Comment by pixl97
6 hours ago
>literally use an excavator to
That might be understating the issue. The excavators we use to dig coal have been, and are monstrous. Thousand ton beasts requiring a fleet of support vehicles around them and the ever increasing depth of overburden.
Also the fly ash leftovers tend to get piled up and occasionally break lose in human and ecological disasters at massive scales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288
This is the same kind of scale as those fictional "Spice Harvesters" in Dune. Look around for a photo where there's a person or a familiar object you know the size of in the same frame as the Bagger 288
That is due to the inevitable scaling that occurs with volume, it is not necessary in any sort of physics sense.
You can try it yourself - you can literally harvest/mine coal with a shovel yourself in many areas, and burn it in a fireplace if you don’t mind how dirty it is.