Question:
Is coal mostly mined underground in Germany? Underground coal
mining is almost extinct in the United States: a small number of
underground coal mines still exist in West Virginia and Pennsylvania
but now most of our coal comes from the Western beds of Wyoming,
from vast strip-mines where the entire topsoil above the coal seam
is torn orr and stored, the coal recovered, and the topsoil returned.
In most cases, restoring the ecosystem above the topsoil is a
horrendous cost, but in Wyoming the surface ecosystem is mostly
tallgraaa prairie which is easy to restore.
Answer:
Not that I know of. The government subsidizes health care for victims
of black lung disease, which would normally be a liability for the
health insurance plans paid for by eastern coal mining companies.
This is more of a historic artifact because as I understand it, black
lung disease is much rarer now due to better dust control in modern
mines. It also provides some money for R&D for cleaner or more
efficient methods of burning coal. The U.S. has large deposits of
easy to get to coal, which makes it cheap.
Ah, wrong. Coal comes out of the ground, all right, but graphite comes
out of a factory. (There were a few places where it was mined, but
those are mostly exhausted now.) The usual process is to cook coal
to coke, wash the coke to remove impurities and then melt it in an
arc furnace, purify it still further when molten and either cast it
or plate it on the electrode rods. The result is fairly pure graphite
for pantographs and the like: lots of more delicate processing is
needed to prepare ultrapure graphite for nuclear reactors.
