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Germany Fired Up Over Clean Coal
MIT's Technology Review is reporting on the world's first coal-driven power plant designed to capture and store C02 emissions. "Vattenfall's small 30-megawatt plant burns the lignite in air from which nitrogen has been removed. Combustion in the resulting oxygen-rich atmosphere produces a waste stream of carbon dioxide and water vapor, three-quarters of which is recycled back into the boiler. By repeating this process, known as oxyfuel, it is possible to greatly concentrate the carbon dioxide. After particles and sulfur have been removed, and water vapor has been condensed out, the waste gas can be 98 percent carbon dioxide, according to Vattenfall. The separated carbon dioxide will be cooled down to -28 C and liquefied. Starting next year, the plan is to transport it by truck 150 miles northwest, to be injected 3,000 meters underground into a depleted inland gas field in Altmark. Ideally, in the future, the gas will be carried by pipeline to underground storage, says Vattenfall. "
30 MW is tiny. A baseload powerplant in the US runs about 1000MW. So, if this process can scale up 30x, AND we can figure out what to do with 30x the CO2, then I'll get excited.
Nuke plants had many of the same issues - a 1000MW powerplant is NOT simply a Navy aircraft carrier scaled up, although it looks that way in the Visitor's center.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
"What is the problem with putting the putting the emissions back in the ground?"
Because that would be a technological solution to the problem. One of reasons that there is still a lot of resistance to the Global Climate Change crowd is that there seems to be a "hair shirt" mentality about it - they aren't yelling because the Earth is going to melt down. Rather, they really want us using fewer resources because we are BAD for doing so. It is a behavior change they are looking for, not really a change in the percentage of CO2 put into the atmosphere. So a technological solution that allows the world to continue using energy like a drunken sailor uses his paycheck is unacceptable.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Huh, I thought it was because the earth has a funny way of shifting around and things don't always stay buried for very long which could be problematic for pressurized gasses, but I guess it's because of anti-technology ecofascists.
There's certainly that, PLUS:
It does not reduce our dependence on a limited resource. We're gonna run out eventually and the sooner we find an alternative the better.
It just so happens that most, if not all of the truly "renewable" energy cycles we've found are also very eco-friendly. Kind of like a double-win.
=Smidge=
That is the good thing about vitrified storage. It is GLASS. Glass doesn't get into drinking water. Also people forget that seawater already contains Thorium and Uranium.
We shouldn't be storing that stuff in Yucca mountain anyway. We should be reprocessing it and make more fuel out of it. What we can not make into fuel we should "burn" in special reactors in to short half life isotopes that decay to ore levels in just around 100 years and use vitrified storage for that.
So the real answer to the question of to why people fear nuclear power is.
They are ignorant, scared, and they have been lied to by the people that use them as their base of political power.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
All these posts about farting planets are very amusing, but should be moderated "funny," not informative.
Companies in the United States currently have billions of cubic feet of natural gas and other gases into long-term underground storage facilities. In fact, anyone familiar with the working end of the natural gas business will be happy to spend hours explaining how it works. The Department of Energy -- http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/natural_gas/analysis_publications/ngcapacity/ngcapacity.pdf has some info on the practice.
Put simply: gas underground moves very, very slowly. The diffusion rate can be measured, and while some gas will inevitably escape, the amount lost can be measured very precisely (and accurately).
Unless we as a society are willing to suffer blackouts, coal and other fossil fuel power plants will be around for years. Heck, even Al Gore says a minimum of 10 years, and I personally (as an energy industry guy) think it's going to be a lot longer than that.
If you accept that there is a man-made climate crisis coming, then storage of CO2 is an excellent short term fix to reducing emissions as we move away from a carbon-based economy. Whether you think of this as "short term" storage or "long-term" storage depends on your outlook. Is 100 years long or short? Seen from a geological timeline, it's laughably short. Looked at as a means of reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere starting today -- it's a great first step.
Well, then we'd be burning trees much, much faster than they could replenish. That's why they aren't really renewable.
Nuclear is really the only way to go. Reprocess and re-use the fuel in breeder reactors, and we'll have enough energy for a long time, and little dangerous waste.
somehow natural gas has stayed underground for millions of years.
love is just extroverted narcissism
How about we stop using retarded 50 year old nuclear technology that only extracts 10% of the usable energy from nuclear fuel and throwing the rest away?
We could feed all our energy needs for centuries on feeder-breeder reactors. Not only this, but the final waste products of this process remain radioactive for only a few centuries vs thousands of years that conventional nuclear "waste" lasts. That makes the issue of disposing of nuclear waste vastly more simple.
I don't really promote 100% nuclear, closer to 50/50 feeder reactors and solar thermal power production. We don't really need to use any coal, gas or oil to power the grid at all. Hell we could even rid ourselves of fossil fuels for most transport as well if we invested in grid powered train tracks and charging rails for electric vehicles on the interstates and major highways.
This is all available on current technology, and it would cost vastly less than the mining, pumping, refining and foreign entanglement costs associated with limited fossil fuels. Why not take this step now? Instead of a hundred years from now when there will not be enough fossil fuels left to fight over. America and Europe were some of the first nations to go through the industrial revolution. Its time to pass the torch to the third world. Its time for us to move beyond industrialization. Its not just good for America, or Europe, its good for the entire world.
IIRC the reason for burying the waste CO2 is that it gets absorbed by the surrounding rocks and converted into harmless minerals.... Someone with more geological expertise than I have will have to explain that, though.
Geological? Try alchemical. Carbon doesn't transmute to other elements to form new non-carbon minerals. Mineralize carbon and you get slate, coal, or diamond.
Better to have a living process rebind that carbon with hydrogen into useful biochemicals and free up the oxygen for later recombustion.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?