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Making coke from oil does not make any sense at all, unless as in petcoke it is the remaining waste product.
https://www.worldcoal.org/file... (70% of all COAL used in steel production ... not even mentioning how much coke is coming form other sources)

Why you get modded down, I don't know. There is a second /. account mimicing a binary number. One of them (you) is only making fun posts which are a so sarcastic it is difficult to grasp them as fun ... most of the time he (you?) gets modded up and down ... :P

70% according to the coal lobby https://www.worldcoal.org/coal...

And even if you total "all other industrial" use of coal other than power, that's only 15% of the total coal being used in the US: https://www.eia.gov/totalenerg...

The other 85% was to produce 1/3 of US power, and that use is on the slide.

If you lose the power production, it won't even be economically viable to mine the 15%, it would be cheaper to buy it in from China.

Listen to what I'm saying here

Yeah, I heard you the first time. Repeating yourself doesn't amplify your point. Try actually citing some evidence against the solutions presented, rather than flatly declaring them to be unworkable, because clearly I disagree.

- "inefficient": 80% sounds fine to me. 20% extra capacity is hardly insurmountable, and less so as prices drop further. Consider that coal plants are only 33-40% efficient, yet somehow they're workable.
- "environmentally messy": I doubt anything you could cite here comes slightly close to the disaster that is fossil fuels, from mining through refining and transport to burning them into pollution and CO2.
- "do not scale": Pumped hydro is obviously grid-scale. Flow batteries can be arbitrary capacity. Flywheels, supercaps etc can be added in any quantity desired, needing only space (and can even be underground). Many of these options can also scale down to something a consumer could purchase and use, giving additional decentralisation and redundancy.

I prefer to measure it as .006 USCoalBurningEmissionsYears.

At least use proper units! It's in Japan, so use Japanese coal consumption for power plants instead of US.

http://www.worldcoal.org/resou...

So about 0.04 JapaneseCoalBurningEmissionYears or 15 JapaneseCoalBurningEmissionDays

Tuna fish is one of the healthiest cheap foods you can eat - or rather would be EXCEPT for the mercury in it which comes from coal.

On plus side, it would not be that cheap if it wasn't for coal pollution! (sadly, this is true)

http://www.worldcoal.org/resou...

Coal provides around 30% of global primary energy needs, generates 41% of the world's electricity and is used in the production of 70% of the world's steel.

Total Global Coal Production

    * 7831Mt (2012e)
    * 7608Mt (2011)
    * 4677 (1990)

Coal burning worldwide is *increasing* (just like oil and gas), but fanatics would rather blame nuclear power for pollution, including carbon pollution :S

Coal burning plants are more radioactive than nuclear power plants because small bits of thorium are in coal and when you burn it

While I am 100% for replacing coal and other fossil fuels with nuclear and renewables, and while the above is factually correct, it is misleading. Then again, there are campaigners against nuclear power that are far more misleading than your comments (they say things like: "natural" radiation is OK, but same amount of "artificial" radiation from nuclear reactors will give you cancer!)

The US uses about 1/7 of the world's production of coal. http://www.worldcoal.org/resou... What about the 6/7th of the world production with China burning more than 3 times the US?

Thanks but I'll pass on destroying the US economy so environmentalist wackos can get over their self-loathing and white guilt...

What a load of bullshit.

1. Where was the wind during the last major heatwave in the US midwest? Oh right, it was a high pressure system stalled over here. 50+GW install base of wind produced whopping 6GW of power. Gas plants had to be maxed out and 7+GW of power had to be bought at extra expense because somehow the wind failed to even provide 15% of its ratted capacity when it mattered.

1a. Somehow most of the wind around here is now shut down, because it is below -20C and people need power to heat their homes.

3. Militarism? Really? Are you crazy?

4. Cost overruns. Yes, everyone likes years of delays (which cause cost overruns!) because idiots can't agree on regulations.

You are an example of an idiot that cannot be convinced to be rational. All your point are so twisted and irrational, that you are firmly in the land of dogma, nor rationality.

Do you even care about pollution and carbon emissions or are you just "anti-nukular"? Coal loves you either way.

http://www.worldcoal.org/resou...

They are working on it. We are digging up coal, oil and gas at faster rate than any time in history. And thanks opposition to clean, baseload like nuclear, this trend is just going to continue until we either turn Earth to Venus, or we run out of stuff to dig up.

http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/

Coal provides around 30% of global primary energy needs, generates 41% of the world's electricity and is used in the production of 70% of the world's steel.

Total Global Coal Production

        * 7831Mt (2012e)
        * 7608Mt (2011)
        * 4677 (1990)

Almost doubled since end of Cold War.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Carbon_Emissions.svg

Now, everyone say thank you to Greenpeace for fucking up the future for thousands of years with their opposition to nuclear power. Part of the carbon problem is squarely on their shoulders.

Your battery to wheels efficiency statistics conveniently left out the efficiency of the coal power plant that charged the batteries.

I was interested in your arguments up until this. The car batteries are charged by the grid, which can be powered by other energy sources than coal. In The Netherlands, for example, around 10% of energy comes from renewable sources, of which the largest contributors are biomass and wind. This excludes nuclear and imported energy, and production has been growing rapidly for the past decade.

Even if the grid was powered by 100% coal, then coal plants on average reach an efficiency of 28%, while high efficiency plants reach 45%. Both significantly better than internal combustion engines. http://www.worldcoal.org/coal-the-environment/coal-use-the-environment/improving-efficiencies/

LOL, power plants are nowhere near 80% efficient, more like 38% thermal to electric, add in a few percent transmission losses and you're not far off from ICE.

From the horse's mouth,

http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/

And all the envirowhackos are protesting "nukular" while coal usage alone increased 10% between 2010 and 2011.

      7,600,000,000 tons of coal, half mined and burned in China.

So all the bullshit that politicians talk about "limiting Global Warming" is just that - bullshit and hot air. What is even more sad, is the envirowhackos protesting things like Transcanada pipeline (tarsands) while completely ignoring the real problem - coal.

Someone said there is enough oil, gas and coal to turn Earth into another Venus. I guess full steam ahead on that plan!

In 2011 coal was the fastest growing form of energy outside renewables. Its share in global primary energy consumption increased to 30.3% - the highest since 1969.

Europe doesn't have much good coal left. After centuries of mining, only crappy coal is left behind. Germany, the world leader in brown coal (the worse of the worse) production and consumption..

http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/

44% of Germany's power production is still coal. But environmentalists say that nuclear is the problem and shut it down. Because we all know that nuclear power causes global warming, destroyed the ozone layer and killed millions in Chernobyl and destroyed the environment there. :S Right??

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/04/0426_060426_chernobyl.html

In reality, radiation "disaster areas" are off limits for humans only. And where there are no people, the wildlife seems to be doing quite well. As it was said before by people much smarter than myself - maybe the only way to save the amazon rainforest is to spread nuclear waste all over it.

The bottom line is nuclear disaster are short term problem for the generation(s) responsible for cutting corners and polluting the area. Overtime, the said pollution disappears (half-life mostly) and future generations don't pay the piper. They get renewed, pristine land instead. Unlike Global Warming, the highest danger is immediate not 400 years from now.

So I must say the anti-nuclear power environmentalists are complete whackos. Somewhere along the line they completely lost their rationality and their actions will fuck over all of us.

If a coal power plants fails, it is just a big fire, annoying and hard to put out BUT controllable.

There are approximately 2300 coal plants worldwide. Pollution from coal plants is estimated to kill 1 million people worldwide each year, or 435 per plant per year. Chernobyl is estimated by the World Health Organization to have caused/will cause 4,000 long-term deaths. So on average, a coal plant operating normally (without any big fires) will kill as many people as Chernobyl every 9 years.

A hydro dam that breaks will NOT cause the water to shoot up stream.

The worst power-generation related accident in history was the failure of a series of hydroelectric dams. Nearly a quarter million people killed. Equal to about 50 Chernobyls.

Chernobyl and Fukishama have now both shown that nuclear incidents are ALWAYS worse then estimated and even worse then admitted to afterwards by the nuclear lobby. You can build again on a flood plain, but radiated soil will be unusable for decades.

Have you looked at the land requirements for the different technologies? Japan has about 47.3 GW of nuclear power generating capacity. Nuclear has a capacity factor of 0.9, meaning it generates an average 42.6 GW for them throughout the year.

Solar has a capacity factor of about 0.15. If you're using 15% efficient panels (125 W/m^2), that means you're getting an average 19 W/m^2 throughout the year. To get an average 42.6 GW throughout the year, you'd need to cover 2.27 billion square meters of solar panels, or 2270 km^2. The evacuation zone around Fukushima is pi*(20km)^2 = 1256 km^2. If Japan replaced their nuclear capacity with solar, it would permanently make more land unusable for agriculture than the Fukushima accident.

Three Gorges Dam in China generates about 80 TWh per year, which works out to an average of 9.1 GW. The reservoir behind it is 1045 km^2. So for every GW of power it generates, that's 115 km^2 of land was flooded and made permanently unusable for agriculture. Dividing Fukushima's evacuation zone by Japan's nuclear power generation comes up with only 29 km^2 of land made unusable per GW of power generated.

So if your concern is km^2 of soil being made unusable for agriculture, you should be even more critical of solar and hydro than nuclear.

It is not as nuclear technology can't be made safe but since about the only argument in the past has been that it is cheap, costs are going to have to be cut in the hope that "it" never happens. That is not a very reliable method to prevent accidents.

The safety of any technology has to be assessed based on the severity of the danger(s), multiplied by the likelihood of accident, normalized by the amount of power generated. This can be simplified to number of people killed per unit of energy generated. The exoticness of the death is not a factor. Whether you're killed by radiation poisoning, a thrown turbine blade, a wall of water, or lung cancer, you're still dead.

When you analyze safety this way, nuclear turns out to be the safest power source. i.e. If you wish to generate X amount of energy generated, the technology which can do so with the fewest casualties is nuclear.

The notion that nuclear power is dangerous and we can't make it safe is a myth. Its incredible power density and the exotic nature of its dangers mean we are much more careful with it than with other technologies. This has resulted in (based on statistics from decades of operation) the safest form of power generation man has ever invented. If you use a different measure of safety, like number of people inj

The good thing is China will basically burn its entire coal reserves, 3rd largest in the world, within the next 30 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#World_coal_reserves
http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/

This means that China will only pollute 3x more than it currently has before it has to switch to something else, most likely nuclear.

Anyway, very few care about the environment in China so this will continue for foreseeable future.

PS. Remember leaded gasoline? At least now we only pollute our ground water with MTBE..

http://www.rense.com/politics6/usgrnd.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methyl_tert-butyl_ether_controversy

I'm not much for using ethanol as a fuel, but ethanol is used as a replacement for MTBE.

Of course this all boils down to too many people. 1,000,000 could pollute almost as much as they wanted without any issues. But 7000x as many can't even piss and shit into the oceans at once without causing a problem.

India:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf53.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_India

China:
http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf63.html
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-05/26/content_12580470.htm

China is starting to suffer brownouts due to policy to limit coal. China is using 50% of world coal production.

http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/
http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/ieo/world.html

I will disagree with EIA about coal in China. There is currently a new policy that says no more new coal power plants unless they replace old coal plants. New coal plants have to be more efficient too (eg. combined cycle, or coal gassification). China will also run out of its coal reserves within 30 years at current extraction rates.

China cannot grow coal because lack of the resource - they are become one of the largest importers of coal. This is expecting to cause brownouts this summer,

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/05/energy-shortages-spreading-rationing-in.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/30/us-china-power-price-idUSTRE74T1TG20110530

http://www.cnbc.com/id/43219200

I ask not to argue, but to have something to slap in the faces of all the treehuggers...

You can say I am a treehugger - a nuclear treehugger ;) I view fossil based energy sources as vastly more damaging than nuclear. I would prefer that fusion be available, but alas, you have to do with what you have. Renewables are OK but there is a problem when you have 8 billion people and each one wants to have their energy (transport, heat, air conditioning, food, etc).

Energy independence is paramount and if nuclear is the only option for base-load non-CO2 emitting energy source, then I have no choice but welcome nuclear.

Frankly, I don't know what the "green" crowd (anti-everything crowd these days - can't call them rational anymore) wants. In Germany now they are protesting that they don't want the power lines to move power from north to south because they look ugly.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13257804
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,757658,00.html

You made me curious.

The standard steel production process takes .6 tons of coke coal per ton of steel produced. http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/coal-steel-statistics/

And a 3.5 GW coal plant burns about 1.4 million million tons of coal a year.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/question481.htm

So building your wind mills will take at minimum the same amount of coal as running a coal plant for 6 months, just for the steel. I just thought that was interesting.

Won't mining the moon screw up all life on Earth, if we mine enough?

The mass of the moon is 7.36 * 10^22 kilograms. For comparison, the total annual world mining of coal is 5990 * 10^9 kg. Assuming the total mining on the moon would be as large (which I consider highly unlikely), then the mass of the moon would be reduced by about 0.000000008% per year. If that's not negligible, I don't know what is. Even if we had started this right after the dinosaurs died, we would have used up just half a percent of the moon. Assuming there's that much useful material on it to begin with.

With the US being one of the leading producers of coal, they should be the biggest proponent of such technology. This is in light of US industry/Economy going to the crap yard.

http://www.worldcoal.org/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=188

How much CO2 is human activity producing?

Google makes possible some rough estimates:

• Annual global coal production: 50,000 million metric tonnes (World Coal Institute)
• Global oil production: 85 million bbl/day, converts to the equivalent of 128 million metric tonnes of coal per year (as reported here and in other stories, with conversion from bbl/day to tonnage/yr here)
• Annual global natural gas production: 2,500,000 million cubic meters, converts to the equivalent of 2 million tonnes of coal per year (UNCTAD estimate of 2000, with conversion factors from above)
• Total annual release of fossil fuels into the global environment: 50,130 million tonnes
• Percentage of carbon in coal (by weight): 90% for anthracite, which is what these numbers are based upon (Encarta)
• Percentage of carbon in CO2 (by weight): 27%
• Annual introduction of CO2 into the biosphere from fossil fuels: 167,100 million metric tonnes
• Estimate of atmospheric CO2: 2,870,000 million metric tonnes (CDIAC)
• This suggests that the use of fossil fuels would have increased atmospheric CO2 by 5% in the last year, disregarding all other factors
• Measurements at Mauna Loa suggest that there is a net increase in atmospheric CO2 of about 1% per year (NOAA Global Monitoring Division).

Evidently something is buffering the increase in atmospheric CO2. While this has been beneficial in the sense that it has limited the impact of burning fossil fuels, it is also very worrisome since homeostatic mechanisms like this one tend to failover very rapidly into alternative stable patterns when the buffering capacity is exceeded. There is no way to determine how close we are to a tipping point. And there is no way to predict the nature of the new stable pattern. For instance, there are mechanisms that could kick in to significantly increase the Earth's albedo and toss us into an ice age, despite the increased greenhouse effect.

This is reintroduction of carbon into the biosphere that had been sequestered away for a hundred million years or more. The last time there was this much carbon in the biosphere was before the age of dinosaurs. It is possible that the last time there was this much carbon in the biosphere was before there was enough free oxygen for chordates.

oops, first link (UK data) should be here.

UK electricity generation by fuel: Nat Gas 38.7%, Coal 33.6% (source)
Total world electric generation by fuel: Coal 39.8%, Nat Gas 19.6% , Hyrdo 16.1%, Nuke 15.7%, Oil 6.7% (source)

Nations with high reliance on coal for electric generation (2005 unless stated): Poland 92%, South Africa 92% (2004), Australia 79% (or 85+%), China 78% (2004), Israel 75% (2004), Kazakhstan 70% (2004), India 69% (2004), Morocco 67% (2004), Czech Republic 61%, Greece 59%, USA 50%, Germany 49%

UK electricity generation by fuel: Nat Gas 38.7%, Coal 33.6% (source)
Total world electric generation by fuel: Coal 39.8%, Nat Gas 19.6% , Hyrdo 16.1%, Nuke 15.7%, Oil 6.7% (source)

Nations with high reliance on coal for electric generation (2005 unless stated): Poland 92%, South Africa 92% (2004), Australia 79% (or 85+%), China 78% (2004), Israel 75% (2004), Kazakhstan 70% (2004), India 69% (2004), Morocco 67% (2004), Czech Republic 61%, Greece 59%, USA 50%, Germany 49%