Talk:Environmental impact of oil shale industry
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[edit] Environmental Considerations
This section is equally flawed and appears to be written by someone who has no direct experience with oil shale. First, by what basis does the author claim that waste rock is a known carcinogen? Even if it were true for waste rock from some specific process, the differences in spent shale from different processes are vast, so it cannot be generally true. The statement that rock expands by about 30% after processing due to a popcorn effect is obsurd urban legend. The increase in mined oil shale volume occurs efore processing merely because there are interparticle voids introduced to any solid when it is broken up, and the fractional increase depends on the width of the particle size distribution. Beds of oil shale do not expand during retorting, as I have observed hundreds of times. A rare exception can occur for extremely rich oil shale veins (~60 gal/ton), which may froth during pyrolysis like a coking coal, but such cases are vanishingly small in importance, do not occur under load, and can be easily compacted away if they do occur.
Akburnham 00:17, 29 October 2006 (UTC)A. K. Burnham
- Anyone can edit. Find sources and add details, delete what is wrong and unsourced. (SEWilco 04:11, 29 October 2006 (UTC))