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RE: Nuclear Energy: Congrats, President Obama - 2/17/2010 6:28:08 AM   
kittinSol


Posts: 16926
Status: offline 		I see your point... considering how much Americans LOATHE investing in public services, it's probably a good thing nuclear stations aren't more prevalent - they'd be in the same state as the bridges. Except worse . Or else, they'd be operated by Walmart.

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RE: Nuclear Energy: Congrats, President Obama - 2/17/2010 6:49:55 AM   
mnottertail


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Status: offline 		http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=first-oxyfuel-clean-coal-power-plan-2008-09-04

I hope this can be improved, nitrogen and carbon will do more good underground than releasing into the air.

my ultimate problem with nuke is well known, given terrorism and our prediliction to do things to draw terrorists towards us.

Ron

< Message edited by mnottertail -- 2/17/2010 6:53:04 AM >

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RE: Nuclear Energy: Congrats, President Obama - 2/17/2010 6:54:55 AM   
samboct


Posts: 1817
Joined: 1/17/2007
Status: offline 		"Oh, I don't know, clean coal is not today, but by example there is a test plant in Germany doing pretty well, and I could see a plasma furnace for coal that would go a long way towards, and clean coal is not impossible, but it is in our future, cause thats whats on the cart, we just need to get people actually working on the hows whys stuff.

Ron"

Hi Ron

Don't believe the BS of the coal industry.  Anybody who's taken physical chemistry will spot the problem with clean coal- there's an entropy cost of separating CO2 from the rest of the waste stream (predominantly nitrogen.)  You can't get around entropy- it's why perpetual motion machines will never work.  All the examples I've seen of "clean coal" plants separate out a small percentage of CO2 so the entropy cost isn't too bad, but if you scale it up, it gets pretty ugly.  GE's estimates were on the order of 15%, NREL's (no longer on website) were around 20%, and in practice, might be closer to 25-33%.

Since generating turbines are designed to function with a certain amount of input energy if this drops off, there are issues with lifetime and efficiency- they're supposed to hit a certain voltage.  If they don't there are lots of downstream problems.

Summary:
1)  It is fundamentally impossible- note- not impractical- but impossible to retrofit existing plants to not emit CO2 without increases in the size of boilers to maintain current power levels.  At this point, new plants make much more sense.
2)  The entropy costs of completely capturing CO2 are at least 15% and likely much higher.
3)  Nobody has figured out how to store CO2 long term and safely.  Any parallels with the petroleum/natural gas industry break down because CO2 has different chemistry than methane- and we're talking very long time scales here.  Got to be in centuries- CO2 has a very long residence time in the atmosphere- on the order of 75 years.

Sam

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RE: Nuclear Energy: Congrats, President Obama - 2/17/2010 7:02:59 AM   
mnottertail


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Status: offline 		OH, hold the phone, I understand the cost of removing nitrogen, it is a problem, and has every chance of being solved if we put our minds to it.

I am not buying into the coal industry, or the nuclear power industry in that way.

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RE: Nuclear Energy: Congrats, President Obama - 2/17/2010 11:44:13 AM   
samboct


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Joined: 1/17/2007
Status: offline 		Hi Ron

That's just a transfer of the entropy cost from the back end of the combustion process to the front end.

The theory of removing N2 is sound, and it has worked in other industries- typically in very high temperature processes. In practice- each coal plant will require a massive amount of oxygen about 2 1/2 times as much oxygen by mass as coal! The reaction is C(s) + O2 (g) --> CO2 (g), Well, carbon has a molecular weight of 12 and oxygen has a molecular weight of 32. You want to figure out how expensive that amount of oxygen is going to be and what kind of physical plant it will take? Recall that oxygen is a gas and that coal is a solid- and coal is therefore two orders of magnitude more dense than oxygen. And there's an energy cost to compressing oxygen to make it more tractable to handle in volume. I have a sneaking suspicion that the pressure vessel needed for the amount of oxygen is going to be several orders of magnitude larger than anything that's been built before. And again-this is not a possible retrofit for existing plants which is where the problem lies- it's some fanciful new plant that may make a nuke plant look cheap.

And if you're worried about terrorism- how on earth do you protect a facility thats going to be storing millions of metric tonnes of CO2 (nearly 3x the mass of the coal that you extracted in the first place) from having some towelhead drill a hole, dump a fertilizer truck full of ammonium nitrate down the hole- and then have him jump down the hole with a lit match yelling Allah Akhbar or whatever it is towelheads yell when they blow themselves and us up? If the geological storage facility cracks, you've now got a cloud of CO2 that will kill anything that needs oxygen in its path for hours- perhaps days, before it disperses enough (depending on the breeze of course.) Nuke plants are safe by comparison, they're much smaller, much stronger, and the waste is hard to handle and very hard to disperse effectively. Dirty bombs are scary, but I think the reality is much less frightening than a massive CO2 repository.


Sam

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RE: Nuclear Energy: Congrats, President Obama - 2/17/2010 11:59:06 AM   
mnottertail


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Joined: 11/3/2004
Status: offline 		part of what they are doing is recycling the co2 thru the burner to extract more o2

and carbon is real handy for any carbon based life form, in proper use.

now, here are a few things they are doing now, that they are actually working on the problem, the widely available tech you got is not the endall beall.

http://www.gizmag.com/research-carbon-dioxide-methanol/11483/
http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/ChemTech/Volume/2009/11/co2_conversion.asp
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070418091932.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/16/carbon-dioxide-storage-rock
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl803258p
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/23996/

some of these might pan out, and some (many) may not, but it isnt the end of the line.



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RE: Nuclear Energy: Congrats, President Obama - 2/17/2010 12:14:50 PM   
samboct


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Joined: 1/17/2007
Status: offline 		Hi Ron

Sorry- I went through about half of those links and gave up. The science writers often have journalistic backgrounds and have a lot of trouble understanding the science. I know- I get asked to review stuff on occasion.

A few points-

Yes, it's possible to turn CO2 into a fuel- this is what nature did starting with photosynthesis. Energy from the sun is used to make a higher energy compound (and lower entropy!) from CO2. Whether it's wood, biomass, whatever- it's all the same idea. But you can't use energy from the grid to take CO2 to make a fuel- that would be a perpetual motion machine. CO2 is energetically downhill from things like methanol, wood, ethanol, gasoline, coal, etc. that's why we can get energy out of these things when we combust them.

In terms of technological progress- I am content not to worry that the laws of thermodynamics will be rewritten. There are thermodynamic limits on any reaction. In some cases, our efficiency is pretty good already. For example, wind turbine efficiency is pushing 60% which is within a few percent of theoretical max. (Can't capture all the wind energy in a given volume.) Plants are actually quite effective- they turn about three quarters of the energy in sunlight into chemical energy. Silicon solar cells suck- they're down about 22% efficiency in the lab- but the best multijunction stuff is breaking 40%- and I think there are some gallium arsenide cells in space that are about 50% efficient. Note that a good coal plant is about 40% efficient- and as noted earlier, any carbon capture technology retrofitted will reduce efficiency significantly.

I'm keeping my eyes peeled on stuff that doesn't use existing generation technology, because I think the current stuff has largely shot its bolt. Biofuels are an interesting area and do show promise. But a decent electric car may negate the need for these fuels.

Sam

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RE: Nuclear Energy: Congrats, President Obama - 2/17/2010 8:43:16 PM   
AnimusRex


Posts: 2165
Joined: 5/13/2006
Status: offline 		You guys are using words waaayy above my pay grade, but one thing seems clear to me; that at the end of the day, the amount of stuff we burn, the amount of natural resources we consume is unsustainable.

Regardless of how clean or dirty, of how responsibly it is done, if every single American and Chinese and European and Indian and Brazilian and Russian consumes 3,500 calories, burns 12,000 kilowatt hours of electricity, 500 gallons of water, and so on and so forth, we will need 6 Earths just to keep abreast of what we need now.

Which is really the point you all are making, I guess- that even if we build 50 new nuclear power plants, making electricity cheaper will result in squandering it ever more extravagantly, resulting in larger more wasteful buildings, more lawns, more packaging, more disposable whatnot, and ultimately ever more consumption.

Which is why, even though I love Obama and pray fervently to his graven image every night, he is dead wrong on this issue.

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RE: Nuclear Energy: Congrats, President Obama - 2/17/2010 8:46:04 PM   
pyroaquatic


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From: Pyroaquatica
Status: offline 		The sun is a giant nuclear reactor.

It does not matter who is 'elected', the puppeteer still fiddles with the strings of the puppet.


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RE: Nuclear Energy: Congrats, President Obama - 2/17/2010 10:58:57 PM   
willbeurdaddy


Posts: 11894
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Status: offline 		If he follows through and they get online, its the first thing hes done right. I dont care if his motivation is to give his union buddies jobs or line the pockets of his cronies invested in Southern Co, just get it done.

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RE: Nuclear Energy: Congrats, President Obama - 2/17/2010 11:11:52 PM   
Archer


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Status: offline 		If the French can make the 80% electric from nuclear energy mark, then what is keeping us from doing it?
They have the same waste stream issues and obviously they have waste they dispose of.

But wind nor solar will get us to the capacity volume to replace all the electricity we consume from coal anytime in the next decade.
Only Nuclear power has that kind of capacity ready to put to work quiclkly enough to replace the coal fired plants capacity.


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RE: Nuclear Energy: Congrats, President Obama - 2/17/2010 11:15:54 PM   
philosophy


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quote:

ORIGINAL: TheHeretic

It isn't a lack of government loan guarantees that have stopped our construction of these plants, but the regulation and endless lawsuits. 


....yup, because a deregulated nuclear industry is such a good idea. After all, US industry has shown time and time again that shareholder concerns are secondary to safety issues.


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RE: Nuclear Energy: Congrats, President Obama - 2/17/2010 11:17:32 PM   
willbeurdaddy


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quote:

ORIGINAL: philosophy


quote:

ORIGINAL: TheHeretic

It isn't a lack of government loan guarantees that have stopped our construction of these plants, but the regulation and endless lawsuits. 


....yup, because a deregulated nuclear industry is such a good idea. After all, US industry has shown time and time again that shareholder concerns are secondary to safety issues.




False dichotomy.

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RE: Nuclear Energy: Congrats, President Obama - 2/17/2010 11:19:27 PM   
philosophy


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Archer

If the French can make the 80% electric from nuclear energy mark, then what is keeping us from doing it?
They have the same waste stream issues and obviously they have waste they dispose of.




...because shipping nuclear waste across the Atlantic is a far trickier proposition than shipping it across the Channel. Most of that crap is sorted out at Windscale in Cumbria, UK.
Also, if nuclear energy in France operated in the same fiscal environment as other energy sources it'd be losing money hand over fist. France subsidises the nuclear industry in a gigantic manner.

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RE: Nuclear Energy: Congrats, President Obama - 2/17/2010 11:20:28 PM   
philosophy


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quote:

ORIGINAL: willbeurdaddy


quote:

ORIGINAL: philosophy


quote:

ORIGINAL: TheHeretic

It isn't a lack of government loan guarantees that have stopped our construction of these plants, but the regulation and endless lawsuits. 


....yup, because a deregulated nuclear industry is such a good idea. After all, US industry has shown time and time again that shareholder concerns are secondary to safety issues.




False dichotomy.


Badly constructed defence based on free market ideology.

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Profile   Post #: 35
RE: Nuclear Energy: Congrats, President Obama - 2/17/2010 11:24:09 PM   
willbeurdaddy


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Status: offline
quote:

ORIGINAL: philosophy


quote:

ORIGINAL: willbeurdaddy


quote:

ORIGINAL: philosophy


quote:

ORIGINAL: TheHeretic

It isn't a lack of government loan guarantees that have stopped our construction of these plants, but the regulation and endless lawsuits. 


....yup, because a deregulated nuclear industry is such a good idea. After all, US industry has shown time and time again that shareholder concerns are secondary to safety issues.




False dichotomy.


Badly constructed defence based on free market ideology.


Characterize it however you like. It was a false dichotomy, period.

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Profile   Post #: 36
RE: Nuclear Energy: Congrats, President Obama - 2/17/2010 11:25:36 PM   
willbeurdaddy


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quote:

ORIGINAL: philosophy


quote:

ORIGINAL: Archer

If the French can make the 80% electric from nuclear energy mark, then what is keeping us from doing it?
They have the same waste stream issues and obviously they have waste they dispose of.




...because shipping nuclear waste across the Atlantic is a far trickier proposition than shipping it across the Channel. Most of that crap is sorted out at Windscale in Cumbria, UK.
Also, if nuclear energy in France operated in the same fiscal environment as other energy sources it'd be losing money hand over fist. France subsidises the nuclear industry in a gigantic manner.


None of which says anything about its viability or profitability in the US. The highest profit drain for nuclear utilities in the US was decommissioning costs.

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RE: Nuclear Energy: Congrats, President Obama - 2/17/2010 11:27:49 PM   
Archer


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Status: offline 		and what forces the US to ship to Cumbria in the UK?

Waste reactor material is being handled and stored. They can't be doing anything the US couldn't replicate handling wise.

In the US nuclear power seems to be making a profit according to the articles I have been reading, so no subsidies needed.

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RE: Nuclear Energy: Congrats, President Obama - 2/17/2010 11:33:15 PM   
Archer


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Status: offline 		And still there is no way that within the next 25 years they can build enough solar or wind capacity (in megawatt hours) to replace the capacity of coal fired plants.

If you want to be able to take coal plants off line in the next 3 decades even you'll have to do it with nuclear power.

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RE: Nuclear Energy: Congrats, President Obama - 2/18/2010 12:11:15 AM   
DomKen


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From: Chicago, IL
Status: offline
quote:

ORIGINAL: Archer

and what forces the US to ship to Cumbria in the UK?

Waste reactor material is being handled and stored. They can't be doing anything the US couldn't replicate handling wise.

In the US nuclear power seems to be making a profit according to the articles I have been reading, so no subsidies needed.


Last I saw if the cost of handling and disposal of radioactive waste was paid for by the operators rather than the taxpayers the plants would be very much in the red.

BTW France is still simply storing its high level waste, at a site in la Hague. Sooner or later somebody has to find a permanent solution or nobody can keep using nuclear power.

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Profile   Post #: 40
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