When in 1939 war did break out between Germany on the one hand, and Britain and France on the other, President Franklin D. Roosevelt dutifully invoked the Neutrality Acts. However, he believed that this was a fundamentally different war from World War I.
Another advanced coal technology is coal gasification, a process in which coal is converted to a gas (called syngas) before it is burned, making it easier to separate CO2 as a relatively pure gas before power is generated.
This new technology allowed the combustion of poorer grade of coal with less ash production and greater overall efficiency. Presently, coal power is still based on the same methods started over 100 years ago, but improvements in all areas have brought coal power to be the inexpensive power source used so widely today.