TOTAL VALORIFICATION OF ASHES AND BREEZES FROM THERMOELECTRIC PLANTS

11th International Multidisciplinary Scientific GeoConference SGEM2011, www.sgem.org, SGEM2011 Conference Proceedings/ ISSN 1314-2704, June 20-25, 2011, Vol. 1, 1211-1218 pp

ABSTRACT

The national and international economic crisis has increased the interest in utilizing coal
to produce electric or thermic energy, but that means also an increased pollution.
According to the U.E. normative, Romania’s environmental problems with the SOX, NOX, CO, CO2 emissions from the thermoelectric plants will be partially solved by 2012. However there will remain some important sources of pollution such as ash and breeze deposits, which have a negative impact upon the microclimate and upon all the
environmental factors. The object of this paper is to establish a technology to permit the integral salvage of the ashes and breezes resulted from the energetic coal burning, reducing and eliminating the necessity of using ash and breeze ponds, which actually
reach 250 ha and can store up to 30 million tones of waste. The technology for the salvage of this industrial waste, with high content of heavy, precious and radioactive metals, contains: physic procedures: separation in magnetic and gravitational field: in
order to obtain some concentrates industrially useful and a sterile that can be used in the construction materials industry. The similitude between the chemical, mineralogical and hydraulic properties of the ashes and those of the classical construction materials, make
it possible to use the “cheaper material” especially to make thermo and phonoizolated products but also some construction materials BCfA (cellular concrete without autoclaving) with superior characteristics. It turns out that there are some elements from the actinide series that can generate an increased radioactivity level in the ash deposit,
which, using the technology proposed in this paper, may lead to a concentration of this chemical elements in a product that can be valorified afterwards.

Keywords: pollution, breeze deposits, impact, radioactive metals, sterile, cheaper material, ash deposit