Environmental Effects of Coal Burning

There are a number of adverse health and environmental effects of coal burning especially in power stations, and of coal mining. These effects include:

● Coal-fired power plants shorten nearly 24,000 lives a year in the United States, including 2,800 from lung cancer

● Generation of hundreds of millions of tons of waste products, including fly ash, bottom ash, flue gas desulfurization sludge, that contain mercury, uranium, thorium, arsenic, and other heavy metals

● Acid rain from high sulfur coal

● Interference with groundwater and water table levels

● Contamination of land and waterways and destruction of homes from fly ash spills such as Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash slurry spill

● Impact of water use on flows of rivers and consequential impact on other land-uses

● Dust nuisance

● Subsidence above tunnels, sometimes damaging infrastructure

● Uncontrollable underground fires which may burn for decades or centuries.

● Coal-fired power plants without effective fly ash capture are one of the largest sources of human-caused background radiation exposure

● Coal-fired power plants emit mercury, selenium, and arsenic which are harmful to human health and the environment

● Release of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, which causes climate change and global warming according to the IPCC and the EPA. Coal is the largest contributor to the human-made increase of CO₂ in the air