Green Money from Black Coal

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Green Money from Black Coal - Many so-called environmentally conscious people regard black coal as being one of the greater scourges of the earth- and well it may be. It depends upon how you use the stuff. What may wake up the "greenies" of our world as to the good things about coal is that it may not be all that long before all of those mankind-saving coal replacements might get to be rather difficult to come by. All of these electric gadgets and complex electronic "necessities" (electric cars, iPads, windpower electricity, and, of course, the Internet, and many more...) are going to become mighty scarce and hard to come by. Why is that? Their components and the batteries on which they must have to work all depend upon the availability of some scarce chemicals known generally as rare earth elements, sometimes referred to as "REEs." It turns out that REEs can be reclaimed for use by extracting them from coal fly ash, tons and tons and tons and tons of fly ash, that result from the burning of coal, mostly in coal-fired power plants that dot the landscape worldwide. I had long ago known that coal fly ash contains an abundance of radioactive materials, mainly uranium and thorium. Although coal fly ash is not so heavily endowed with REEs as it is with the radioactive contaminants, it contains a great variety of scarce and valuable rare earth elements. And we simply throw the fly ash away into some inconvenient place in an unwilling environment without bothering to take the good stuff from the bad before tossing the whole mess. For anyone with the interest to learn more, there is a good reference for you to look at on the Internet. There you will learn that for every million parts of coal fly ash there will be about 450 ppm of these rare earth elements - not easy to find by digging holes in the ground - but right in front of you the next time you come across a big mountain of wasted coal fly ash sitting around and getting ready to pollute your front yard and once clean water from the river which your home faucets bring into your kitchens. * * * * * * * * * * Original Photographs- Pixabay.com - Composite by Gus Kilthau * * * * * * * * * *