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Energy Secretary Chu Endorses "Clean Coal"
DesScorp writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Energy Secretary Steven Chu is endorsing 'clean coal' technology and research, and is taking a pragmatic approach to coal as an energy supply. '"It absolutely is worthwhile to invest in carbon capture and storage because we are not in a vacuum," Mr. Chu told reporters Tuesday following an appearance at an Energy Information Administration conference. "Even if the United States or Europe turns its back on coal, India and China will not," he said. Mr. Chu added that "quite frankly I doubt if the United States will turn its back on coal. We are generating over 50% of our electrical energy from coal."' The United States has the world's largest reserves of coal. Secretary Chu has reversed his positions on coal and nuclear power, previously opposing them, and once calling coal 'My worst nightmare.'"
Yawn. Who didn't see this coming a million miles away?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Oxymoron of the century.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
The dirtier the fly ash.
...ideology meets reality.
Bwahahaha.. where's your change now!
I understand that there is no such thing as truly clean coal, but what is so bad about trying to produce cleaner coal for electricity generation?
Yes I do support nuclear, but we are pretty efficient at digging up and combusting coal. Why not work harder to scrub it better and deliver more electricity for the plug in hybrids?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
amirite?
I, for one, would welcome our pollution-filled overlords. Anything that bankrupts the middle east can't be that bad in my opinion.
[an error occurred while processing this sig]
This is all political posturing at best motivated by some poll taken in a coal district. There's NO way this administration would ever actually do anything to support coal. Anyone connected to coal or coal mining who supports Obama would be about as foolish as a gay guy supporting Pat Buchanan.
This is my sig.
Will "clean coal" provide health care for the miners? Will it eliminate those nasty, dangerous sludge ponds that occasionally break through their retaining walls? For some reason I doubt it.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
In one formula, CO2. Coal is the fuel that produces more CO2 per joule than any other energy source.
Jumbo Shrimp
Military Intelligence
Civil Disobedience
Evaporated Milk
Fresh Cheese
Political Science
Reality TV
White Chocolate
Clean Coal
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
By today's standards, anything they build will be cleaner than the 25+ year old plants. Cut some of the nuclear lawsuit shit and maybe we'd have options other than coal.
It turns out that coal lobbyists were his worst nightmare.
Pfft... call me when one of the big-wigs endorses it, not their secretary.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
From my understanding free energy has been available since we went to the moon(officially anyway)...when will these fuckers allow it's use in public?!?
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=coal+radioactive+emissions
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
In my opinion its more of a "as long as we use coal we might as well try to make it as clean as possible". "Clean coal" is better than dirty coal... Even if its still dirty.
It's the only way to get off the energy teat.
Let's nuke! I enjoy! Give nukes to everyone, no coal. Real terrorist-free energy!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Well, well. Some truth about energy! Amazing. Lets take this a bit further and say that if certain groups haven't scared the hell out of people about nuclear, we wouldn't have so many coal plants in the US. We could be selling the coal to other countries. :)
From reading the Economist, I've the impression that clean coal isn't actually that great. Check out these two articles:
The illusion of clean coal
Trouble in store
Despite all this enthusiasm, however, there is not a single big power plant using CCS anywhere in the world. Utilities refuse to build any, since the technology is expensive and unproven. Advocates insist that the price will come down with time and experience, but it is hard to say by how much, or who should bear the extra cost in the meantime. Green pressure groups worry that captured carbon will eventually leak. In short, the world's leaders are counting on a fix for climate change that is at best uncertain and at worst unworkable.
Aside, the WSJ isn't really giving us any new information, is it? Obama was advocating CCS during the election, so is it really surprising that his secretary is now advocating it?
Everything is hard and complicated. Excellent leadership! So kidding everything is hard and complex. Which is why somebody has to make a decision and point us in the direction to accomplish it.
I know, I know. One should not burn (or transmogrify) one's food. I am just saying corn can be used to make plastic.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Stop burning coal. This isn't the industrial revolution. It's 2009 for pete's sake. Breeder reactors. Pull your superstitions out of your brain and your heads out of your asses. B-R-E-E-D-E-R R-E-A-C-T-O-R-S!
In short, he's saying that we can't just drop coal and switch over to alternate sources at the drop of the hat, and we can't make other countries do so, so investing in carbon sequestering technologies is necessary. It seems like a perfectly reasonable position. I don't support coal, and greatly support wind, solar, and nuclear (in that order), but I can't reasonably expect our entire power infrastructure to switch over in years, much less decades.
Why not investigate some technological answers to the problem of CO2?
Here's the thing, not only does it environmentally make sense (if indeed, it works). It also makes commercial sense since clean coal technology would sell internationally.
Countries around the world are desperate to reduce their dependence on oil. Look at Germany and France... they have enormous domestic reserves of coal. Right now they are dependent upon Russia for oil imports which puts them in a very difficult position.
There is definitely nothing wrong with funding more research. The fact is that we have tons of coal plants that aren't going away any time soon - it would be great if we could retrofit these plants. Furthermore, even if people lost their fear of nuclear power, we still couldn't build them fast enough to keep up with demand due to the longer planning and approval processes required. So even with wind, solar, geothermal and nuclear, we are going to have to build more coal plants to keep up with demand.
The problem I have is the coal companies and politicians keep talking about Clean Coal as thought it is a viable alternative to other clean fuels today, when in fact carbon sequestering is a complete joke so far. It's as bad as claiming that hydrogen powered vehicles are just around the corner. Nuclear waste storage is a much more mature and "solved" problem than CO2 storage, as is nuclear reprocessing.
of my co-op at a refinery. there was an entire block of the plant that just sat idle, did nothing, and smelled horrible. my boss told me it was
an old coal-tar extraction plant designed to extract the oil from coal circa 1980. it never panned out to anything more than $4 a gallon gas in 1980, and
was scrapped conveniently keeping the federal funds injected to bring it to fruition.
they had also tried "steam assisted flares" to reduce ozone depleting emissions around that time...which of course made the smoke go away but not the pollutants. federal funding firmly in hand.
clean coal through carbon sequestering is just one more of these technologies energy companies push when an administration critical of fossil fuel shows up, and cant be bought.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I don't know about the merits of clean coal, but anyone who spouts made-up verbs like those must have his head up his ass.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
since it would be a long train and a long row to hoe.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Kill two birds with one stone:
Have Nasa design space ships to go to Mar using COAL as the fuel. As Nasa always does, it will invent innovative technology to solve the problem of the CO2 emissions. They're highly motivated, since Nasa hates global warming (who doesn't?).
When we get good enough at spaceflight, we'll go out to the gas giants and harvest methane.
Wouldn't it have just been better to have been right in the first place?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Clean coal is a dead end for two reasons:
Firstly in order to capture and sequester the CO2 you make the energy much more costly, approaching wind power and surpassing nuclear by quite a bit.
Secondly, the period of time the CO2 needs to be sequestered securely in order to avoid having a large impact on the climate is on the order of magnitude of ten thousand years, which is longer than properly reprocessed nuclear fuel. Also, the fly-ash remains toxic indefinitely.
So basically you have to ask yourself if clean coal is worth it, seeing that it will likely be much more costly, and involve greater waste storage problems, than nuclear power. It might be worth it to research retrofitting existing plants with scrubbers and filters, but in terms of our future energy supply coal seems like a dead end.
I generally agree that environmentalists have screwed the planet pretty good on nuclear power, but I think charging them with the crime of driving some steelworks out of business might be a bit off.
I think the deal is really more that steelworks that could make really thick plates just aren't used that much anymore, and I'd bet principally because the world's warships don't use thick steel plates. While, granted, I would feel a lot safer behind a very thick armor belt as found in an Iowa class battleship, than in a different ship, current naval protection doctrine eschews passive protection in favor of active protection. Instead of armouring ships, you build loads of anti-missile system, electronic warfare, and you also try to avoid detection.
But once Navy's made that switch, they didn't need the uber thick plates, and really, they were the only really big customers. Other people that use armor of some kind, such as tanks, tend to layer it up with different things - like composites.
Without the military driving the creation of foot thick plates, who really needs to do it? I really do try and think, just why I would a foot thick steel plate...
This is my sig.
"'"It absolutely is worthwhile to invest in carbon capture and storage because we are not in a vacuum,"
How gratifying to know that the top of the energy [industry] food chain is educated enough to be aware we have an atmosphere.
As for carbon capture and *storage*, perhaps we can have Mr. Chu's address so we can use his backyard for storage. He's the first d00d of energy, he should get the first load of carbon.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Nuclear plants can be placed anywhere. If they are water cooled, cooling towers are not needed. If they use dry cooling towers, water is not needed.
The headline on the original article is kind of misleading, but here's some quotes from the article:
So, basically he's saying it's a good idea to pursue this technology because we aren't the only coal burning country, and even if we were, other large consumers of energy would still likely use coal. If your goal is reducing carbon in the atmosphere, that'd make sense.
Then:
So really it was just general comments about carbon sequestration research, possible alternative fuels, and future directions for energy technology.
It sounds like the guy is just talking about options, and appears to recognize the problems with many of those options, and the WSJ just decided to put a "clean coal" spin on it all. And then you find in the middle of the article:
So basically, the government doesn't actually appear to be backing clean coal, cause -look - they're going to not ignore environmental lawsuits in risk evaluation. And Chu is also emphasizing the importance of conservation and efficiency over any specific technological changes to energy production. And finally, the middle paragraph just kind of throws a question in there about the value of investing in technology related to clean coal, without linking it back to what Chu was talking about originally.
Bad summary, not a great article. Chu's also said in the past that nuclear energy will have to be part of any future solution to America's energy needs. The man is a scientist - he wants to evaluate all of the options, not just specific ones, and all the quotes in the article attributed to him bear this out. Mostly it just looks like the WSJ trying to create the impression of political skulduggery.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu, brought to you by Clean Coal Technology.
Nuclear power plants have been operating commercially for about fifty years by now. It's a mature technology.
OTOH, there's no coal powered electric power plant anywhere in the world using carbon capture systems. Carbon capture is a theory in the heads of coal industry lobbyists, not a practical reality.
The reason we should invest in clean coal is because the potential benefits -- if it works -- eclipse the benefits of just about any other large scale generation resource. Compared to "sexier" renewable resources, Coal is cheap and abundant. If we can get clean coal technology to work, then we have an excellent answer to our energy future.
What is it worth for even a 1 percent chance that clean coal works? I think the answer is it's worth a ton of money -- certainly more than the couple billion we spend today. It bothers me that the naysayers refuse to even consider coal. It's a dogmatic response that rivals the most intense religious zealots. I am not necessary pro-coal. I see its problems. But I'm also not blind to it's potential.
Chu is not anti-nuke. I don't know where you got that idea, but Secretary Chu has long been a proponent of nuclear power. From a 2005 interview with UC Berkeley's Bonnie Azab Powell:
Question: Should fission-based nuclear power plants be made a bigger part of the energy-producing portfolio?
Chu: Absolutely. Right now about 20 percent of our power comes from nuclear; there have been no new nuclear plants built since the early '70s. The real rational fears against nuclear power are about the long-term waste problem and [nuclear] proliferation. The technology of separating [used fuel from still-viable fuel] and putting the good stuff back in to the reactor can also be used to make bomb material.
And then there's the waste problem: with future nuclear power plants, we've got to recycle the waste. Why? Because if you take all the waste we have now from our civilian and military nuclear operations, we'd fill up Yucca Mountain. ... So we need three or four Yucca Mountains. Well, we don't have three or four Yucca Mountains. The other thing is that storing the fuel at Yucca Mountain is supposed to be safe for 10,000 years. But the current best estimates - and these are really estimates, the Lab's in fact - is that the metal casings [containing the waste] will probably fail on a scale of 5,000 years, plus or minus 2. That's still a long time, and then after that the idea was that the very dense rock, very far away from the water table will contain it, so that by the time it finally leaks down to the water table and gets out the radioactivity will have mostly decayed.
Suppose instead that we can reduce the lifetime of the radioactive waste by a factor of 1,000. So it goes from a couple-hundred-thousand-year problem to a thousand-year problem. At a thousand years, even though that's still a long time, it's in the realm that we can monitor - we don't need Yucca Mountain.
Question: And all of a sudden the risk-benefit equation looks pretty good for nuclear.
Chu: Right now, compared to conventional coal, it looks good - what are the lesser of two evils? But if we can reduce the volume and the lifetime of the waste, that would tip it very much against conventional coal.
Ivory Coal. Unlike Ebony Coal, ours is 99 and 44/100 percent clean.
I'm pretty sure the breeze blocks used to build most houses in the UK are largely made out of fly ash.
Deleted
Just like there's no such thing as ... clean sun (break-even on solar panels just sucks,...
Photovoltaic cells actually reach energy breakeven (more energy out than it took to build them) after only a couple years (depending on technology). Claims that it took more than the life of the panel proved bogus.
But that's not the point.
The purpose of the panels (and their supporting systems of mounts, batteries, inverters, ..) is to deliver high-quality electric energy to a location. As such the proper comparison is between the costs (energy and otherwise) to do this with the panels versus the alternatives. The main alternatives are grid power and (worse) local fuel-driven generators.
So you don't compare the energy cost of building a panel installation capable of powering your load to what it puts out. You compare it to the energy cost of supplying grid power. Melting and forming metal and other materials for power lines, insulators, wires, support guys and guy anchors, transformers, power meters, enclosure boxes, main breakers, - for the run to the load and the load's share of the generation and common transmission infrastructure. Cutting and chemically treating trees to make poles. Clearing land (and dedicating it to the power line in perpetuity). Shipping the materials, equipment, and workers to (and from) the site. Drilling the holes and setting the poles. And so on.
Then once it's installed, you also have to count the energy cost in raw fuel BTU (or whatever) to MAKE the delivered energy - a cost the panels don't have. For instance: burning fuel to make heat, running it through a heat engine to make horsepower, running that through a generator to make electricity, running that through the generator and transformer coils and transmission lines, etc. You lose in the heat engine, the mechanical friction, electrical resistance in all that copper, hysteresis in the generator and transformer cores, excitation power for the generators, minor loads in the control logic, etc.
So the grid takes FAR more energy input than it delivers. Do you hear anybody claim it should therefore be shut down because it's not some more than 100% efficient perpetual motion machine? Of COURSE not! So why do you hear (and repeat) the "less than breakeven" claim about photovoltaic cells and use it (even if it WERE true, which it isn't) as an argument not to use them?
If someone were fool enough to try to MAKE photovoltaic panels using ONLY the electric output of other photovoltaic panels for ALL the energy of their construction (even getting the raw heat from resitive heaters and eschewing even thermal solar panels), the energy breakeven question might have some merit. (But even in that absurd scenario the panels would more than pay off their own energy cost.)
= = = =
Photovoltaic panels have limited deployment because they're still MORE EXPENSIVE than grid power in many situations - including powering houses in cities and suburbs. But about a 5:1 improvement would bring it to sunny suburbs as well.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Ask yourself why the press let this crap slide during the election. Obama and his surrogates made lots of dumbass assertions that went uncalled because the press had a lovefest.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Mr. 'Smart Science Guy' has his mind changed for him on 'Clean Coal' after being appointed to a political position. Who would think that such a thing was possible?
I've got your sig, right here.
Simple matter of business guys.
You can have clean energy. But be willing to triple your electricity bill, and wait about 20 years to replace about 800 GIGAWATTS of coal, natural gas, and oil burning power power plants. At the price of renewable and nuclear power, that's only a few trillion dollars of engineering and construction. And oh yeah, a generation of thousands of specialty technically skilled engineers and specialized construction workers that don't currently exist.
Seriously, you think you can replace 50 years worth of power infrastructure in less than 50 years? While demand is growing?
Somebody has to come up with a few Trillion dollars if you want to have your guilt free power.
But until someone ponies up a few trillion dollars, we are stuck slugging it out, a few billion dollars at a time, making it a little better, a little cheaper, and a little cleaner every year. You wanna be part of the solution? Go to school, learning the engineering, I'll take all the help I can get. Million Horsepower engines are not easy engineering.
But it's not like there's some conspiracy out there. Nobody, including Obama has enough money to solve it with any know potential technology on the drawing board.
" we're going to be deeply screwed when it comes to producing something we've come to take for granted in the modern age - plastics."
I'm a capitalist, free market, generally right-wing kind of guy. That said, I'd love to see less plastic in the world. Not eliminated, mind you... just used a lot less. Yeah, plastic is cheap, and in fact is downright necessary for many things... I wouldn't want a glass shampoo bottle, for instance. But the abundance of plastics in our society has led to the "cheap disposable" mentality of modern economics... things are cheaper to buy up front, but don't last as long, and tend to end up in dumps and landfills more. You don't repair a TV or a radio anymore... you just buy a new one. I don't think its a coincidence that the more plastic there is in a product, the less it will last, which is ironic, since the plastic itself will be around for thousands of years in some cases.
Plastic = cheap and trashy, not just in the cost of the plastic itself, but in the mindset of the manufacturer whenever something has a lot of plastic in it.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
What is needed to make "clean coal?"
Carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide needs to be reduced back to something which can be stored (a solid or liquid) or burned again (such as methane). This process requires energy, but some of the catalysts which do this get their energy from sunlight. Unfortunately, these catalysts don't work well in normal atmosphere, but they do work in something like syngas (a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen). Research on these catalysts to make them cheaper and capable of operating in more oxidative (normal) atmospheres and work better with CO2 could lead to technology which directly converts CO2 in the air into fuel using sunlight. This is "high risk" research normally (and is not really funded right now), but put under the heading of "clean coal" it is low risk (much easier working with just the coal plant exhaust) and perhaps, maybe, possibly could get private funding.
I would bet that's what the angle is... get power companies to pay for the research that will replace fossil fuels.
(yeah, I know plants already do this)
... is the full name of that guy perhaps Mr. Chu Thulu?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It seems massively stupid to me to put spent carbon dioxide way deep in the ground. Sure the idea is sound, but if you are going to put something into the ground (very very deep, no longer in the biosphere) then why the hell not make that nuclear? You spend a lot of effort putting something that gave you very little energy (chemical energy) out of the biosphere, when you could have put something that gave you a lot of energy (nuclear) perhaps a bit deeper. The amount of physical waste per volume is much less with nuclear, and the amount of energy is vastly more. The earth already has a radioactive core (ever see a volcano, how do you think that happened, where did the heat come from?). In the world of geology, a 250,000 year half-life is an eyeblink! If you are worried about too much heat being given off at a 10 mile deep storage facility, ...gee get some cooling pipes into the ground. Thermal radiation travels a lot further than alpha and beta particles, so keep them say ...half a mile (through rock) away from the site. What to do with the hot water....turbines anyone? What to do with the spinning turbines....electric generators anyone? What to do with all that waste electricity.... Slashdot anyone? Is this really all that hard, I mean really!
after allocating lots of money to his friends for the mythical green energy production, he still has an obligation to provide people with real energy.
Here's Your Clean Coal Technology
The game.
Main Entry: clean
Pronunciation: \ËklÄ"n\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English clene, from Old English clæÌne; akin to Old High German kleini delicate, dainty
Date: before 12th century
1 a: free from dirt or pollution . . .
From what I've read there is currently no such thing as "clean coal". I have no problem with researching a way to make coal "clean". But I'me dubious that it is possible, or possible at a reasonable cost.
To be fair, that was sarcasm, not humor.
if we could make efficient biofuel out of algae, the difference there would be that the cycle would be closed. CO2->Algae->Biofuel->CO2
It depends, if coal is the source of CO2 for algae growth the loop would not be closed unless the CO2 is captured, By burning biofuels you're still releasing CO2. Now if algae removed CO2 from the atmosphere it may actually be carbon negative. That's because the dead algae can used as a fertilizer and added to farm land soil.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
o matter what you do with the coal it's CO2-positive.
So what? CO2 is not the source of global warming.
CO2 is a source for global warming but not the only one. Another greenhouse gas is methane, and lifestock, both cows and sheep emit a lot. Now the amount they emit can be reduced. This is because they are ruminants and naturally eat grass. However many range operations feed them foodstock like corn which their digestive system doesn't process that well.
CO2 is not even the largest (by percentage of content) green house gas in the atmosphere. Water is, and its somewhere in excess of 95% of all greenhouse gas.
But as carbon warms the atmosphere, even if only a little, it increases the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. Another positive feedback system, which is what this is, is that as temps rise more methane from bogs and permafrost will be released as well.
Global temps are falling. They have been for as long as you have been aware of the so-called issue.
Citation needed.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
We probably going to self-destruct pretty quickly here. Let's not forget this lesson, and store some carbon for next civilization 50000 years from now, maybe they will get a clue.
And, I am thoroughly against the idiotic "Cap and Trade" gimmick. It is a farce, in the extreme.
As are all Libertarians.
This post is what's a farce.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Just like there's no such thing as clean nuclear (gotta do something with that waste)
Actually, the French have been recycling their spent nuclear fuel for years.
And "France Acknowledges Massive Radioactive Pollution at La Hague".
Or "PRESS RELEASE"
"Vice-President Cheney Wrong About French Nuclear Repository Program, Independent Institute Asserts"
"French Public's Opposition to Nuclear Waste Repositories as Deep as that in the United States"
Then there's the matter of whether nuclear power is profitable. The libertarian free market CATO Institute has this article: "Nuclear Energy: Risky Business". In it it says
"Given all of this, how do France, India, China, and Russia build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don't. Government officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Either these governments build expensive plants and shove them down the market's throat-or they build shoddy plants and hope for the best."
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I don't know why we can't do it, hell, look at France, they've done very well using nuclear energy this way
France has not been successful at reprocessing nuclear waste.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
My old university McMaster has a CANDU reactor which recycles the spent nuclear fuel as well.
According to this "How is high-level nuclear waste managed in Canada?" reprocessing is not done in Canada.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I did some research and we are all wrong. You are right on the dates, for sure, but I'm still right that it is the loss of a military technology applied to the construction of reactor vessels.
It's just that, its not actually the armor, as I claimed. Its the naval gun barrels. The reason the Japanese have a plant that can do it is that they are basically using the same stuff they used to make the 18" guns on the Yamato for make the reactor vessel in one piece. It makes sense, as you figure a gun barrel has to contain some fairly massive pressures in it.
Prior designs used in our existing nuclear reactors were two piece designs welded together and are therefor considered not as safe for modern designs.
I can't find the source for this but I think, and I could be wrong, that US guns were made at the Washington Naval Yard, and that, it was switched over to missile production in the 1950s, and ultimately privatized off. So its doubtful any of that specialized equipment survives in the USA.
Still, there's no reason someone could not make the equipment to make a reactor vessel. It's really just a chicken and egg situation.
This is my sig.
Energy Secretary addresses large coal pile:
"I Chu-Chu-Chuse you."
we cannot afford to forget that it is nuclear power that promises us the quickest (and cleanest) way to combat our oil dependency.
The last nuclear power plant commissioned in the US took more than 20 years to build and put in operation. But say you could cut that into a quarter, 5 years to build a 1 gigawatt reactor, it's still not the fastest way to add generation. If you erect 20 5 megawatt wind turbines a month in one year you'll add 1.2 gigawatts of capacity in a year.
As and for cleanliness, nuclear power is dirty. There's the mining and initial processing, reprocessing spent fuel, storage of the leftovers as well as toxic chemicals used for reprocessing, then closure of the power plant.
we're going to be deeply screwed when it comes to producing something we've come to take for granted in the modern age - plastics.
Oil, petroleum, isn't needed to make plastic. Before oil was used to make plastic plastic was made from plant material. The original cellophane plastic wrap for sandwiches was made from cellulose, a part of plant cells. Way back when, before 1951, Kodak made their film from cellulose. The only reason bioplastics lost favor was because DuPont invented a process to polymerize petroleum to make plastic and that was cheaper than bioplastics. Today bioplastics are making a comeback. I don't feel like looking for it now but Kodak had a pdf online showing the process of making bioplastic.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Okay, now this is pure abuse of moderation. This is a very real issue, going on now, fucking killing people. You don't see how it's relevant? Flamebait doesn't mean "anything people will have strong reactions to" or you would never be able to say anything important. I think it's clear that I've picked up a mod troll today.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
One problem I have with clean coal (always sounds like an oxymoron to me) is there is no "proven" storage method yet (it's all numbers on paper) and it will be another 20-30 years before we can comfortable (if ever) confirm any effects. Now considering clean coal is an unknown and will be for another twenty (20) years "at least" you have to wonder if spending the billions ear marked for clean coal on fusion technology will give everyone a better return. There are test/research fusion reactors going on line (Sth Korea have a research fusion reactor going on line later this year) all over the world. I can't help but feel that the clean coal path is like going down the valve research path in the 1960's because it will keep glass blowers employed when transistors have just been invented as did many US consumer electric companies in the 60's (and got their financial's handed to them by the Japanese who went with transistors). Yes the US does spend a lot on Fusion research but the amount of money invested is a small when compared to the amount of money people spend on mobile phone ring tones.
Well, when they run out of whatever exotic materials they use to make breeder reactors, I for one hope there will be something to fall back on. Diversity is generally a good thing.
BS! People have been building off the grid since the beginning of civilization. Only those who do it today have electricity. Offgridders use various sources of alternative energy including geothermal, solar, wind, and microhydro along with others.
producing your own needs for electricity is great
but its a VERY SMALL amount of the world's total energy consumption.
Today off grid applications are small but it can easily be expanded. Solar, wind, and other systems can quickly be added. Solar panels can be placed of roofs for instance. Farmers can erect, or have erected, wind gennies on towers. They don't take up much space and they'll create a new source of income for farmers.
But the first thing offgridders do though is to reduce energy use, conserve electricity. Instead of using 75 watt incandescent lights, they'll use 15 watt CFLs or LEDs under 10 watts. For hot water, tankless instant on water heaters are more efficient. Solar hot water heater systems can bee used themselves, or can preheat water for instant on heaters. Passive solar designs can reduce any need for heating and cooling of indoor space, and with insulation with high R values heating and cooling can be eliminated. But even if heating is needed or wanted geothermal heating can be used. And by reversing the system when hot it can cool space as well.
There are many things that can be done to reduce energy consumed.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
What will accelerate global warming faster?
1. We burn coal, and sequester the carbon dioxide. This requires compressors, pumps, - energy - to do.
2. We burn coal and don't sequester the carbon dioxide. This makes more efficient use of energy, since we don't need to compress the CO2 and store it underground.
I guess we (rich countries) could also try to suck CO2 out of the air, but I haven't yet seen a proven method.
Trees?
There are two problems I know of to use trees to absorb CO2. One is that some trees have been shown to emit more CO2 during parts of their growth. Another problem is that once the trees die they'll release the CO2 again. What has been proposed is to bury trees deep underground. However others have called those people Envirokooks.
Something I just thought of typing this reply is if burying trees will really work, it may make greenhouse gases in the atmosphere worse. This is because as organic matter decomposes in an anaerobic , without oxygen, it decomposes into methane which is 20 tymes as strong a greenhouse gas as CO2 is.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The big problem with clean"er" coal is that the CO2 output isn't being dealt with on fundamental level. There is the route of feeding it greenhouses or engineered organisms to make biomass/lipids/syngas/methane/oil, but under current conditions that just ends up being burnt/digested and releasing the CO2 again, so it would be at best carbon neutral if the CO2 is being "recycled".
The long term solution is to commit to destroying the CO2. This is energy intensive for a reason. Arguably it is a net negative. The only thing going for this is that many renewable energy sources are not suitable for baseload power and insufficient grid energy storage exists or is planned. So, commit to clean coal baseload power, and commit the renewable power to CO2 destruction since that is not dependent on consumer demand whims.
CO2 destruction will probably use a number of technologies. Plasma reactors may be the preferential choice for direct CO2 destruction, but will consume significant energy, mostly electrical (examples include gliding arc reverse vortex, and microwave). Some of the necessary energy could be supplied as process heat from renewable sources such as concentrated solar thermal and geothermal (both of which can also provide the electrical energy for the plasma reactor). There are also intermediate techniques that come close, in that they break down the CO2 into something else but don't fully destroy it. The CR5 solar thermal reactor can break down CO2 into O2 and CO (the CO typically being used as part of syngas to make methane). High temperature electrolysis using steam and CO2 can produce various ratios of CO, O2, H2, and methane (HTE is basically a solid oxide fuel cell run in reverse). Engineered algae can be fed a CO2 rich environment, and their dried biomass can be sent through a gasifier similar to a coal gasifier. Tweaking the gasifier will get you a high carbon density biochar, which can be used as a soil fertilizer and is considered by quite a few people to be a viable form of carbon sequestration (since it is a stable material compared to CO2 gas/liquid buried deep underground which might get loose again in a violent burst). These and other techniques can produce CO, which could then be sent through the plasma reactor rather than CO2 directly, or use other techniques to isolate the carbon and release the oxygen. There certainly has been some interesting research on using engineered organisms to produce nanoscale structures. That recent work with DNA nanoscaffolds could lead to organisms producing carbon fiber and graphite from CO2 rich environments, which is another suitable end result for the carbon.
The people who make the first company to industrially destroy CO2 at near commercially viable prices will become filthy rich. They get to suck down government grants/subsidies/tax credits, and can sell carbon credits like they are printing money to every desperate industry that can't go completely clean, like a captive group of hostages ready to be abused. If the byproducts like biochar and graphite are of suitable quality, that represents another significant income source. Make enough money from this, and you could implement raw air capture of CO2 to source even more CO2, the CO2 that comes from distributed sources that can't be easily captured and/or taxed. Governments could then be obligated to pay them to take the CO2 out of the very air itself as a service to their citizens and to meet international treaty obligations the soon to be enacted Copenhagen Accord.
invaders
If India tried to invade Russia because Global Warming decimated Indian agriculture they wouldn't have the problems Napoleon and Hitler had. Neither army could handle the cold that well. India'd have another problem though. Currently India and Russia are friendly, and Pakistan and China are friendly, to each other. India does not get along with either China or Pakistan though. The Sino-Indian War was a war between China and India in 1962 and they still have bad feelings between them. Then India and Pakistan were partitioned from British India. And India would have to go through one or the other to invade Russia.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Yeah, if you go to the anti clean coal websites, that seems to be their only legitimate complaint.
Some who oppose may only do so because of CO2 but others do for other reasons as well. Others, like Appalachian Voices and Mountain Justice oppose Mountaintop Removal. And others have other reasons to oppose coal.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Pay no attention to this bag of money I received from coal lobby :/
recycled paper takes more energy to make than the original wood paper.
Where's your source? According to the Energy Information Administration there is a "40% reduction in energy when paper is recycled versus paper made with unrecycled pulp." Another webpage answers the question "Does virgin paper use less energy to produce than recycled paper?" as thus: "There can be no definitive statement on which uses more energy because each forest, producer, vehicle, mill and so on will have its own way of working, and the different types of energy-use also have different environmental impacts. Broadly the reprocessed fibre in recycled grades is more efficient in energy terms."
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Does it really matter if it leaks to the surface if the rate is significantly less than we are currently releasing?
It can be a matter of live or death for life around a leak. Thousands of people and lifestock died when Lake Nyos, in Africa, released CO2.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
"It absolutely is worthwhile to invest in carbon capture and storage because we are not in a vacuum,"
If we were in a vacuum, it would be pretty pointless attempting to burn coal at all.
Was it only me that noticed that the US media coverage of Barack Obama's election victory speech was carpet-bombed with mindf**k ads showing green leaves on a white background and the words "Clean-Coal".
I have to ask, what is it about me that makes me understand exactly what these powerful interests are doing to me when they do it, whereas it seems to escape most peoples' attention. That's bloody frightening.
In any case, I don't care how the US generates its energy as long as it reduces its carbon emission footprint rapidly down to 20% of its current value.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I expected the obligatory Chernobyl mention, but TMI and Chernobyl were night and day.
Yea, Chernobyl showed how nuclear power can fail but TMI showed how it can work. The control and safety systems prevented a worse incident.
I'm inclined to view TMI's accident as an example of how far we've come and how much we learned from Chernobyl, and I'm far from unique in that assessment.
Except TMI happened before Chernobyl, lessons from Chernobyl didn't help TMI.
even if I was as strongly against nuclear power as they were, I'd still hope to be intellectually honest enough to call that article out for being the complete mess that it is.
Perhaps another one could have been better to use, such as this one: "Nuclear Materials 'Poison' Navajo Land", but that one was one of the first results when I googled. Or this one, " FACT SHEET on Uranium Mining and Nuclear Pollution in the Upper Midwest". Indian tribes and reservations have had to deal with uranium mining, and storage, including having their treaty rights violated. The proposed permanent storage site, Yucca Mountain, is by the Treaty of Ruby Valley part of Western Shoshone land, and they oppose the use of it for nuclear waste.
Of course if it goes through and waste is stored there it'll just be another broken treaty in a line of treaties the US has broken with Indian tribes. That I know of no nation has broken as many treaties as the US has.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
wind turbines are rated by thier output under ideal wind conditions.
According to howstuffworks "At 33 mph, most large turbines generate their rated power capacity". In places it is windier than that. The Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States details by region wind potential.
Also relying on wind puts your grid at the mercy of whether the wind blows or not.
Ah, the use of solar and geothermal can help. I once heard that when the wind doesn't blow it's usually sunny. I'd add that solar and wind energy can be harvested at the same tyme during the day. And geothermal can be used as a baseload.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Those are good reasons to cut back on coal, I didn't know about those earlier. Thanks for posting those.
I knew coal mining was deadly but I was absolutely shocked by the first photos of mountaintop removal. I love mountains and seeing one turned into a parking lot just doesn't sit well with me. As I read more I found other problems also. Do you remember that leak of coal slurry last year at TVA? There have been other leaks. Mountaintop removal also buries rivers and streams, and toxins enter into drinking water.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Name me a commercially successful reprocessing fast breeder reactor. One. Anywhere. Something that would provide good grounds for going "Oh look, those guys over there seem to have nailed it, let's base our energy future on what they are doing!"
Nope, all you got are tiny test systems, colossal government-backed failures, sodium explosions and leaking reprocessing pools, and - hope springs eternal! - product brochures from GE. Well thanks, but no thanks.
"But these new planned systems solve all the problems of the old systems! And they won't run into any unforeseen difficulties, we don't have those any more! Every new technology now runs perfectly, just as planned!"
Right.
Renewables, energy efficiency. and conservation on the other hand, those we can pretty much pop down to WallMart and buy off the shelf. And yes, they can do everything we actually need, and are easily as dependable as coal or nuclear. Double glazing is about as 'base-load' as you can get.
So, since you brought him up, ask yourself ... which energy source would Jesus use?
don't listen the CATO institute, they're not very trustworthy.
First, why do you say CATO is not trustworthy? Do you trust Forbes? That article CATO has is from "Forbes", CATO just reprinted it. As this next one is anti-nukes you probably won't accept it either but there goes. Dating from 2005 " True Costs of Nuclear Power -- Half-a-Trillion Dollars Sunk" says electricity from nuclear power plants cost at "least 9.0 cents a kilowatt-hour, far more than other readily available fuels." But the most important assessment of nuclear power's profitability is Wall Street and Wall Street has never funded nuclear without subsidies.
Yucca mountain is no longer a viable storage site if that is what you were talking about. They found a fault ran underneath it that they didn't think did.
Why should they be surprised? Back in the '70s a building was damaged when Yucca Mountain was hit by an earthquake. Then several years ago another earthquake hit near Yucca.
The general impression I get from your post is that you think nuclear power is somehow really dirty.
Nuclear power is dirty, as are all sources of power we could use. even geothermal energy is dirty.
All you need for long term storage is a geological stable site that is isolated from the water table.
And where will sites like this be found?
I was not aware of mines on native lands, most of the best mines are in Canada from my understanding.
Those mines in Canada are on First Nations's land. "Greenpeace joins First Nations and citizens to oppose Sharbot Lake uranium exploration". "A Violation of Algonquin Law".
And it's not just the US and Canada that mines uranium on Native lands. Australia does it as well as other nations.
As for "government funding" it's just government loans that I've heard of no grants
From January 2007, "Analysis of Nuclear Subsidies in Lieberman-McCain Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act of 2007 [pdf]". It says "Finally, Sec. 323 of the bill enables projects within different technology categories, including nuclear power, to bid for an additional federal grant of as much as $100 million - or more if approved by the Secretary of Energy."
Now those subsidies are just US ones not Chinese, French, Indian, or Russian.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Bury the CO2 - Why won't it leak back up to the surface?
You strawman, who told you to bury it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration
Carbon dioxide can be injected into old oil wells and other geological features, or can be stored in pure form in the deep ocean.[citation needed]
The first large-scale CO2 sequestration project (1996) is called Sleipner, and is located in the North Sea where Norway's StatoilHydro strips carbon dioxide from natural gas with amine solvents and disposes of this carbon dioxide in a deep saline aquifer. In 2000, a coal-fueled synthetic natural gas plant in Beulah, North Dakota, became the world's first coal using plant to capture and store carbon dioxide.[31]