West Virginia has suffered two mining tradegies in the last month. It will be interesting if this will change our consumption of coal. Some are proposing more safety regulations, which will probably increase the price of coal. Coal advocates say cleaner coal is possible.

Mining is simply a riskier venture than drilling. It will be interesting to see what happens.

 

--

 

I agree with xcel. We live near a coal fired power plant and its amazing to see the mountain of coal they have there. But, its probably why I cough a lot...

Just got my electric bill and price went up .03/KwH to 0.158, ( I have electric heat but price wise, its better than oil or gas.). Electric bill was only $125 last month including everything; cooking, lights, heat etc.

 

When I worked at a coal power plant we needed like 30 or 90 days (don't remember exactly) on hand. We would get about 100 train cars of coal every day or two.

I think we put out 300MW or something with all 3 turbines running. I think A nuke can do 3x that on one turbine and they generaly have 2. Xcel can correct me on these numbers because his experience is up-to-date where mine is 5 years old.

 

I'm anticipating the media will use the accidents to give coal bad publicity on top of the attention any tradegy will receive. I hope the cleaner coal technology makes advances.

 

No disrespect intended towards anyone working in the coal mining trade and their families during this time of grief. I'm sure there are hundreds of petro workers killed each year as well around the world in drilling/refining/truck accidents each year. Do we ever hear about them?

 

The plant that I work at was down to 14 days because of work on the rails near the mines in Wy. normal has been at least 90 days.We can produce over 2500mw on 4 units.kevin

 

I totally agree - they are hurting and the survivors may have their lives changed forever.

It seems to get more attention than refinery explosions.

 

Perhaps the reason being that news media tends to focus on dramatic accidents.... a refinery explosion will kill a lot of people more or less instantly....one second you are there, the next second you have become a statistic.
On the other hand, a coal mine disaster (or any other mining disaster, for that matter) there is the element of wait, the anxiety, the suspense, that builds up as hours and days pass. And eventually the great climatic sense of relief (if survivors are found) or dissapontment (if all or most perish) caps up the news story.

 

Indeed, news focuses on single events of many people killed in one place. There's some 43,000 people killed in auto wrecks every year, but I don't think any more than one or two major wrecks ever makes the news. Certainly no single auto-wreck that I know of prompted congressional hearings.

43,000 Americans killed versus - what - 25 or something? Where is the focus on auto safety? We could be doing so much more to stop the deaths and half-million major injuries reported involving automobiles every year. The most obvious of course being improved licensing to substantiate you actually have the skills needed to operate the vehicle you want to drive. 5 Americans die every hour of every day in auto wrecks; you'd think we would put more focus on it than we do.