February 16, 2017
By Brad Plumer
...one of Congress' very first acts...(click here) would be to kill an obscure Obama-era regulation that restricts coal companies from dumping mining waste into streams and waterways.
But that is indeed what’s going on. In early February, the House and Senate voted to repeal the so-called “stream protection rule” — using a regulation-killing tool known as the Congressional Review Act. On Thursday, President Trump signed the bill, which means the stream protection rule is now dead. Coal companies will have a freer hand in dumping mining debris in streams.
Killing this regulation won’t exactly fulfill Trump’s goal of reversing the coal industry’s decline; that decline has more to do with cheap natural gas than anything else. Instead, Republicans are mostly focusing on this rule because they can. Because the stream protection rule wasn’t finished until very late in 2016, it’s much, much easier to kill than most of the other Obama-era rules around coal pollution. It was a ready target, so long as the GOP acted fast...
"History of Technology" (click here)
By Edward R. Golding
Below is the bottom of page 200 and the top of page 206. The book clearly states on page 206 there are radioactive elements in raw coal. Those elements become more dense and more dangerous with the burning of coal as they fall out of the burning process. However, the point is, Scott Pruitt thinks nothing of coal dust containing all kinds of pollutants, the least of all radioactive and toxic elements into streams.
