you are a a navy seal or airbourne ranger the rest is hard to get to. Propoals for a state park and tourist development have fell to the wayside repeatedly. A quick survey from the air or google earth will show the devistation that has occured on a Corps controlled flood control project. Common sense would dictate the removal of the vegetation from the watershed area would be detrimental to flood control. However the Corp is not the organization controlling the area, the coal corporations have free run of the place to do what they want. Illegal MTR's have been found on the site and the Corps is never held responsible for the stripping of the watershed or the illegal unpermitted mining.

Pangolin was not being facetious we are being sacrificed for a dirty carbon fuel that will destroy us long before it destroys the planet.

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

Here they used the cinders from the coal plant as cheap driveway and dirt road gravel.  Notably on the miles long forest road into a marsh landfill for ash and paper making waste that resides in the immediate watershed of a stream feeding a (now acid/mercury contaminated) beautiful chain of 5 lakes and a river feeding into the Wisconsin River.

Homeowners fell for the deal, so many homes have this toxic mess leeching into the groundwater that feeds their wells.

I was able to narrowly convince a neighbor not to do it on a common road we share, my argument wasn't environmental, it was economic.  I pointed out that the few hundred bucks saved on gravel would lower the resale value of our properties by catastropic percentages.

The ugly nature of the stuff alone would do that, but once the pollution issue became obvious, it might make our homes untouchable by any future buyers.

Could spreading this stuff as gravel and landfill cause losses in propery value that would make the cost of cleaning up these official toxic sites look like chump change?  Think about the loss of home value in the credit crisis alone, 2 trillion so far.

What if the loss in value of every home with groundwater contaminated by this stuff were calculated?

Primates with simple hand tools?  A nuisance.   Primates with bulldozers, trucks, mining equipment, and power plants?  They are what killed us, we just haven't dropped to the ground yet.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Keep in mind that coal provides (very roughly) 2 EWh of electricity each year into US grids.

5,000,000,000 USD for 2,000,000,000,000 kWh = 0.0025 USD/kWh to clean up the ash. That's 0.25 cents, call it 0.2 - 0.3 cents/kWh as sensitivity proxy.

Not very expensive at all. Of course there is the CO2 thing which is tricky (unknown macro economical costs). Olivine sequestration might be cheap enough at 1-2 cents/kWh. Further improving other pollution abatement equipment (scrubbers, active carbon filters etc) will likely add another cent at least. Mining impact is sometimes difficult to restore so is another problem for economical quantification.

All things included, coal is at best rather expensive, at worst very expensive, but even then not prohibitively so IMHO. That said I wouldn't mind a moratorium for coal at all.

First, someone mentioned the taxpayers paying to remediate old mining damage--but the Acid Mine Lands money is actually paid by coal companies on a tonnage basis. The problems are that current companies are paying for past damage, and so current state representatives from the states where most mining is now occurring--Wyoming in particular--insist on getting "their share" of the money, although the great bulk of the damage was from long ago mining in Pennsylvania and also WV, where there is a huge backlog of sites needing remediation. The other problem is that Congress is sitting on a pile of this money, not releasing it to be used for its intended purpose, because it makes the deficit look less bad. Hundreds of sites have been leaking toxic acids into streams for decades, and will no doubt continue to do so for centuries. They'll never clean all this up. It's expensive and difficult. But it could provide jobs.
The main point I want to make, however, is that if we're going to talk about externalities let's talk about ALL of them. The province of Ontario in Canada made the decision a few years ago to phase out coal power even though its plants were already operational, because they calculated that the cost of switching to clean power would be less than the health costs from the coal air pollution--and in Canada, of course, the state pays healthcare costs. But the guy who came here to WV to explain this decision emphasized that Ontario does not have an indigenous coal mining industry, or this choice would not have been politically possible. This means they surely did not include the land damage or health and safety costs of coal mining in their analysis, nor the costs to the roads of trucks weighing up to 100 tons careening over them. This piece looks at one of the most overlooked costs, the disposal of the ash from the plants--but there is another kind of toxic coal slurry pond, created by the washing of the coal near where it is mined. Three hundred million gallons of this witch's brew spilled into rivers in Kentucky in 2000. And then of course, there is climate change. I doubt the Ontario government included that (and how can you assign numbers to something that may literally cost us the Earth?) So if you are going to run analyses of the FULL cost of coal, you need to include all these things. When you do that, solar doesn't look so expensive--and wind is downright cheap.

I think our environment and our health are worth the billions that have to be spend. The industry can afford this anyway.

Never stop using your brain!