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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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Finally an unlimited source of dry ice for Omaha Steaks. I'm going to buy some stock....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
And where exactly is all of this methane going to come from?
You can convert coal and oil to methane, but it isn't a clean process by any stretch of the imagination.
I doubt existing natural gas supplies would last long under this proposed plan.
"They would consume methane and oxygen and produce liquid carbon dioxide, which could be sequestered underground." I'll guess we'll put it with the spent nuclear fuel rods.
It produces less radioactive waste then coal-fired plants, but could we please sink more into solar energy sources? By some estimates, we'll begin the end of primary production in the persian gulf within the next decade. Venezualia and the Ukraine may stretch the world's oil supplies by a few years, but the sooner we can get alternatives up and running, the less it's gonna suck when we run out of the cheap oil.
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It's all about the cash
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
Have a safe planet and a smile.
* 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
The problem with all of these is you have to worry about the re-emergence of the CO2. Limestone seems like a good option because you just have to keep it dry. The downside is that limestone is heavy and even though the production is exothermic, producing lime has not been worked out. Pressurizing CO2 and storing it underground works, unless it leaks out. Then you have the same problem. Liquid bubbles are good if you have a very high pressure place to store them (the ocean), but the long term effect is acidification of the ocean and exhaustion of the carrying capacity (estimated to be around 1000-1500Gtons, we produce around 3Gtons/year).
There aren't any easy answers. However long term, since coal is about 57% of current electricity in the U.S., it's not going away. What carbon sequestration will do is allow us to bridge the gap economically and technologically between high and low carbon fuel sources.
I'm a big fan of wind, but there are still lots of hurdles.
-- Bird in the Bush: The Renewable Energy Blog http://www.birdinthebush.org
http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings /01/vision21/v211-5.PDF
Chris Williams clw7500nc@gmail.com
It sublimates directly at atmospheric pressure. It will form a liquid at high pressures however.
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
A friend who worked in the Hazardous Waste disposal industry lamented the ignorance of many protesters who came out to his site and harrassed the workers. They didn't know the difference between Hazardous and Toxic waste. CO2 is not toxic. In high concentrations it can be harmful (depending on the lifeform), but that is the definition of Hazardous. Toxic means it does harm even in small concentrations.
Example:
1,000 gallons of horse urine if dumped on a field would probably kill the grass, but if dilluted and spread over time it would not.
1 milligram of plutonium spread on a field would kill the grass, no matter how you dilluted it and grass wouldn't grow again for a long time.
I'm sure I didn't explain this as well as he could have, but I hope you get the gist of it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
For sake of reference, the suffocation incident was at Lake Nyos in Cameroon and is documented at http://www.snopes.com/horrors/freakish/smother.asp . 1,746 people killed in a matter of minutes... evidence of how scary Mother Nature can be. Although, to be fair, death was apparently very swift and likely painless.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
We could always reduce 2CO2(g) back to C2 and 2O2 and then just burn the resulting carbon! .. oh wait
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[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."
What a rosy view of the future!
NO. 300 gigatons of CO2 cycle through the environment every year. In a closed cycle.
But every year, humans add an extra 6 gigatons to that cycle that was not there the previous year. We do this by taking carbon from deep underground (in the form of oil) and burning it to release that CO2 to the atmosphere.
Natural processes do not change the global CO2 balance, at least not on the short time scales that humans are capable of changing it.
We are talking several hundred billion dollars, if not a trillion plus.
He then goes on to say it would take 100 years and 1 trillion dollars.
In other words "aint' gonna happen".
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
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.
How is this diffrent then toxic waste from nuclear plants being stored under ground....
Much more hazardous, especially on an immediate basis.
Liquid CO2, pushed down injection wells under pressure, occasionally springs a leak. When this happens you suddenly get a giant bubble of CO2 on (and in) the ground, displacing the oxygen and killing everybody and everything (even plants if it persists in the soil long enough) for miles around.
This has happened when CO2 injection was used to pressurize oil wells to squeeze more oil out of the gound.
A similar phenomenon happens naturally (though fortunately VERY rarely) when largely CO2 volcanic gasses vent into a deep still lake (such as in a volcanic crater). The gasses disolve, carbonating the lower waters. Then suddenly something disturbs the water and some of the carbonated water comes up and starts to bubble - rapidly "turning over" and boiling out the CO2 in the rest of the lake in a matter of minutes and releasing a similar ground-hugging toxic bubble.
Think of a shaken soda can the size of Lake Tahoe.
if we continue storring all this wouldn't eventually run out of place to put it?
Nuclear, at least, takes up very little space and decays over years/centuries/millenia (depending on the isotope - generally the hotter the faster). Some of its components are also useful and can be separated out and put to work. Others can be "burned" in nuclear reactions into less hazardous and/or more useful material.
That's not to say it's safe or good stuff. Some of it is horrid. But "running out of room" isn't the problem. (Keeping it in its room until it promises to be a good little kid and MEANS it is the problem.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that 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.
I keep "proposing" zero emmisions plants all the time, but as soon as I type the word "nuclear" around here, everyone gets all squirrly ...
We'd probably also have newer, more efficient nuclear power plants and decommissioning many fossil fuel plants if it weren't for "bleeding heart California liberals and environuts."
Every group seems to take turns saving us and screwing us over.
That said, you're absolutely right. Bush's Clean Air Act is like a line from Orwell's 1984 doublespeak.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
No politician? Granted, $7.2 million isn't a huge amount of money, but it was enough for Bush to bring it up during the debates. I think the fact that it would increase agriculture jobs is just as important as helping the environment.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
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.
Problem is, every so often, the carbon dioxide gets out. And lots of people die. Now, there are degassing projects which release the gas from the lakes into the atmosphere in a gradual controlled process.
Degassing
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
This guy talks about 3000 RPM as a novel, high, shaft speed. Standard power generation turbines normally run at 3600 RPM, or sometimes 1800 RPM, to synch with the power grid. Modern microturbines run up to 96,000 RPM. (Yes, at last, Capstone Turbine isn't vaporware any more. You can actually buy a 60KW generator from them. This is an option worth considering if you need backup power for your data center.) Only 24% efficient, though. General Electric's most efficient gas turbines have reached 60%. (Big turbines are more efficient than little ones.)
Turbine technology is up against materials limits. Vast amounts of effort (many billions of dollars) have been put into finding better materials for turbine blades, because this limits aircraft performance. Current blades are single crystals of metal, often with a ceramic coating. Pure ceramic blades have been made, but have tensile strength and brittleness problems. The turbine this guy is talking about requires materials way beyond anything that exists today.
If it's thermodynamically possible to build a big machine of the type this guy is talking about, it should possible to build a little one right now.
title sufficent
yet lameness filter attacks
my haiku deflects
filter returns blow
poem redoubles it's effort
will it be enough?
enemy unslain
patience wearing so thin
anticipation
revelation comes
slashcode prohibits colon
title corrected
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.