Today's New York Times has an article about contractors increasing their use of steel slag and coal ash in premium concrete. Does anyone sell their coal ash to local concrete mixers?

I don't think any tourist railroads are burning enough coal to generate enough ash to make this worthwhile. Where I last worked we built a new power plant and had the whole foundation poured from this stuff, it was something in the order of 40 mixer loads. It is also used quite a bit in highway construction on even a bigger sale. I think the suppliers of ash are cranking out tons of the stuff per day.

I think you're right. Last time I checked, Wyoming coal production was 400 million tons per year. That will make a lot of ash, and Wyoming isn't the only place producing coal, as we well know.

Well sure, the states give Eastern coal plants a quota of how much sulfur dioxide they can emit. They use as much rich, high energy eastern coal as they can, and burn just enough low-energy Powder River coal to hit their emissions number.

From reading Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee, there's a plant in the South that takes four trainloads a day just from the Powder River. That's a lot of ash. It must go somewhere.

I'm not sure if you could inject the contents of your ash pit into that stream or not, but it'd be great if you could.

Wasn't ash also used for ballast on many rail lines?

The coal power plant near our town sells to concrete companies. Our town uses cinders and ash instead of salt on snow and ice on the streets. Makes a mess, just like it did many years ago. I'm not sure it's as damaging as salt.

Another issue not mentioned is the quality of the ash that a steam locomotive is producing. When the power plants produce and sell the ash, there are significant limits to the amounts of unburned carbon, that can be in it as well as other impurities. Fineness is also another thing about power plant ash, if any one has worked near power plant fly ash here it is nasty stuff. First they pulverize the coal till it is about as fine as talcum powder then they burn it, the resulting fly ash is finer then that.

Some plants sell the ash while for others for various reasons it may not financially pay to produce the ash of sufficient quality just put it in mountains that they create next to the plant.

As to quantity of ash produced by a power plant and the quantity of coal, at the plant I am working on this week they have 2 375MW units with 8 coal pulverizers each. Each pulverizer has an 8ton per hour rating on them I believe when they run. That is a lot of coal and you almost always see a dump truck or two carrying away fly ash at any time of day. Some plants I work at I think they may have one dump truck filling up every 5 minutes to go to their landfill so that is a lot more ash then I think any steam locomotive out there is making on average.

Adam