Burning coal in electric utility plants produces, in addition to power, residues that contain constituents which may be harmful to the environment. The management of large volumes of coal combustion residues (CCRs) is a challenge for utilities, because they must either place the CCRs in landfills, surface impoundments, or mines, or find alternative uses for the material. This study focuses on the placement of CCRs in active and abandoned coal mines. The committee believes that placement of CCRs in mines as part of the reclamation process may be a viable option for the disposal of this material as long as the placement is properly planned and carried out in a manner that avoids significant adverse environmental and health impacts. This report discusses a variety of steps that are involved in planning and managing the use of CCRs as minefills, including an integrated process of CCR characterization and site characterization, management and engineering design of placement activities, and design and implementation of monitoring to reduce the risk of contamination moving from the mine site to the ambient environment. Enforceable federal standards are needed for the disposal of CCRs in minefills to ensure that states have adequate, explicit authority and that they implement minimum safeguards.

This book accompanies you on a journey that starts with the basics of mine water treatment and takes you further through correct sampling for planning to active and passive systems. In the respective chapters you will learn the most important techniques about the parameters to be measured (e.g. on-site parameters, flow rate), which methods are available to actively treat your mine water (e.g. high density sludge method, reverse osmosis, ion exchange) and which ones to perform passive treatment (e.g. constructed wetlands, vertical flow reactor, limestone channel). You will also get an insight into the use of mine water. Don’t expect a cookbook – rather, it’s an ingredients and utensils list to help you find the right recipe. For extended help on this, check out the more than 1000 references on all the techniques presented. I wrote this book for hydrogeologists, engineers, graduate students, government officials, miners, geoecologists, chemical engineers – in the broadest sense: you. This book is a translation of an original German edition. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision and a thorough copy editing and update by the author ensured that the contents are correctly represented.

The present book deals with various, very significant topics of coal fly ash beneficiation, such as treatment of acid mine drainage with coal fly ash, toxic metal adsorption using coal fly ash, recovery of metals from coal fly ash and phytoreclamation of abandoned acid mine drainage site after treatment with coal fly ash, the status of research in coal fly ash utilization and applications and some other related topics in this growing and increasingly important research area. Overall, coal fly ash beneficiation has come to assume an important role in most areas of waste management research today. Continued growth and emphasis on scientific research is expected in all areas of waste management and conversion of waste to wealth technologies.