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Nucular Hydrogen Economy
Mark Baard writes "The hydrogen economy will at least in part be based on nukes. The DOE will build a pilot high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor (HTGR), which theoretically can co-generate electricity and hydrogen, side by side, inside a cheap modular unit."
Here is the text of the article...
On a sunny Saturday morning 30 years from now, you may decide to take your family for a ride to the country. You'll still be driving a car, and you may still get stuck in traffic. But that's OK, because the only thing you'll be breathing in is water vapor from the car in front of you.
Welcome to the seemingly benign "hydrogen economy" President Bush has touted over the past year. Pollution-free cars. Abundant fuel. A cleaner environment.
But there's one factor the president isn't talking much about: the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new nuclear power plants his administration imagines making all of that hydrogen.
The Bush administration and Senate Republicans want to give billions of taxpayer dollars to the nuclear industry to make high-temperature, gas-cooled reactors (HTGRs), which--theoretically--can co-generate electricity and hydrogen, side by side, inside cheap modular reactors. Advocates of the plants say they wouldn't need the expensive protections required for traditional models.
This summer, the Senate is expected to vote on the Energy Policy Act of 2003, which includes funding for new HTGR plants and the construction of a pilot co-generation facility to be run by the U.S. Department of Energy in Idaho. The bill was sent to the full chamber by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last month.
Spokespeople for the committee and the DOE say the aim is to cut greenhouse emissions, since energy companies continue to use coal and natural gas in making hydrogen. But small, modular HTGR plants may do it more efficiently and cleanly, they said.
That all depends, of course, on how you define "cleanly." To extract hydrogen from water--to get the H out of the H2O--you first have to make steam. The modular nuclear plants would do that without polluting the air, but would also leave behind radioactive waste.
Scientists have not yet designed a nuclear facility whose safety and efficiency trumps that of gas or coal. One proposal, from MIT, has a nuclear reactor sitting under the same roof as a chemical plant bubbling with sulfuric acid and hydrogen iodide.
Each modular plant would produce as little as one-tenth of the energy of a single light-water reactor. And since by some estimates the United States would need the equivalent of 500 light-water reactors to produce enough hydrogen, it may take thousands of modular plants to get the same job done.
The nuke industry, not surprisingly, says it's interested in joining the hydrogen economy. Entergy, the second-largest nuclear energy producer in the U.S., hopes to break ground on its co-generation Freedom Reactor within five years.
But only the feds seem willing to pay for the research and development that would make the futuristic plants a reality. "We generate electricity," said a spokesperson for Exelon, the country's largest producer. "We're not heavily involved in funding research and development."
Taxpayers may soon be. The Senate's energy bill affords the DOE $1.1 billion to build an HTGR co-generation nuclear plant at its Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory within 10 years.
The bill also proposes to kick-start a nuke renaissance by subsidizing half the cost of six to 10 new HTGR power plants in the United States.
"We need to move toward clean-air energy sources that are more reliable than wind and solar," said Marnie Funk, a spokesperson for New Mexico Republican senator Pete Domenici, chair of the energy and resources committee.
Renewable energy sources, like wind and solar, are emissions-free. But the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. Many people also see wind turbines as an eyesore: Cape Codders are fighting plans for an offshore wind farm that would obstruct their views. "And then you've got the bird issue," said Funk. Wind turbines earned some notoriety by killing as many as 50 golden eagles along California's Altamont Pass during the 1990s.
Today, w
Wouldn't want to contradict you but methane is CH4 and the reaction is:
CH4 + H2O => CO + 3H2
H2O + CO => CO2 + H2
which means at the end:
CH4 + 2H2O => CO2 + 4H2
see: http://www.howstuffworks.com/fuel-processor2.htm
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
As far as I'm aware, heating methane to 1600K produces acetylene and hydrogen.
You say
At the moment, hydrogen is very hard to extract from sea water. Basically you need to put in all the energy (more in fact) that you want to get out. The problem is that hydrogen is a great storage form for energy (like oil, batteries, gas, nuclear materials, flywheels) but not a source of energy (like sunshine, wind, waves...). We can use nuclear materials and oil as if they were a source of energy because we have access to vast amounts of them, but they are not really sources, and will run out.
Until we get either some revolutionary new method of extracting the hydrogen (wasn't there a story here about some method involving a laser heating up a large tank of water on an artificial island and breaking up the water molecules?), or we get access to the atmospheres of planets like Jupiter which have many earth masses' worth of hydrogen, hydrogen remains a storage form, unusable as a source.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Octane, the most common component of gasoline is C8H18 (ASCI drawing:)
H H H H H H H H
| | | | | | | |
H-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-H
| | | | | | | |
H H H H H H H H
The article's relentless insistence on how THE GOVERNMENT MUST MUST MUST IMMEDIATELY LAUNCH A Manhattan-project-like effort to develop a hydrogen economy and SAVE AMERICA reminded me of those Anime Otakudom lines about "The World Will Be Saved By Steam!", or like various other rants that people go on, usually political or anti-drug. Sure, there's good technical discussion in there about fuel cells and storage issues, but that's not really what it's about.
So Remember, Kids, Hydrogen isn't the answer! Professor Steamhead says ""Steam. Water plus heat equals steam. Always remember this. The world can be saved by steam." and he's got a giant steam-powered mecha robot to do the job with!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If anyone can find a copy of it online, there's an excellent article from the Dec 8, 1978 issue of Science that provides some perspective. Someone cranked the numbers for the concentration of uranium in coal and America's yearly consumption, and (if I remember it correctly) they found that the trace levels of uranium were actually high enough that we'd have gotten more energy from using it in a fission reactor than from burning the coal. That means that it'd be far more than the amount of uranium consumed in reactors each year, and it's all just going straight into the atmosphere.
We keep the article posted in our undergraduate physics lab, just in case people start complaining about the weak little sources we use for radioactivity-based experiments.
Microsoft delenda est!
Before you complain about the spelling, note that the original article is headlined "It's Nucular" and the /. headline is echoing that on purpose.
:).
Okay, now you can post
I hope you aren't using ch3, as that is a unbalanced methyl group that would not be stable.
CH4 - Methane
C2H6 - Ethane
C3H8 - Propane
C4H10 - Butane
Are the most simple Alkane Hydrocarbons that we use fuel, and because of there saturation they are relatively stable, just flammable.
Medevo
Defending my brother and the good folks at the Voice: the spelling was a joke, a reference to the fact that this potential nuclear revival would result from a Bush administration initiative. I'm astonished so many smart people in this group didn't get an obvious joke, mocking the administration.
Erik Baard
actually, you DON'T want all that waste too close together in one place.
t tp://www.logtv.com/chelya/kyshtym.html
http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/7018-8.cfm
h
Too many fast neutrons + too much unstable material = Criticality
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The Most Contaminated
Spot on the Planet
Chelyabinsk Nuclear Disasters
Plutonium and Tritium for Soviet nuclear weapons is produced at three closely guarded locations, each of which includes a "closed" city of workers. These cities do not appear on maps, and until recently, travel to and from them was all but prohibited. Even now, foreign visitors have been allowed to see only two of the sites. Each of the sites has an official name, often including a number that indicates a post office address, but each was known by another name or names abroad as well as in the Soviet Union.
The complex officially known as Chelyabinsk-40 is located in Chelyabinsk province, about 15 kilometers east of the city of Kyshtym on the east side of the southern Urals. It is situated in the area around Lake Kyzyltash, in the upper Techa River drainage basin among numerous other interconnected lakes. Between Lake Kyzyltash and Lake Irtyash is Chelyabinsk-65, the military-industrial city once called Beria, but today inhabitants call it Sorokovka("forties town").
Another Mayak laboratory, the All-Union Institute of Technical Physics, is located just east of the Urals, 20 kilometers north of Kasli. It is better known by its post office box, Chelyabinsk-70. It was opened in 1955, shortly after the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory opened in the United States.
Chelyabinsk-65, was reported to have 83,000 inhabitants and "almost 100,000 people." Chelyabinsk-40, the reactor complex, covers some 90 square kilometers, according to a recent ministry report, and is run by the production association Mayak("beacon" or "lighthouse"). All the reactors are located near the southeast shore of Lake Kyzyltash and relied on open-cycle cooling: water from the lake was pumped directly through the core.
Probably fashioned after the U.S. Hanford Reservation in the state of Washington, Chelyabinsk-40 was the first Soviet plutonium production complex. Construction was started on the first buildings of the new city in November 1945. Some 70,000 inmates from 12 labor camps were reportedly used to build the complex. It is here that the physicist Igor Kurchatov, working under Stalin's deputy Lavrenti Beria, built the first plutonium production reactor, called "Anotchka" or A Reactor, in just 18 months.
The people of the Chelyabinsk Region have suffered no less than three nuclear disasters:
For over six years, the Mayak complex systematically dumped radioactive waste into the Techa River, the only source of water for the 24 villages which lined its banks. The four largest of those villages were never evacuated, and only recently have the authorities revealed to the population why they strung barbed wire along the banks of the river some 35 years ago. Today, as a result of Kyshtym-57's (a local environmental group lead by Louisa Korzhova) fight for radiation victims, a new law was introduced which allows residents of Muslyumovo to resettle themselves elsewhere. Unfortunately, the new law is limited only to one village.
In 1957, the area suffered its next calamity when the cooling system of a radioactive waste containment unit malfunctioned and exploded. About two million curies spread throughout the region, exposing to radiation over a quarter million people. Less than half of one percent of these people were evacuated, and some of those only after years had passed.
The third disaster came ten years later. The Mayak complex had been using Lake Karachay as a dumping basin for its radioactive waste since 1951. In 1967, a drought reduced the water level of the lake, and gale-force winds spread the radioactive dust throughout twenty-five thousand square kilometers, further irradiating half a million people with five million curies.
Chelyabinsk-40, or the Kyshtym complex is best known to the outside world as the site of a disastrous explosion in 1957, only recently acknowledged by Soviet officialdom. The tanks were entirely immersed in, and cooled by, water. But the monitoring system was defective.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Uh. A 3,000 megawatt hour nuclear power plant uses a whole lot less raw materials to build than the 100 to 200 square feet per *kilowatt hour* equivalent photovoltaic system.
There are some really nasty things that go into manufacturing some PV cells. Copper Indium Diselenide (copper, indium and selnium) requires hydrogen selenide which is a really really nasty gas. All that plastic, glass, arsenic, silicon, gallium, etc.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
No, actually it doesn't. Plutonium is an alpha emitter. Before the core was placed in the Fat Man bomb tested at Alamogordo people were passing the plutonium core around. It was about the size of a grapefruit and warm to the touch. Plutonium-239 doesn't emit a lot of radioactivity, that's why it has a 250,000 year half life. Now, if you want something that emits high energy particles that will kill you grab a hold of a chunk of cobalt-60 or strontium-90. Plenty of nice high energy gamma there for you, which is why these isotopes have relatively short half lives. The longer the half life, the less dangerous the isotope.
The danger of plutonium lies in the fact that it is a chemically toxic heavy metal that, when absorbed into the human body, ends up in your skeleton or your liver. This is very bad because even though alpha particles won't penetrate your skin they will fuck up your bone marrow and destroy your liver, so you can end up with a variety of unpleasant cancers. And since your entire blood supply is filtered through your liver those cancers will metastasize.
But as far as the "one pound of plutonium would kill everyone on Earth" myth goes it's bullshit. We've already dumped hundreds of pounds of plutonium into the atmosphere through nuclear testing, and last time I checked we weren't all dead. Unless of course this is heaven, in which case I am pissed because I can't get decent bandwidth in my neighborhood and you would think that God would take care of that.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
On the contrary, the 3 cents/kwh figure for wind includes real estate costs. The 12 cents/kwh for nuclear does not include the external waste disposal costs.
The 14,000 acre area is enough wind power for the enitre United States of America using today's most modern 2.5 megawatt turbines with syncronized directionality. The land below can usually be used for farming or grazing.
The surplus and battery banks necessary are insignificant. Although the wind stops and starts, it is usually blowing somewhere on the grid. Existing grid generators will probably be phased out over time as they are replaced with surplus turbines and PEM-electrolysis fuel cell hydrogen storage tanks.
France derives 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy. This is due to a long-standing policy based on energy security.
France is the world's largest net exporter of electricity, and gains some EUR 2.6 billion per year from this.
Wastes: The national policy is to reprocess spent fuel so as to recover uranium and plutonium for re-use and to reduce the volume of high-level wastes for disposal. Waste disposal is being pursued under France's 1991 Waste Management Act which sets the direction of research which is mainly undertaken at the Bure underground rock laboratory in eastern France, situated in clays. Another laboratory is researching granites.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
Assuming the plant detonates. This kind of reactor doesn't. Although a water cooled one of this type would be better (shutting off the cooling shuts off the reactor in this type).
"Just like I can tolerate only a certain amount of stupidity."
I wouldn't make comments like that if I were you.
"Plutonium, did you know that Marie Curie died in agony of multiple debilitating cancers"
Try reading sometime.
"How are you even able to post on Slashdot?"
Sure, he was wrong, but that question applies even more to you. You accused him of inaccuracy and didn't even fact-check... Are you implying that Nagasaki wasn't bombed by plutonium or that the thousands of deaths from a power plant melting downis more than the amount of deaths caused by a nuke?
"You can't "shut down" the process of radioactive decay"
No, but you can shut down what powers a nuclear plant, the chain reaction.
"It's all the peacenik's fault that we have nuclear waste"
Your reading comprehension sucks. Try reading what he says. Let me rephrase to make it easier on you. "If we recycle the waste, less of it will be in dumps, and the anti-nuke people make this impossible, even though it can be safe." And before you get stupid on me again, note that not all of it would be safe, etc. But some, if not most, of that can be recycled, but that option is blocked by paranoia.
"What does this have to do with a lot of outrageous misinformation regarding radioactivity and nuclear waste?"
He was explaining and giving examples of why he would be considered 'green'. This is called an informal version of 'establishing credentials". He has. You haven't. I have... at the least, I've shown I know how to use google, which you have failed to do.
"You've got a long way to go yourself, pal"
Pot, stop talking to the kettle, you're giving me a headache.
"What the hell does this have to do with nuclear waste?"
I don't know, sewage vs. nuke waste, seems a fairly decent analogy to me. Maybe I'm just smarter than you.
I'm not shy, I'm stalking my prey
Actually, microwave transmission is not the way to go if you want a nice, compact system. Whilst the tranmitter gear is easier with microwaves, the receiver must be huge for any realistic system.
A better bet is lasers with tuned photovoltaic cells at the receiver. You can get upwards of 80% efficiency and the spot beam diameter at 36000km (geostationary orbit - sunlight about 99.5% of the time) is only about 140m.
The best bit about doing it in space is actually the fact that you can use low efficiency cells (which are cheap to manufacture). Because you have no real space restrictions you can make your array as large as you want. It turns out it is cheaper to make a large array of low efficiency cells than a small array of high efficiency cells.
As for why NASA hasn't done it yet - you'd have to ask them and your politicians. I am an Australian - so NASA isn't responsible to me. One would guess that it is because of the original studies combined with a need to complete the ISS before moving onto anything else. The other reason is because there isd no reason for NASA to do it. Something like this should be built by private industry - not the government.
Eating and injection actually avoid some of the most dangerous effects.
Plutonium is primarily(*) an alpha emitter, which means the radiation gets absorbed in a really short distance.
The worst thing you can do to yourself with a small amount of plutonium is to inhale it in finely divided form. Then zillions of particles can lodge in your lungs and each one will zap the neighboring millimeter of tissue until it finally goes cancerous.
In case you're wondering, last time I looked at a toxicology reference, plutonium likes to settle out of the bloodstream in bone.
So the answer to your question is basically that swallowing X amount of an organic toxin that targest your metabolism can be worse, *in the short term*, than swallowing the same amount of a heavy radioactive metal.
(*) There's also interesting things like neutrons from spontaneous fission in some isotopes, etc.
google up 'pebble bed reactor' and you will find that current cutting edge designs take small uranium 235 balls and coat them in a rugged heat resistant cladding that has a higher melting temperature than the heat produced when the coolant all goes away and they're just sitting in air.
Bottom line, a catastrophic coolant failure results in zero meltdown.
I was recently involved in a class debate on whether it is necessary to increase nuclear power production threefold to meet a carbon free economy by 2100. It seems many of the topics raised in this thread deal with points we covered in our project, e.g. safety and efficiency concerns, hydrogen production, economic feasibility, etc.
As my portion of the project dealt with safety and proliferation, I can say that at least from safety standpoint, building newer nuclear plants is a better solution to accomplish these goals than sticking with fossil fuels. For example, existing coal plants cause 15,000 premature deaths annually in the U.S. alone. Now, given the probability of 400 deaths in the event of a nuclear meltdown, this would require over 25 meltdowns per year for nuclear power to be as dangerous as the coal industry. Currently the probability of a meltdown is 1 in 20,000 reactor years, or once every 30 years.
But even if you doubt these conclusions, you can rest assured that the effects of greenhouse gases would be far more severe than an incident involving localized exposure of nuclear waste (however unlikely that may be). Keep in mind the last ice age occured when the average global temperature was as little as five degrees (C) less. And currently the global temperature is rising at a rate that tops all previous historical trends.
"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens." - Baha'u'llah