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US Pulls Plug on Low-CO2 Powerplant Project
Geoffrey.landis writes "The administration announced plans to withdraw its support from FutureGen. FutureGen was a project to develop a low CO2-emission electrical power plant, supported by an alliance of a dozen or so coal companies and utilities from around the world. The new plant would have captured carbon dioxide produced by combustion and pumped it deep underground, to avoid releasing greenhouse-gas into the atmosphere. It had been intended as a prototype for next generation clean-coal plants worldwide. Originally budgeted at about a billion dollars, the estimated cost had "ballooned" to $1.8 billion, according to U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman."
It was a stupid idea to begin with. Hey, let's spend billions of dollars trying to solve a problem that we can't control anyway!
Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.
--Ronald Reagan
$1.8bill isn't a lot of money when compared to the cost of nuclear power, or the money spend blowing up parts of the Middle East..
I'd like to note that $1 billion is about what the government spends on each of the new modern military aircraft that they purchase. If we just took a little out of the defense budget, the cost of something like this, which is a PROTOTYPE and expected to be expensive, wouldn't be as much of an issue.
You blithering idiots! If given a choice between sucking on a black cloud of death, or not, I would choose not. I'm sure that Congress is wasting that much grandstanding with the major league baseball steroid inquiry that is before them, AGAIN.
how about (and i know this is crazy) we build a modern nuke plant for 2X the price
and get 10X the power!
I know its crazy, but it just might work.... wait... IT DOES WORK!
and it's floating over head, and requires no maintenance.
"an infinite player that has lost his finite mind" ~Infinite Play the Movie (it blends with reality)
If you can't / won't do it NOW, then the long emergency will get longer. And Darker. No, it's not the end of the world. It's just a new world we won't recognise, and one that won't likely permit 7 billion people shitting all over it.
You can buy a shit load of grid tied windmills for 1.8 billion dollars...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
... or is pumping CO2 underground a stupid idea ?
So the cost increased by just slightly more than the Iraq war is costing us every three days? That says magnitudes doesn't it?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Please go away and actually do some research into the costs of the various energy options, and you might appreciate why research into carbon capture and storage is money well spent.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
In the 1960s, Rocky Mountain Arsenal tried to get rid of waste by pumping it into the ground. When they started doing that, there was an increase in seismic activity in the region, including several earthquakes that caused significant damage. When they finally stopped doing it, the seismic activity tapered off.
Don't click the above link, it's got some nasty javascript in there. Tries to open a load of popups, kills Firefox (even on linux). Save yourself the hassle and don't click....
this is my sig
If you're pumping the CO2 into a depleted gas field, that gas field captured natural gas for many millions of years. Another type of disposal site that's been proposed is deep saline acquifers, in which case the CO2 will dissolve in the water, which has also stayed where it is for millions of years.
Finally, if you're really paranoid there's mineral sequestration, where you react the CO2 with various types of rock to form carbonates, which are very stable compounds (they're rocks, basically).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Flamebait?
It's pretty valid comparing the cost of clean coal to the cost of Nuclear or Oil? Should I have phrased it a little different? I.e. spell out the cost of ensuring a steady supply of oil is, erm, enormous?
My interpretation is that this would be a stop-gap until we can develop an efficient means of using renewable energy. Why?
Shifting reliance from oil to coal would "Make America safer!" because the US is like the Saudi Arabia of coal
China is building powerplants like crazy, and guess what they're using? COAL
Storing CO2 underground is a temporary solution, but it would buy us some more time to develop means of converting it into something in another physical state (gas or liquid). Then perhaps we could begin to fill up those oil fields we've been draining for the past hundred & some odd years.
Clean Coal is not just pumping the CO2 underground. It is reducing the concentration of CO2 and other pollutants (nitrates and particles) in the exhaust of power plants through the use of various technologies. These include CO2 scrubbing, sequestration, and mixture of the coal with with nitrate absorbing materials prior to consumption. The reason the backing was pulled for this plan was because the actual clean coal technologies have advanced a lot over the past 5 or 6 years and implementation into existing plants is cheap and effective. So people have realised that the very idea of puming the gas underground was dangerous, costly, and ineffective.
I live near the site Futuregen was to be built. There was fierce competition between Illinois and Texas for the location of the plant. Illinois was chosen based on science not politics. I have heard that Bush was furious that Texas was not chosen, pulled a few strings and the project was cancelled. From what I have read this was a technology that would work and let us take advantage of the abundant coal supplies without damaging the environment.
I really don't get it, we are looking for an alternative to oil and instead of researching renewable sources we are dumping money into yet another fossil fuel ? How stupid is that ?
You should indeed. Nuclear power is well understood and bringing a new reactor online can be done with technology which is already available.
The objection that I have to this program was that it was an experiment, a costly one, with no guarantees of future success. Nuclear energy isn't a panacea or necessarily the best of ideas, but the risks and challenges are well known and it can already be used to produce energy in a cost effective manner.
Most of the complaints people have about the current Fission reactors is that they are unsafe and the waste is toxic and hard to handle. But the reality is that it is really hard to get a nuclear reactor to reach a meltdown. Even the plant in Chernobyl which was being run in the least competent manner imaginable, was able to keep from reaching the really serious point where there's a sustained uncontrolled nuclear reaction. 3-mile island, the nuclear material was completely unable to make it past the huge amount of concrete that the facility was made of.
The amount of waste from a reactor tends to be exaggerated, it is significantly less material than is created by coal plants, with the ability to reprocess the majority of the radioactive material for another plant. The amount of waste that is created in the US would be reduced significantly if it were subjected to the sort of reprocessing that happens in other parts of the world.
Expensive is relative. In the U.S., I would say that it is pretty cheap at the meter, most people can pay for their monthly electric with ~1/2 or 1 days wages. The conveniences provided save a great deal more time than that(each month).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
First it was the "all your base belong to us"
Then it was "I welcome our ___ overlords"
Then it was the three step profit thing.
Then it was soviet union jokes.
Now the latest trend seems to tag everything "whatcouldpossiblygowrong." You know what? Every technological venture entails risks. If it weren't for risk takers, there'd be no pure silicon, no transistors, no fabs, no chips and our industry wouldn't be around. There'd be no cars, no rockets. There'd be no wheels even. So stop tagging everything with this anti-tech message. It's stupid.
because that is about as good as spending money on clean coal is. At the end of the day it's not a 100% solution and the electricity generated is hellishly expensive without lots of money from tax payers. The question is do tax payers want to finance the coal industry when part of the extraction procedure is to devastate the environment. I view clean coal along the lines of someone with a product that has become socially unacceptable and promising with billions of your money we may be able to make you like it even though its a half assed and expensive solution that doesnt change the product.
...of oil. The point is to start using clean "something". Let's use some clean coal. And maybe a few windmills. And build some solar panels and tidal force power plants. And some nuclear power plants. And cultivate the seas for algae, while growing various biofuels on the earth. Let's do it all, and let market forces decide which ones stick (hint: it'll probably be a combination of some of the above).
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Good idea. And since it is your idea, you go first. No gas heat or fossil-fuel-generated electricity, no fossil-fuel automobile, no snow blower, snowmobile, dirt bike, lawnmower, and no... plastics.
:o)
As of NOW.
Have a nice day.
In the other news - the defense budget is biggest since WWII.
Oh, except that congress just cut all funding for ITER , the international thermonuclear experimental (fusion) reactor.
So no fusion, no coal, no basic research. It's all oil all the time.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
If there were guarantees of future success, it wouldn't be much of an experiment. It's worth our pouring a lot of money (but still microscopic compared to our overall energy expenditures) into ambitious experiments just so that we learn the full range of options and their implications - if we learned, we example, from this experiment that "low Co2 coal" is much more dangerous and expensive (for whatever reason) than the coal industry would like us to believe, wouldn't that be worth a mere couple billion dollars?
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
One of the reasons it's been an American policy to keep Cuba under embargo is because they are a symbol of success without American support in the Western Hemisphere. Originally, I think, military planners were genuinely scared of the ideological impact of a successful Cuba, despite the fact that they were no more propped up from Russia than Japan was from the United States. Now, businesses, mostly in the aeronautical and arms industries prop up the failed foreign policies of the 60s through the 80s in order to continue making money hand over fist.
Now, oddly enough, Cuba is the only western civilization to have passed peak oil (Brazil could also be a candidate depending on your definition). When the Soviet Union collapsed, the cheap oil flowing into the country stopped almost overnight, and they were forced to transition from a car-based, petrochemical powered agriculture industry to human powered travel and (by necessity) organic, renewable farming. It's one of the reasons Cubans live far longer than Americans.
I think it's funny that the embargo has actually helped Cuba far more than being a part of our sphere of influence. Our decision to try to ostracize them for being independent has only made the advantages far more obvious, otherwise it would have been turned into another Puerto Rico, and they'd be facing far more challenges in the future as a result.
Jean-Francois Im's blog
Why are we looking to trade one version of toxic pollution for another. We need to find real " clean " energy alternatives. Someone mentioned China is using coal, yes they are and polluting their air and cities as well, all in the name of progress. I agree with the person who said we could put a heck of a lot of windmills on the grid for 1.8 billion. We should mandate windmills and solar energy arrays on all federal and state government properties by say 2012. If anything it can at least reduce the cost of government utilities and drive the cost of these products down for us.
Ray
You must be American. He's talking about the Sun. Woosh.
How we know is more important than what we know.
comparing everything to spending in iraq is why you got flambait. these days everyone is comparing spending to iraq, when its very rarely a good comparison.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Can't we just double carbonate our soda drinks? Problem solved.
Jolt Cola: All the sugar and twice the caffeine. Now with double the green-house gases.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Are you freaking kidding me? Do you have any idea how much harmfull radiation that thing puts out?? Not In My Backyard!
If the gas would escape due to an accident or earth quake, lots of people can be killed.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I can't imagine that fear mongering wackjobs like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club are actually behind our abandonment of nuclear energy. And that begs a very serious question...
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Pressing carbon dioxide into underground cavities is an extremely stupid idea. Nobody knows how long it will stay there and what side effects it has. The only use of this technology is to deflect criticism for still burning insane amounts of fossil fuel (or organic fuel that destroys rainforests and starves people). The US even got away with boycotting Kyoto, so I guess the pressure on the US government just isn't big enough to make them recur to that sort of window dressing.
Yes, for example, people are always complaining about the half-life of radioactive waste.. but what exactly is the half-life of carbon-dioxide? At least the waste from fission reactors can be processed and stored easily.. the same cannot be said for CO2.
How we know is more important than what we know.
If it weren't for risk takers, there'd be no pure silicon, no transistors, no fabs, no chips and our industry wouldn't be around.
When I take a risk and kill someone, I go to jail for manslaughter.
When Big Business takes a risk and kills 1000 someones, the CEO gets a bonus.
Because of the risk of punishment in return for misjudging risk, I take the time to research what I'm doing and implement safeguards and backups in order to reduce the risk as much as possible. History demonstrates that corporations cannot be bothered. They can't be bothered to do the research or create safeguards, and since the government is there to back them up, they rarely bother to insure themselves to a level matching the risk they're undertaking. After all, it's profitable to simply allow the corporation to go bankrupt, reform the board at ShellCorp Mk. II and buy back the original corporation's assets at firesale prices.
But go ahead, cheer on your unfettered capitalism as it refuses to learn from history and repeat the same fatal mistakes over and over. I'll be buying scuba gear and CO2 detectors for when the giant underground ballon of CO2 pops.
Another problem solved by burying it in the ground! It worked for ET!
Thank God the goverment had the foresight to cancel this project. Although it may have helped stop climate change, it would have flooded the underground with CO2, causing angry mole-men to declare war on us surface dwellers. I am thankful to delay the welcoming of our mole-men overloards.
Haaaaaa ha ha!
Okay, time for bed...
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
That's right, since Iraq is costing us orders of magnitude more than almost anything else. We really should be using more reasonable units like milliIraqs.
Automatically deciding that if something is compared to what is happening in Iraq, then it should be flamebait... that's just wrong.
Way too much money is being spent CURRENTLY on a situation that has gone on far too long, and that just about everyone agrees is a mistake for one reason or another. Since a vast majority believe that it was a mistake to go over there, or to still be there, we can safely look at the countless millions (billions?) that are being used to fund that ongoing issue.
Now, if our President decides that 1.8 billion is too much to spend on a project that *might* actually be worthwhile, while he is CURRENTLY spending far greater sums on a "project" that is not as worthwhile, why can't a comparison be discussed without it being considered flamebait?
Who cares if people don't like how *everything* is being compared to what is going on in Iraq? If the comparison is valid, they should suck it up. Too many things are swept under the rug just because people are tired of hearing about it.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
My understanding is that reprocessing spent fuel rods creates fissionable material suitable for creating atomic weapons. My guess is that we can't 100% guarantee these reprocessed fuel rods won't end up being used as weapons and that's the reason the US doesn't do this.
Peace, or Not?
Cuba under Castro? Part of western civilization?? LOL
Aside from its own supply, Cuba gets oil from Venezuela. Cuba, a country of 11 million people, consumes 200,000 barrels of oil per day. That's a lot, given they only have a few cars and a sorry economy of the country.
Also, your claim about their life expectancy being higher than the US is wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
Please find me your statistic that disputes the above.
Cuba is an oppressive dictatorship. We need to get rid of Castro ASAP.
Now that sounds plausible. I've spent the afternoon, on and off since this story was posted, trying to figure out why W went against Big Business for the first time. Now, it makes sense.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
The idea of reprocessing nuclear waste is a good one. However, the reprocessed material is highly fissile and therefore perfect for making high yield nuclear bombs. While there is a significant amount of complexity in making a bomb with this material, gun type devices will not work due to the neutron generating potential of plutonium. The idea that proliferation of nuclear warhead capable material is a bad thing argues strongly against reprocessing plants. Not to mention the cost of setting up reprocessing greatly surpasses the cost of mining and enriching (increasing the U235 content to 3-6%), natural uranium.
So you're getting all excited about a statistical tie, when we're spending $6700 per head and they're spending $251? Not to mention the fact that they have an infant mortality rate that's lower...
Hmm... keep the blinders on. I guess you wouldn't know what to do without them.
I go to school in Charleston Illinois and the town is right next to Mattoon, where FutureGen was going to be located. I had been impressed that it was actually going to happen because our governor here is a bit of a POS. He basically caused the university to not have a Music Building for 6 years and when we could finally build it, we couldn't afford the original blueprints any more so stuff got modified and isn't going to be quite as impressive as it was supposed to be. [personal opinion] He has single handedly caused more problems than any other Illinois politician that isn't named Daley.[/personal opinion]
When I found out that Blagojevich actually got it signed off on, I was amazed. This went on for about half a month until we were informed that the only group to pull funding on it was the Federal Government. The state of Illinois, the town of Mattoon, and a couple of neighboring states had all put their money in. Now the government has pulled out and is going to screw em over. The thing is, not only is this a really good idea, it would give the area a much needed job boost. Sure it's only like 30 or 40 jobs, but the area needs it.
The thing that causes me to have no surprise whatsoever is that, when they had the plant location down to 3 choices, a location in Texas was towards to the top.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
For example?
\u262D = \u5350
And spend close to a trillion dollars on a war over fossil resources in the Middle East.
The US energy policy is fucked. Totally, completely, totally fucked. Utterly utterly mindbogglingly stupid.
sig sig sig siggy sig
If the USA wanted cleaner coal technology, they could have it right now, simply by forcing all coal plants to meet modern standards.
As the laws now stand, you could drive a flotilla of aircraft carriers through the loopholes. For starters, pre-1970 coal burning powerplants were effectively grandfathered in under the Bush era laws. Those powerplants don't have to be upgraded to meet current regs as long as the owner only performs "routine maintanence".
The EPA defines "routine maintanence" as anything that doesn't exceed 20% of the powerplant's value.
In 5 years you could rebuild that powerplant doing nothing more than EPA approved routine maintanence.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It takes energy to sequester carbon dioxide, and if the energy that this takes is as great as the energy to unsequester it (that is, to release it from coal), then there is no point in burning it because the effect of burning and sequestering it yields a net energy return of zero. So far I've seen no presentations of the efficiency of sequestration. Seeing as how corn ethanol has a net energy yield of less than zero, I'm dubious about sequestration and, until I learn otherwise, will assume it's a big "kick the ball down the road" diversion, like hydrogen cars. I really wish there were more writers familiar with thermodynamics writing about these things. When it comes to energy schemes, it's not just the thought that counts.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
if you were comparing spending on Vietnam to iraq or something it might be valid, but everyone just uses the war in iraq as a pressure point to try get a reaction, not because it's got anything to do with the topic at hand, exactly like comparing everything to the nazis
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Supposedly, there are breeder reactor fuel cycles that make isotopes that are far from optimal for nuclear weapons.
OTOH, if you are looking at nuclear waste, the most effective use of it from a terrorist's perspective would probably be a dirty bomb. Quick, easy to make, and it still gets the local news blabbering about radiation, plus it makes cleanup a PITA. However, non-powerplant sources of radiation are probably easier to acquire than powerplant sources.
Interestingly, the trend for non-breeder reactors seems to be for reactors that breed a significant amount of fuel in-situ while they are running. For example, current commercial designs can produce half their power output from materials bred while the plant is running.
That myth has almost halted all development in nuclear power generation at the 1950s level apart from in places like India and South Africa which didn't believe it. The new generation plants (gen III, IV why not call it X because little has actually changed apart from green paint) have had very little work done on them to distinguish them from earlier designs that really were never very good for civilian use in the first place. Nuclear power might be an answer but the only way to find out is to actually develop the new designs that might be worth something instead of the old ones that are just an inefficient way to funnel money from the taxpayer and other energy companies into specific pockets. Consider the orders of magnitude difference in expenditure between lobbying and R&D - no new devlopment is required to meet the goal of a scam but if we want something useful in this feild actual effort has to be expended.
Reprocessing was mentioned which reveals the ignorance of the poster - not very much reprocessing is actually done becuase it is difficult. Nuclear trolls pushing their views on stories about other toipics really should learn a little about their subject.
This is silly, not doing reprocessing has not done anything to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. This process has been used for a long time in France, Britain, and other countries, and there has never been any material reported missing. In the case of Iran for example, it was the North Koreans that gave them access to materials and tech. Some missing material from the break up of the Soviet Union, well who knows what was going on there at the time.
The reason for the US not doing this is quite simple: there has been no new nuclear power plants built, very little if any money into research, and a general lack of interest in regards to nuclear energy aside from military use. Progress has stagnated; the amount of money required to bring everything up do date and allow reprocessing to be possible is more than what congress is willing to spend.
However, recent reports suggest there may be a renewed interest in this area. The main advantage being that the spent fuel is much less dangerous several orders of magnitude faster.
um, your aware C02 is a harmless gas right? it's not dangerous and doesn't need storing.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Not to burst your bubble, but I doubt the CIA would want to find much that puts Cuba's current state in a good light either.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That's right, since Iraq is costing us orders of magnitude more than almost anything else. We really should be using more reasonable units like milliIraqs.
Close, but a miliIraq is a ridiculously small unit, much like measuring the U.S. military budget in pennies (or pesos), a more appropriate unit would be the kiloIraq. pronounced as "Kill-O-Iraq," of course.
Yes, it should be obvious to all patriotic Americans that the real solution is to pump the excess CO2 into water. In fact, many of the refreshing soft beverages currently available on your grocer's shelves, including the entire flavor line of Coca-Cola brand beverage products, contain significantly more carbonation than most sparkling water. When you drink beverages that contain still/non-sparkling water, the terrorists win. Have a Coke and a smile.
Breakfast served all day!
The whole point of "clean coal" is that the CO2 is stored underground where it won't go into the atmosphere and fuel global warming. The question is how long it will stay there.
We shouldn't be thinking about how to put this stuff away, we need to think about ways of creating less of it! Alternative fuels, more fuel efficient cars (especially in the US!) and nuclear fusion, ESPECIALLY nuclear fusion.
So basically, what you're saying is, that we should live in caves until someone invents nuclear fusion. The logic from the environmental left is brilliant. In order to save the earth so that we can have decent lives, we should go back to living the way we did in the stone ages, and all die at 25 of starvation, exposure and disease.
This is my sig.
timmarhy is one of these idiots who thinks the greenhouse effect is a myth.
How we know is more important than what we know.
OK Find me the statistic that shows it the other way around!!
Is that so hard to do??
I agree, that tag was sort of useful before, because it was tagged for stuff that held unusually big risks (or at least so the uninformed reader would be led to believe after glancing over the story), but now the entire category has been ruined. :-(
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Bhopal, India 30,000 killed by union Carbide, and no punishment, will that do? If you just looked past the end of your nose there are plenty of examples!
Don't get your knickers in a knot, people compare energy costs with Iraq because that sneaky fucker Saddam hid our oil under his country. Do you really belive the US is pissed at Iran because of a few centrifuges that it has a right to operate under the NTP? Wake up and smell the oil.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Revisionism at it's finest! You have been conned. That was not actually the reason Superphoenix was shutdown or the time it happened as it's operating history that you can even read on wikipedia shows.
Superphoenix was the prototype full scale breeder reactor so it's major purpose was to find what problems a full scale breeder reactor would have. Many of those problems are not easily solved. The largest one is that high grade waste (eg. spent fuel) has to be handled completely remotely which gets a bit difficult on an industrial scale to cut it all up etc. Fast breeder technology has been abandoned at this point since it is far easier to make new fuel and now accelerated thorium has the potential to be able to use high grade waste and weapons material to fulfil the role fast breeders were designed for. It's time to stop reading the recycled 1970s PR material from before it was clear that fast breeders are not a simple solution and pay attention to more current events.
Don't fall into the trap of the type of liar that likes to blame other failings on what was ulimately powerless groups. Remember that it was Carter and Thatcher, (both strong nuclear advocates with a deep understanding of the situation) who halted the constuction of new nuclear power plants in the USA and UK for practical reasons. It can't be blamed on small bands of people complaining about TMI and was years before the largest nuclear accident and the more mainstream distrust of nuclear power.
..you just aren't going to be getting federal funding for it. One might think the combined wallets of the coal and electricity selling corporations might be able to pony up all the cash themselves....
I thought it was to reduce mercury emissions.
http://outcampaign.org/
Split the CO2 into elemental carbon and oxygen-- then we can safely bury the carbon since it's solid, and release the harmless oxygen into the atmosphere or use it for industrial purposes or whatnot.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
If you look at that link you gave, there are two lists. One is by the CIA and one is by the UN. The UN gives Cuba a greater average life expectancy than the US. Now admittedly not by much (they are consecutive), but it is impressive given the dramatic difference in say GDP(PPP)/capita.
Rank Country ave male female GDP (PPP)/person
37 Cuba 78.3 76.2 80.4 4,500
38 United States 78.2 75.6 80.8 45,594
Are you under the impression money spent in Iraq doesn't come out of the same budget as the money spent on this experiment? Because they both do, and the American taxpayer is hypothetically paying for both, so it's a very relevant comparison.
India is a corrupt third world country.
Despite America's love of corporations, killing thousands in one go is generally frowned upon.
Oddly enough, despite Cuba being such a paradise, people risk their lives to leave it every year.
Not visa-versa.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Yes, but what makes you think you can build a modern, clean, coal power plant at the same cost of a pre-1970s one?
You should go build one if you can. California is having a lot of power production problems. I'm sure they'll welcome you with open arms.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
...but a miliIraq is a ridiculously small unit...
80-100 million dollars, in about 8 hours time. The whole world, including the war, doesn't come close to a Kiloraq.
What?
Why? it's my favorite tag.
CO2 doesn't have a radioactive half-life, but it lasts a long time.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
One of the practices in the United States that practically guarantees continued pollution is that of buying and selling "pollution credits". If one power plant produces more pollution than is permitted they may purchase pollution credits from a power plant that produces less than its allotment (which may be from another state). The polluting power plant has no incentive to reduce their emissions.
But you missed the part about Greenpower - which means you're buying wind power, small-scale hydro etc. Even that is way cheaper than whacking solar panels on your roof.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Okay, so assuming projects like this cancelled one can deal with the environmental impacts of burning coal...
What about the environmental damage caused by the *extraction* of coal. I mean, I know the Earth is full of the stuff, but mining it (usually open-pit mines) tends to do a hefty amount of damage, doesn't it?
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
CO2 doesn't float in air. Just because it's a gas doesn't mean it's going to seep up out of the ground and escape into the atmosphere for no discernible reason. When CO2 escapes, it just sorta hugs along the ground and suffocates you. There have been numerous disasters involving massive CO2 releases of that sort.
I'd say the main concern isn't that CO2 is going to magically escape, it's that underground, there are all sorts of pressures and forces that make stuff shoot up. That's why you look for a stable geological foundation to inject into. There's nothing wrong with putting plain CO2 in the ground, though, rather than wasting energy converting it to some other compound. It's not any more prone to escape than oil, water, or natural gas is.
Warren Anderson is considered a fugitive by Indian law, he has been charged with manslaughter there. The US did not grant extradition though, I do not know why. The case is a bit more complicated than you make it look.
Other than that I agree, some big corporations can get away with crime more easily than individuals as they have leverage on governments. It's no surprise that a monopoly a justice produces justice that sucks.
\u262D = \u5350
"What if a massive cloud of CO2 is released suddenly, due to a massive earthquake or whatnot? "
This already happens every time a volcano blows anyway. Volcanic eruptions launch massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the air.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
They are talking about paying upwards of a billion dollars to make a power plant that they won't get any money back from? Obviously it won't be the government running it. Some corporation would take over and get all the profits from it. Which company you ask? I have no idea, but if I checked recent PAC donations to congress I am sure I could narrow it down. I am tired of the corruption in government.
Geez... compared to the Big Dig -- which also traps a lot of greenhouse gases (under Boston) and came in about $18 billion over budget, 800 million over budget is a steal!
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
The issue with this is that the tech is not just unproven but in fact complete hot air.
I recently (late last year) attended at talk at IEAust where one of the speakers was an engineer from the local (govt. owned) energy company. The talk was on greenhouse issues facing power generation and this guy had some interesting points to make about "clean coal technology" as it is known in Australia.
Basically, the idea is to capture the emissions produced from burning the coal, 'scrub' the CO2 out of it and pump the CO2 into an underground reservoir (geosequestration). The problem is that there is no known process for containing and scrubbing emissions at the rate produced in coal-fired power generation.
Even the geosequestration part is dodgy, because no-one knows how the CO2 will react in the proposed formations, or if it will leak out again. Sure, oil and gas companies have been doing this for decades to increase production from hydrocarbon fields, but they don't care if gas leaks out of the formation - only if the formation pressure is increased enough to pump more oil.
This engineer was of the opinion that the real way forward (for WA at least) was in biomass technology, geothermal, wind and solar. This was the biomass process he was involved in: http://www.verveenergy.com.au/mainContent/sustainableEnergy/ourSustainableEnergyPortfolio/iwp.html
For Australia at least, I've come to the conclusion that big coal producers push the idea of this technology, keeping it 'just over the horizon' in order to remain the preferred customer of governments keen to be seen as 'green' while not really spending money to upgrade power generation infrastructure. Hopefully that will change with the new federal government but time will tell..
ACCEPT THE UNITED STATES ALREADY POSSESSES NUCLEAR WEAPONS! I grow so tired of this argument about reprocessing "Well we better not do it because SOMEONE might create nuclear weapons from it." WHO! Who exactly is going to make nuclear weapons from the nuclear waste we reprocess. The United States already possesses Nuclear Weapons and has for sometime. There is no way in hell we're going to allow some third party to take the reprocessed waste and do anything with it. Are you saying that we might give the idea to someone else? I hate to burst your bubble (BTW, I realize you weren't stating this as your own idea, so please do not think I'm personally attacking you) but the knowledge of Nuclear Weapon construction is available anywhere and everywhere, and it's not as hard as we would like. I can't speak for states (which if they want the weapons bad enough they'll find a way to get them) but no individual group (i.e., terrorist, cult, etc.) is going to grow to the trouble to build any Nuclear Weapon from anything when they can go to one of the old Soviet Republics and pick up a a couple of ALREADY BUILT weapons for about the price of a V-8 Cadillac. If we reprocessed Nuclear Waste, we would have a shadow of the amount we have now left and a place like Yucca Mountain could easily store hundreds of years worth of the small amount left over.
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
Where's the evidence that shows our current global climate change is a result of greenhouse effect?
that the republican party is just as corrupt as W. Delay and Hastert are great examples. So are the traitors who sold our nuke knowhow to pakistan and turkey. That includes Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Eric Edelman, Marc Grossman, and of course, W. for protecting these men and their treason.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I am looking for Firesign Theater CDs. Know a good source?
Good story on El Reg: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/28/us_clean_coal/
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Couldn't you tell that I was joking with him? Take a joke, please.
However, since you brought it up, I will say that plastics have a LOT to do with fossil fuel, since most plastics come from the same sources: coal and oil, which happen to be the current popular "cheap" sources of hydrocarbons. It is still the use of non-renewable (minimally renewable, really) resources... the same resources used by automobiles. So plastics compete with gasoline for resources.
There has been progress in making consumer polymers out of other hydrocarbon sources, but it is about like fuel... not very much progress, and we could put more effort into it.
MIT estimates there is enough power from geothermal sources around the world to cheaply provide all of the energy for humanity for thousands of years. With deep drilling techniques developed for oil wells we can find scalding hot rock anywhere in the world. And they also estimate it would take approximately $1 billion in research to get the project underway to make the technology viable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power
I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty awesome. It has none of the ecological disadvantages of wind and hydroelectric. It is more efficient than solar. And it provides the same amount of power no matter the weather, time of year, or time of day. Oh yeah, and no toxic waste that takes thousands of years to decay or the excessively expensive operational costs that comes with nuclear power.
Natural gas is regularly pumped back into the ground at oil fields. It's not some new idea that hasn't been done in practice.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
Yes you can build a shitload of windmills for $1.8 B. But do you know how much energy it costs to produce these windmills vs. the amount of returned energy out of wind? And do you know what a field of windmills looks like when you live in a small crowded country?
Sure, in the USA there's plenty of open area to cover with windmills, but here in The Netherlands there are so many of these windmills already that it's becoming butt-ugly. Not only that, all these windmills produce about 1% of the annual energy requirements. It's not a solution, it's a feel-good measure for the green families..
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
If you want examples from the good old USA of corporations getting rich from people dying, you could look at the cases of the tobacco companies, or coal mines, or chemical companies for a start. Then you could look at all of the unsafe consumer products (check the filings of the US consumer product safety commission cpsc.gov for a nice long list). It's really naive to believe that corporations don't benefit from selling dangerous or defective goods. It costs money to make things safe and to recall items that have been found unsafe. It's much cheaper (i.e. more profit) to cut corners and hide problems.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
IMHO the - IYHO obviously "not really serious" - point that was reached was enough of a disaster to me to dismiss this sort of energy.
The objection that I have to this program was that it was an experiment, a costly one, with no guarantees of future success. Nuclear energy isn't a panacea or necessarily the best of ideas, but the risks and challenges are well known and it can already be used to produce energy in a cost effective manner. Would you have been saying the same thing back in 1950 (or whenever it was) when the government was funding research into nuclear power? All research is an experiment with no guarantee of future success.
The main problem with the milliIraq unit is that it is dependant on time. You can't simply say that 1 Iraq costs X amount of dollars when every additional day would change that amount.
We should have a unit which is independant of time (i.e. milliIraqday, which would roughly be 270 million US$) or use the proposed unit for running costs only (i.e. "Giving all Iraqi children a decent education costs roughly 1 picoIraq").
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
No problem.
The US is only funding 10% of the costs for ITER.
The UN list is based on a projection of life expectancies up to 2010 (we're in 2008 today fyi).. it's assuming that Cuba's life expectancy increases .. that estimate is based on information the Cubans themselves provide.
The world's total solar power capacity is roughly equivalent to one unit of your average coal-fired power station
Ok, the coal plant near me is an 1800MW dual-plant. Are you saying the ENTIRE solar power capacity of the world is less than that? That's 1800 Megawatts, about enough to run 450,000 people and businesses.
Perhaps I am mislead but that doesn't even pass the smell test for me. If so, I have to drastically rethink my support of solar.....but I'm guessing you're just wrong.
Bring it.
:) C02 is no big deal to hold underground. It can be done easily.
I have valves installed that hold a 10,000 psi well down in Venezuela right now. Many of them.
Trust me, we have valves and instrumentation that can handle CO2 underground. We already do this with underground natural gas storage and CO2 isn't a giant change.
And yes, I sell valves. Relief valves, control valves, block valves, cryogenic valves, high temperature valves, steam valves. All kinds of valves. All kinds of materials.
Originally budgeted at about a billion dollars, the estimated cost had "ballooned" to $1.8 billion
Ballooned is in quotes to make us think the energy dept official is either exaggerating or looking for a lame excuse - when the *estimated* costs have already almost doubled, it *is* ballooned. Just imagine what the final cost would actually total if this is what the estimate does before any work is started!! I for one am actually impressed that FOR ONCE, increasing amounts of taxpayer money is not being thrown down on some project with out of control cost increases.
We've made a business of exporting our technology to other countries that have similar resources to exploit.
Why is this any different? FutureGen either makes a profile from a sale to China, or they proceed to do the work themselves.
The government is not filled with people able to make value. The coal industry expertise is extraction not development.
I think we'll have FutureGen technology in 10 years. But not invented here.
The greenhouse effect is a well studied effect. The earth would have been icy cold without it. CO2 is one of many gases which contribute to the greenhouse effect, and our climate depends on it. No one disputes this fact. Some people and a few scientists still discuss if more CO2 makes the greenhouse effect stronger, or if the current amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is enough to trap all the heat radiation in the bands CO2 absorb. This is a valid argument. We know for a fact that the earth is getting warmer, and that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases, but it is not possible to scientifically prove there is a relationship either way. It's completely not possible and will never be possible. Just like it it impossible to accurately predict the weather in two days. The best we could to is an educated guess, and to refine our predictions based on all the possible variables.
What do we do about it in the meantime? One possibility is to continue increasing CO2 emissions and see what happens. This may lead to a climate disaster and make most of the earth uninhabitable, but at least we would have a better indication of that 90% of the climate scientists were right. Another possibility is to be more careful and reduce the CO2 emissions until we understand the causes of climate change better.
It is usually better to act carefully to avoid accidents before they happen, than to react quickly after the accident has happened. I am among those few who don't think CO2 is causing the climate change, but I would not bet my planet on it. Would you fly an aircraft over the Atlantic if you think there is enough fuel to get you over the sea, or would you take five minutes to check the tanks and do the fuel calculations before you take off?
About 3 years ago it was reported that the Sellafield reprocessing plant in the UK has lost kilos of materials. It was soon suggested that it was only 'accounting mistakes' that caused the discrepancy (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4272691.stm), but the fact that these mistakes can occur is worrying in itself.
That said, I used to live a few miles from Sellafield and I am in favour of nuclear energy.
The polluting power plant does have an incentive to reduce their emissions, because the total number of emissions credits is capped at some finite number (and the cap can even decrease over time, applying increasing pressure to the plants).
If plants want to pollute a lot, they can't collectively buy more credits than exist on the market, because they're finite. The limited supply drives up the price of the credits, and at some point it becomes more cost effective for an individual plant to simply reduce its emissions than to purchase emission credits. (Where that point is depends on how much the plant emits.)
When the SO2 emissions market was implemented in the U.S., the average per-plant emissions did go down. (I just went to an economics talk on this a few days ago.)
In the case of tobacco companies, the customers are the one who decide to take a risk, not the company.
Union carbide on the other hand was a good example of a corporation imposing risk on people.
\u262D = \u5350
The continuous stream of PR and FUD from the tobacco companies that smoking isn't bad for you plus their advertising might have had something to do with people deciding to take the risk and start smoking... and of course, once they started, they were addicted and found it very had to quit.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
From my experience during the last time I visited Australia, the country in general is pretty decent at using solar power (probably because they got a lot more sun than many places, and less snow etc). If coal demand slows down, perhaps they can pioneer some more technology along the lines of solar or perhaps tidal power.
The CIA roughly agrees (80.9 vs 79.5). The point remains that despite being very poor they live a long life. And from people I know personally who have been there, they aren't that unhappy.
Interestingly enough, the percentage of Cuban refugees compared to the population of Cuba is roughly the same as the proportion of Mexican refugees compared to the population of Mexico and ditto Canada. I myself am an immigrant to the US. Could it be that a certain proportion of people simply move to a new country to make a living? I know that the reason I 'fled' to the US was economic, and the last customs official I spoke to (admittedly not an expert by any means) said that the vast majority of people who claimed political asylum were in fact economic refugees.
The majority of the fleeing Cubans, according to Wikipedia, are actually using fairly well trod routes (mostly by plane it seems), which suggests that their exodus isn't particularly a risky one.
Incidentally, I've never met a Cuban refugee, but plenty of American refugees (And indeed plenty of Somali and Afghan too). So I have no personal experience of their plight. I make no claims about whether Cubans are well off or not, other than what is reflected in the figures, which were the original point of contention. Paul Farmer seems to think they are okay though.
While you are right that conventional coal plants can be made just as clean as gasification, it's just much more expensive to scrub a conventional coal plant than a gasification plant. The difference is quite significant.
Most of the savings is due to more beneficial thermodynamics. Syngas (the product of gasification) has a much higher concentration of CO2 than exhaust gas (the product of a conventional plant). This higher concentration (also higher pressure and temperature than at the exhaust stack) provide a larger driving force for the removal of CO2 from the gas stream. This larger driving force means that there is less need for capital investment in scrubbing equipment. It also means that less energy is utilized in scrubbing the gas. Finally, since gasification results in more complete oxidation of the carbon, the plant is overall more efficient. The result is cheaper energy from the same coal.
http://pubs.acs.org/isubscribe/journals/cen/85/i44/html/8544gov1.html
Adding scrubbing and sequestering equipment onto existing plants is estimated to add 75% to the cost of energy from coal. Coal gasification (with carbon sequestration) would only add around 33% to the cost of energy from coal.
Yes, but that's only done with the expectation that it will stay there for a few years, not hundreds or more.
The EPA defines "routine maintanence" as anything that doesn't exceed 20% of the powerplant's value.
In 5 years you could rebuild that powerplant doing nothing more than EPA approved routine maintanence.
Is the value the actual value of the plant, or the cost to build a new plant? A car analogy might be in order here: If I have a 15 year old clunker that cost $20,000 new and is worth $500 now, am I allowed to only do $100 in maintance per year (which could have the car off the road fairly quickly), or $4,000 in maintance per year?
We have four boxes with which to defend our freedom: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.
Parts of Australia are currently suffering from drought. There is trillions of tonnes of water in the Kuiper Belt. Doesn't mean that going into space and bringing it back to Australia is a cost-effective option for supplying water...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Having lived in Miami, I know plenty of Cubans too.. including a few who have been there recently. And they're all waiting for Castro to take that final raft ride. In Cuba, people do live a healthy lifestyle, they get walking exercise, and they eat healthy food .. they refrain from junk food. But guess what, a healthy lifestyle can be lived here too. People choose not to do it.
..must be slow paced, what with people having no money to spend on cars and computers .. fine ..
.. look at North Korea versus South Korea .. before 1950 .. North Korea was considered rich .. and South Korea was considered hopelessly poverty stricken. Countries like Singapore, Japan, western europe, modern China .. that decided to allow individual liberty and capitalism have shown enormous growth potential. So many people get lifted out of poverty. When the state owns monopolies, innovation stalls because incentives disappear amd corruption takes grip.
Sure, some may claim it's a paradise over there
But one thing I can tell you for sure is that I never heard of anyone wanting to take a treacherous raft trip to Cuba from Miami!
America has far more opportunities. As do most countries where the state doesnt own monopolies. If you want to see what communism does
Interestingly enough, the percentage of Cuban refugees compared to the population of Cuba is roughly the same as the proportion of Mexican
Mexicans have to try much less. The Cubans either have to risk their lives or somehow find the resources to get a plane ride.
Economic or not, fact is their government has failed them.
You can bet that they are killing this project because they believe it will prove to be feasible, which is the danger. If it's proven to be feasible, then the public would demand that the coal plants begin to implement this technology which means lower profits for them. If it was expected to prove unfeasible, they would demand that the experiment be completed. /djs
Fast breeder reactors scare the hell out of me.
Something about a large quantity of a molten(sodium) metal that burn in the presence of water and is explosive when exposed to the air. If something goes wrong, it could easily go very very wrong.
Compared with pebble bed reactors or even current light water reactors, there is a fair bit more danger.
They use more of the fuel, create less waste and the waste they create is safer, but it is not like they don't have some rather significant drawbacks, which may prevent them from ever seeing widespread use. They are of course illegal under international treaties as well, but that could be changed more easily than the technical stuff(probably would be too, if they were to get the technical stuff settled and there was political support).
You haven't demonstrated this, merely made claims. The argument is that the number of migrants to the US has the same proportionality from Cuba, Mexico and Canada. Thus, using the number of migrants is clearly not telling you anything about the govt in question, unless you have further hard data to make your case.
You should not compare conditions with the US, which inherited much of its wealth from the winnings from WWII and other historical boons, and instead consider similar sized neighbours Haiti (life expectancy 55, GDP $4400) and Dominican Republic (75, $32000). By those measures it is not clear that Cubans are much worse off at all (sitting halfway between the two in welfare). Indeed, the figures for migration between the 3 would be very interesting.
Considering that Cuba has been attacked both militarily and economically by the US it is surprising it does so well.
What if we could pump the CO2 into vats of genetically engineered algae that would consume the C02, produce oxygen, and when exhausted be processed by TDP into biodiesel?