Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
See Carbon sequestration
The problem here is that utilities are currently trying to build new "Clean Coal" generating plants that have no carbon capture at all.
The "Clean Coal" phrase as Chu used it in the article is very different than the "Clean Coal" phrase used by my local utility trying to build a new plant. I would not mind Chu's "Clean Coal", but I do not want what the utilities are currently calling "Clean Coal".
engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff
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?
Who's reversing his position? Everyone talked up so-called clean coal during the election.
I agree however; even if we don't use the technology, we can make money selling it to other people.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
We've got tons of coal that's (relatively) easy to mine and (if not clean) not nearly as bad as it used to be and its environmental impact isn't all that much worse than a lot of the "green" sources.
Bullshit.
Football Odds
From the recycling article regarding the US and reprocessing. "In October 1976, fear of nuclear weapons proliferation (especially after India demonstrated nuclear weapons capabilities using reprocessing technology) led President Gerald Ford to issue a Presidential directive to indefinitely suspend the commercial reprocessing and recycling of plutonium in the U.S. This was confirmed by President Jimmy Carter in 1977. After that, only countries that already had large investments in reprocessing infrastructure continued to reprocess spent nuclear fuel. President Reagan lifted the ban in 1981, but did not provide the substantial subsidy that would have been necessary to start up commercial reprocessing."
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.
Well, I did not get the information their ad.
The quote is from Obama, interview with the San Francisco Chronicle.
FactCheck.org addressed the McCain-Palin ad(s).
They did not address the direct Obama quotes at all.
FactCheck.org directed you to Obama's energy policy on his web site, but did not address his words to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Maybe you should get your own facts straight and actually read what FactCheck.org stated and shows.
"As president, as president, I will tap our natural gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology, and find ways to safely harness nuclear power. I'll help our auto companies re-tool, so that the fuel-efficient cars of the future are built right here in America."
--Barak Obama, Acceptance Speech, Democratic National Convention. August 28, 2008.
Seriously man. Seriously. You cite the Drudge version of the Chronicle piece just like a conservative tool. Here's the whole quote:
"So, if somebody wants to build a coal power plant, they can. It's just that, it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted. That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel, and other alternative energy approaches. The only thing that I've said, with a respect to coal -- I haven't been some coal booster -- what I have said is, that, for us to take coal off the table as a ideological matter, as opposed to saying, if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, we should pursue it. You know, that I think is the right approach." Barak Obama, SF Chronicle Interview, Jan 17, 2008 (emphasis mine)
How about you think for yourself just a tiny little bit, eh?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
But if we have to burn the coal (and right now we do), why not see if there is some way we can lessen the environmental impact?
We have a way already, it was developed at Sandia national labs on the behalf of the USDOE, and you can read a bit about how to deal with the carbon here. We capture 80% of the CO2 and then at least get to use it again. And a percentage of the algae becomes fertilizer. Of course, that assumes that such an approach fits into our national agenda — only time will tell. Is it as good as a complete "clean coal" solution? That very much depends on who you ask.
As for new coal-fired power plants, they are an aberration and should be avoided at all costs. If we must build new power plants which are not inherently sustainable, let us build plants to reprocess nuclear waste, and plants to run on the resulting fuel. Yes, the technology could be used to produce weapons-grade materials. No, this is not relevant, because we already have more of that than we could possibly need.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"