Clean coal?
While John Howard's been recommending nuclear energy as a solution to climate change, Kevin Rudd's been spruiking 'clean coal'. The thing with 'clean coal' though, is that it is a nonexistant technology, and I'm pretty skeptical about predicitions that we'll manage to invent it within a certain timeframe.
1 comment:
I studied Power generation as part of my final year project at uni. I'm a mechanical engineer. It's not so much that clean coal doesn't exist as it it exists on a slidding scale. Some power plants are cleaner running than others, and the way you run a given power station will change how speficicaly clean it is as well. Old power stations (like ours) run in a system with high peak and low off peak demands (such as ours) will run very badly. unproven technologies aside, if new powerstations were built on known technologies, bassed specificaly on the South eastern Australian power requirments, they would definately be cleaner than the current model.
That said, Australia is better suited to the use of renewable energy systems than just about any other county in the world. We are top 5 for possible wind power sites and the solar locations go without saying. We also have significant deap thermal posabilities. All these could be well taken advantage of by now if the Government ever grows enough trouser luggage to do something
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