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Zero-emission Power Plants Proposed
ckbreckenridge writes "Supercompact, superfast, superpowerful turbines called ZEPPS (zero-emission power plants), designed to combat global warming, could help produce the electrical power needed to keep up with 21st century demand. They would consume methane and oxygen and produce liquid carbon dioxide, which could be sequestered underground. The current electricity grid would need to be replaced by a 'supergrid' across the USA, says Jesse H. Ausubel in The Industrial Physicist. Work on such a system should start as soon as possible, since CO2 levels leaped up 2 ppm in the past two years as global warming becomes more of a reality."
How is this diffrent then toxic waste from nuclear plants being stored under ground.... if we continue storring all this wouldn't eventually run out of place to put it?
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I guess I'll be the first one to day it...
You are going to combat the excessive amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere by...producing more CO2? Even 'sequestered underground,' that isn't much of an option.
But it creates *liquid* co2 that needs to be stored?
I thought it had CO2 as an output...?
Sequestering CO2 underground is tantamount to screwing our kids over -- again! Burying liquid CO2 will only result in it's boiling at a later point in time, at which point those that live above it will suffocate (this has already happened in Africa, I believe) and we'll get a really killer (as in bad) positive feedback mechanism with respect to climate change. Warm that area, warm it's contained CO2. That CO2 then boils, enters the atmosphere, and adds to the problem.
What we need is real solutions, not some half-assed band-aid effort. This is not a solution, but a cop-out.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
Why is it only areas that can be monopolized get wise energy choices like methanol? The reduced-pollution benefits of alcohol have been known for over 2 decades, yet no politician wants to force the issue on ethanol-burning transportation. Instead it's oil-powered hydrogen fuel cells.
* Don't you just love that phrase? It's like 'solutions'. My waste solution is to sequester my used food wrappers and banana peels in the city dump. Hey, that does sound better than stinking up the environment with trash, doesn't it? OTOH the next time I serve jury duty, now that I know what 'sequestered' means I'll fight 'em tooth an nail.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Storing CO2 emissions underground is not the same as zero emissions.
Moving oil from underground to the surface is not the same as "producing" oil.
And breeder reactors do not create more fuel than they consume.
These may all be worthy activities, but let's try not to engage in magical thinking.
As Barry Commoner observed: "Everything must go someplace. Everything is connected to everything else. There is no such thing as a free lunch."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The current trend is toward smaller, more distributed power, not massive single units. Distributing power generation closer to where it is needed reduces transmission line losses. Putting all your generation in a few, large units also causes problems when one or two of them go down at the same time. Can you say brownout?
The real solution is twofold: use more efficient powerplants (use waste heat from powerplants rather than dumping it into rivers and oceans), and more importantly, reduce consumption.
SCO, Microsoft, P2P, what's your hot button?
[Rant]
I am so very tired of overused adjectives, and "super" is the worst of them. Everything is super-something. Here we get three in a row, and another one further down in the summary paragraph. I don't even know what they mean anymore. How compact? How fast? How powerful compared to current units? This has gone on for years, and communicates nothing anymore. So this is my super-sized outburst.
[/Rant]
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The radioactivity is not the point. Plutonium is exeptional toxic (ie. poison).
TCAP-Abort
This is a fine idea, however, I can't help but wonder who will pay for "replacing" all of the existing plants.
Do you have any idea how many power plants (not to mention co-gens) there are in the US? A shitload. I know because I sell to them.
Great ideas come to fruition only if they can get funded. And we are talking a LOT of funding in this case. I mean, look at HRSG's (heat recovery steam generators). Those are here NOW -- and most plants can't "upgrade" because of the money.
There would be this huge supply of liquid CO2 stored underground. Nobody wants to fill the atmosphere with CO2, but at least some of it gets converted back to oxygen by plants. Won't we eventually have an oxygen shortage when too much oxygen has been used in the ZEPP combustion process and is now stored underground in the form of liquid CO2? Will some future generation need to find an energy-efficient way to release oxygen from CO2 or possibly water? Is this more difficult than the original problem? There must be a better way.
What a crock. This "solution" isn't a solution at all. If liquid CO2 in deep wells or the ground were a long-term sustainable storage mechanism for carbon, why is it that there is no such carbon storage existing naturally? Limestone, biomass, (living things, oil, gas), and oceans are all viable carbon storage media. I have no reason to believe the process described is a safe or effective way to store carbon so as to ensure indefinitely that it does not end up in the atmosphere.
It would be much better to continue research on other power sources, some of which are already commercially viable, or continue research on making lime from something other than limestone. If all that sounds too hard, plant a fucking tree. It'll do more long-term good than trying to sell people a way to make CO2 some future generation's problem.
There are only three kinds of energy available to us: solar, nuclear, and kinetic. The kinetic energy is that of the planet's motion through space; it includes a rotational component, its motion around the sun, the sun's motion around the galaxy, and the galaxy's motion through intergalactic space. We do not want to tap either of the first two (this would result in much greater climate change, since earth would turn more slowly and/or move closer to the sun), and the other two are impractical to exploit. Therefore we are left with either nuclear power or solar (light) energy and its immediate derivatives: wind, falling water, solar heat, and thermal differential. If we cannot find ways to make use of the five solar energy sources, or a way to make exploitation of nuclear energy safe, we will find our current living standards unsustainable within 200 years. This junk is just a temporary hack that would cost more in the long run than just finding cleaner energy sources.
Using plants to reduce the atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn't work because eventually all of that carbon would end up back in the atmosphere. With plants decaying or being burnt, CO2 is let off.
But say instead the plants are eaten, by growing fruit and vegetables (which is the obvious choice vs. non-edible plants). However the carbon will still make its way back to the atmosphere by being released by the animals that ate those plants.
This shows clearly what the real problem is. We are mining carbon from underground in the form of crude oil, and have no way of getting it back down there. Therefore we will always have a positive sum of carbon.
Until we find a way to convert CO2 into straight carbon, the carbon that we have released from underground will always be with us up here.
Zero emission power plants have existed for more than a century. They are called hydro dams. In some countries this is the main means of producing electricity. The only output is water which would have gone down the river anyway.
Do you think that oil was created in the supernova of a star? It came from decaying plant and animal material. So whats wrong with putting the carbon back into things that will eventually ( Billions of years later) return it to where it came from? What no pateince? What we need is a way to facilitate the means of turning plant material back into usable fuel... Biodiseal. If we can some how make that transformation more efficient we will have our solution.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
This has happened when CO2 injection was used to pressurize oil wells to squeeze more oil out of the gound.
They are still doing this. Any pointers to the deaths you mentioned?
The problem with storing vast amounts of CO2 underground is when it does get released and it will, it will flood the atmosphere with CO2. In smaller amounts plants can convert the CO2 to oxygen. So we could concievably add CO2 to the atmosphere as long as we increase rain forest size and create a balance to the CO2. But an extremely large amount of stored CO2 being released because of tectonic motion is not a pleasant thought. Everywhere man inhabits, we kill vast amounts of plant life. We now have billions of humans on the earth consuming resources and producing waste. How long do you think we can sustain that? We have to discover "new" sources of energy, shrink the worlds population dramatically and take care of our resources. All these things are really tough problems. But as long as we as a world, not just a few industrialized countries, work towards solutions. we can eventually solve these problems. But the current situation is while some countries work towards solving these problems, many others don't, instead they get exemptions because they are poor countries. Worse yet, their populations are growing rapidly because they are having 15 kids per family all born into poverty.
It will take more than one idea or technology to solve this problem. Windmills, for instance, might be a complementary solution. Windmills take energy directly out of the atmosphere, which can help counteract the most direct effects of global warming. I believe I saw a post here on /. that said that if 95% of the world's energy was produced by windmills, we would be extracting more energy from the atmosphere then is being added by global warming.
95% is probably an impractically large number. In reality, we need lots of cooperating elements in order to solve this problem. We need to immediately curtail the growth of carbon emissions and then work to reduce it. We need to increase the number and capacity of carbon sinks. New trees need to be planted to replace those being lost in South America. We need to understand what effect the regions of the ocean suffering from hypoxia are having on the oceans ability to absorb carbon dioxide. We need to find out what other problems are being caused by the change in the makeup of the atmosphere and work to fix them.
The U.S. is going to have to step up and become a leader in environmental issues again. This could be the most important long term threat the world has ever had to deal with. The U.S. has been one of the largest producers of CO2 pollution. It's only recently that other large countries have been generating more. The U.S. risks becoming the scapegoat for the entire problem and the target of justifiable anger. Our actions here in the U.S. affect everyone in the world.
I hope that the U.S. and other nations find the strength and will to rise above pettiness and cooperate to solve this problem. It certainly can't be done by any one nation alone.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
A few days ago I read on Slashdot about biodiesel produced by a very efficient algae. One big stumbling block was that you needed CO2 in concentrations like you would get from the exhaust of a power plant to grow that algae at top rate. And looky here, today Slashdot is discussing a bunch of power plants putting out CO2 and they don't know what to do with it.
Efficiency generally increases with scale. So does the ability to apply environemntal measures.
Natural gas works well for heating homes because it is clean and does not require extensive environmental processes.
If we use natural gas in power plants, its cost will increase, and home owners will start to switch to alternate fuels -- oil, coal, and wood -- all of which are "filthy" fuels when burned in a small home heating plant.
It makes more sense to use these dirty fuels in large central plants where they can be burned with greater efficiency, and environmental measures better applied.