Could We Please Stop Talking about "Clean Coal"?

... or "cheap coal" for that matter.

The fact is, it's neither clean nor cheap.

Coal-fired electric power plants might look like a cheap way to produce energy, but only if you concentrate on how much a ton of coal will cost you on the open market today (for what it's worth: as of last week, according to Energy Information Administration, the highest Btu coal, from Northern Appalachia, would run you $62.75).

Make no mistake, there's no way to make that power clean, however.

And when you count more than just the market -- don't get me started on the impact of mountain-top removal -- coal's not cheap, either.

As if the disaster at the Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia on 6 April wasn't enough, there's now word that two miners are missing following a roof collapse at Alliance Resource Partners' Dotiki Mine in Kentucky (read news reports from the Associated Press here and from Bloomberg here).

The Upper Big Branch catastrophe killed 29 miners, the worst US mining disaster in four decades. And now two more men won't be coming home.

Does that sound "cheap" to you?

Business Week has an excellent analysis up on the sorry state of regulation, at least as far as protecting miners is concerned. The 2006 Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response Act (The MINER Act -- get it? Oy. I hate cutesy acronyms.) came in the wake of another catastrophic West Virginia mine disaster, at the Sago Tmine in which 12 miners were killed.

According to the article: "The act raised the maximum penalty for safety violations, forced mine operators to build emergency underground shelters with oxygen, water and food, and required installation of more modern communication devices." That all sounds good, doesn't it?

Let's take a closer look.

The Dotiki mine, according to news reports, was ranked seventh in the number of "significant and substantial" violations since 2009 (for data junkies, the website of the Mine Safety and Health Adminstration is a great resource). A "significant and substantial" violation means that the MSHA inspector considers that "there exists a reasonable likelihood the hazard contributed to will result in an injury or illness of a reasonably serious nature" (click here for full MSHA document).

Why would a mine that has such a record be operating?

As Business Week's Jeff Plungis and Holly Rosenkrantz report, "While the new law did result in more citations and higher fines, the Labor Department's Mine Safety and Health Administration in 2007 added 10 criteria that inspectors had to meet before a mine could be shut down for a 'pattern of violations'... Only one mine has ever been ordered closed for a pattern of violations... That order, issued in November 2008 to a Patriot Mining LLC mine in Virginia, was revoked when one of the violation findings was withdrawn..."

Does that sound "clean" to you?

So miners keep getting injured and dying, and fines have come to be seen as a cost of doing business. And we don't really notice until there's a major disaster, like Upper Big Branch (the Dotiki roof-fall is not leading most of today's news reports).

Meanwhile, by challenging citations (there's a helpful link right on MSHA's home page: "How to contest citations"), the industry pushes off the date when penalties might have to be paid.

According to Business Week, the "backlog of challenged cases ... has grown to more than 16,000 today from fewer than 1,500 in 2005" (emphasis added).

The current regulations don't even have baby-teeth; all they can do is gum a violator. It's time to stop pretending that miners' lives are valuable, and time to start acting as though we really believed that. A respectful minute of silence is good; tough legislation would be much better.