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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.
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.
Too many NIMBY and "nukes are bad, evil monsters who will eat your babies" weenies in the way of nuclear power.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
I think it says much about the success of the social conditioning of the American people. After all else is said and done, one can measure the effects of mind control simply by looking at the end results. I think this was even noted somewhere in the bible using an agriculture analogy concerning fruit.
-FL
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
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.
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.
Hey, here's an idea - maybe it was canceled because the costs had risen 80% before a single spade of dirt was dug? I mean, fer chrissake, look at the Big Dig.
Oh, yeah - the Illinois site wasn't the actual selection - the industry jumped the gun and announced the Illinois site prior to the DOE's final decision. All 4 sites were still under consideration when Illinois and the industry tried to present the DOE with a fait accompli by announcing the site and passing laws to make things go smoother.
Of course, none of that could possibly be true, as the current president is like some satanic octopus, with his evil tentacles manipulating everything invisibly behind the scenes. Invisible, that is, to the select few who see clearly - aren't we lucky to have people like them?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I have heard that Bush was furious that Texas was not chosen, pulled a few strings and the project was cancelled.
Please link to the source of this fact. Or, consider the possibility that it's just a bunch of shrill nonsense being passed around by someone suffering from classic BDS. Read up a thread or two, and consider the fact that the notion of this approach has already been completely eclipsed by other developments.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.