Over significant areas of the UK and western Europe, anthropogenic alteration of the subsurface by mining of coal has occurred beneath highly populated areas which are now considering a multiplicity of 'low carbon' unconventional energy resources including shale gas and oil, coal bed methane, geothermal energy and energy storage. To enable decision making on the 3D planning, licensing and extra...

Investigations into the cause and control of the production of sulfuric acid in effluents of coal mines, and the effects of such effluents upon streams were begun in 1946.1 Working and abandoned mines of Western Pennsylvania alone contribute an estimated million tons of sulfuric acid per year to the drainage area of the Ohio River. A field survey of mine drainage and receiving streams was inaug...

Blending of imported and domestic coal is becoming of increasing importance. Until recently, coal blending in power stations was mainly adopted to reduce the cost of generation and increase the use of indigenous or more readily available coal. Low-grade (high ash) coal can be mixed with higher grade (imported) coal without deterioration in thermal performance of the boiler, thus reducing the co...

OBJECTIVE To assess whether the recent increases in the prevalence of coal workers' pneumoconiosis (CWP) in the USA reflect increased measured exposures over recent decades, and to identify other potential causative factors. METHODS The observed CWP prevalence was calculated for 12,408 underground coal miner participants in the Coal Workers' Health Surveillance Program for the period 2005-200...

Many bituminous coal mine effluents contain, along with other ions, high concentrations of ferrous iron. This is brought into solution by sulfuric acid produced by the oxidation of sulfuritic material, possibly iron sulfides in part, occurring with bituminous coal (Leathen et al., 1952). The ferrous iron is oxidized by bacteria to the ferric state at a more rapid rate than can be accounted for ...

Recently heard at a tutorial in our field: “It cost me less than one hundred bucks to annotate this using Amazon Mechanical Turk!” Assertions like this are increasingly common, but we believe they should not be stated so proudly; they ignore the ethical consequences of using MTurk (Amazon Mechanical Turk) as a source of labor. Manually annotating corpora or manually developing any other linguis...

The present study aimed to investigate the correlation of smoking with cumulative total dust exposure (CTE) and cumulative abnormal rate of pulmonary function in coal-mine workers. A total of 376 coal-mine workers were recruited as the observational group, while 179 healthy workers in other industries were selected as the control group. All the workers underwent pulmonary function testing to de...

Efforts to delineate underground mine workings in the vicinity of tailings impoundments has relied on available maps and confirmatory boreholes. Often the characterization of regions between boreholes remains suspect or entirely unknown. Surface geophysical measurements can be used to supplement the borehole data and better delineate these intermediate zones. Furthermore, geophysics can be used...

Fourteen samples of No. 6 coal seam were obtained from the Chuancaogedan Mine, Jungar Coalfield, Inner Mongolia, China. The samples were analyzed by optical microscopic observation, X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscope equipped with an energy-dispersive X-ray spectrometer (SEM-EDS), inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) and X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) ...

The alveolar macrophage (AM) is a critically important cell playing a prominent role in lung inflammation via the production of oxygen radicals, enzymes, arachidonic acid metabolites, and also a large panel of cytokines. Among interstitial lung disorders, silicosis and coal workers' pneumoconiosis (CWP) are the most widespread fibrotic lung diseases. Although their pathophysiology remains incom...