All Fired Up Over Clean Coal

摘要

It Was A Disturbing Sight: Many peaks in Vermont's Green Mountains were bald or turning a foreboding brown. The trees were dying from acid rain caused by pollution from coal-fired power plants in the Midwest. The images still haunt Dr. Robert R. Holcomb, a children's neurologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and an ardent environmentalist. His 1995 trip to Vermont spurred a lifelong quest to combat fossil-fuel pollution. Nine years later, on Jan. 30, Holcomb unveiled his dream-come-true system for zapping pollutants at coal-burning plants before they can taint the air. It's an imaginative scheme―and an impractical one, according to some physicists and engineers familiar with Holcomb's work. But even his toughest critics admit that breakthroughs are urgently needed to eliminate smokestack emissions. And some of the critics have their own designs on the drawing board.