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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.'"
Oxymoron of the century.
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In one formula, CO2. Coal is the fuel that produces more CO2 per joule than any other energy source.
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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
A major political figure completely reversing his stance a subject and is able to provide straightforward and logical explanations for the change? Maybe I'm used to the previous administrations policy of "what we say goes, no matter what" but, yeah, this does kind of surprise me.
Say what you will about clean coal, but he is right about one thing. China is going to keep burning coal until there's no coal left to burn or something cheaper is found. Why not research the hell out of the subject and sell it to them in 10 years when they realize that they're killing their population with pollution? And if they somehow work out a way to have truly clean coal (burning coal with no particulates and no release of CO2) then why shouldn't we use it here at home?
Personally, I like nuclear, solar, and wind for our energy needs. But I think we should be researching every possibility, including clean coal and biofuels. Having a diverse set of energy sources means that when when resource becomes scarce we can more easily shift our focus and continue on.
Dude... we had change from pro-coal to anti-coal. Now we have change back to pro-coal from anti-coal.
Maybe my math sucks, but that's 200% of the change we expected.
Why you hatin'?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
One the problem with "clean" coal is the radioactive waste. For the amount of energy produced, coal created more radioactive waste then nuclear. The difference is it is mixed in with tons and tons of chemically toxic ash, so there is no way of ever disposing of it safely. For nuclear energy the waste is conveniently concentrated and small enough it can be disposed of safely in stable rock.
Perhaps if we mixed the waste from our reactors with coal ash, people won't be so worried about it.
You can't build nuclear plants that fast
Why can't we? Would it have anything to do with the fact that the enviro-nazis and NIMBY bastards successfully stymied the construction of new plants back in the 70s and 80s and in so doing left zero incentive for American industry to retain the plant and equipment to build reactors?
I read somewhere that there's only one steelworks in the world that's capable of forging the reactor containment walls and they have years of back orders on the books. Of course it didn't used to be that way but the various anti-nuclear movements drove down demand to the point that it wasn't profitable for other steelworks to retain the equipment to produce them. Other parts of the supply chain have been equally impacted.
Congratulations environmentalists -- you ripped the heart out of the only energy source that could have weaned us off carbon in our lifetimes. Seems a bit shortsighted in retrospect, doesn't it?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
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!
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.
In a nutshell. Just because you're pro-green, doesn't mean you're completely out of touch with reality. We use coal for a HUGE amount (it's the largest single source) of our national energy production, and it'll be decades before that can change in any meaningful way, so it only makes sense to see if you can make a virtue of necessity.
The thing I liked about Obama was that he wasn't batshit crazy. This is a perfectly sensible move, something he promised to look into during his campaign, and something worthy of study at the least. I am at a loss to explain all the crazy that's leaking out in this thread.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.