Slashdot Mirror
Coal Plants Get New Lease On Life With Natural Gas
HughPickens.com writes Christina Nunez reports in National Geographic that in the past four years, at least 29 coal-fired plants in 10 states have switched to natural gas or biomass while another 54 units, mostly in the US Northeast and Midwest, are slated to be converted over the next nine years. By switching to natural gas, plant operators can take advantage of a relatively cheap and plentiful US supply. The change can also help them meet proposed federal rules to limit heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, given that electricity generation from natural gas emits about half as much carbon as electricity from coal does.
But not everyone is happy with the conversions. The Dunkirk plant in western New York, slated for conversion to natural gas, is the focus of a lawsuit by environmental groups that say the $150 million repowering will force the state's energy consumers to pay for an unnecessary facility. "What we're concerned about is that the Dunkirk proceeding is setting a really, really bad precedent where we're going to keep these old, outdated, polluting plants on life support for political reasons," says Christopher Amato. Dunkirk's operator, NRG, wanted to mothball the plant in 2012, saying it was not economical to run. The utility, National Grid, said shutting it down could make local power supplies less reliable, a problem that could be fixed by boosting transmission capacity—at a lower cost than repowering Dunkirk. Meanwhile the citizens of Dunkirk are happy the plant is staying open. "We couldn't let it happen. We would lose our tax base, we would lose our jobs, we would lose our future," said State Sen. Catharine M. Young. "This agreement saves us. It gives us a foundation on which to build our economy. It gives us hope. This is our community's Christmas miracle!"
But not everyone is happy with the conversions. The Dunkirk plant in western New York, slated for conversion to natural gas, is the focus of a lawsuit by environmental groups that say the $150 million repowering will force the state's energy consumers to pay for an unnecessary facility. "What we're concerned about is that the Dunkirk proceeding is setting a really, really bad precedent where we're going to keep these old, outdated, polluting plants on life support for political reasons," says Christopher Amato. Dunkirk's operator, NRG, wanted to mothball the plant in 2012, saying it was not economical to run. The utility, National Grid, said shutting it down could make local power supplies less reliable, a problem that could be fixed by boosting transmission capacity—at a lower cost than repowering Dunkirk. Meanwhile the citizens of Dunkirk are happy the plant is staying open. "We couldn't let it happen. We would lose our tax base, we would lose our jobs, we would lose our future," said State Sen. Catharine M. Young. "This agreement saves us. It gives us a foundation on which to build our economy. It gives us hope. This is our community's Christmas miracle!"
You say that and you are correct, but when the best solution we have right now, nuclear, is mentioned the greenies freak the hell out and star screaming and running around in circles. Until we actually embrace what is possible to do and stop wishing on new technology to catch up, we'll be stuck here for a while.
Apparently environmentalists themselves. Perfect is the enemy of good. If one were to be cynical one would suggest that environmentalists only want sources of energy that are expensive and unreliable because the availability of abundant energy sources won't strike a stake through the heart of capitalism and consumerism.
Envirowackos are anti-human.
The problem with nuclear, without even going close to the radiation boogeyman, is that:
- it requres huge investement before nothing happens
- it takes years to construct a power plant
- it's pretty much unflexible regarding any peaks or lows in consumption
- the latest generation concrete housings' carbon foorprint takes a decade to offset
- provided the fuel mining, enrichement and transportation is almost carbon neutral
- the nuclear plants require a lot of sweet water for cooling, 24/7, and the world is running out
Oh, and nobody is willing to foot the bill, including insurance and decomissioning, so techically greenies don't really need to freak the hell out or start screaming, because mostly nuclear power is off the table due to practical issues. Which probably is why I don't know any greenies who do run around in circles. Actually, most of the greenies I know are free-market liberals. Now, *that* doesn't make any sense...
Nuclear is dead in the US. It's been regulated to the point that it's not financially viable to build one. I know a guy who worked on the construction of one and he said what caused the massive costs overruns is that the plans constantly change while you are building. He said they would build a wall, then tear it down and build another wall with different specs then a year late the specs would change again. He built one wall four times. The cost overruns and impossibility to meet any kind of schedule kill it.
It's all just about boiling water. We boiled water with wood, then coal, natural gas and now nuclear power. All these years and we're still boiling water.
One community's "Christmas miracle" is another community's environmental and tax burden, another private company's windfall at the expense of the public interest, another and apparently another generation's problem.
Natural gas is better if you use a combined cycle gas turbine plant, where the natural gas is burnt in a what amounts to a jet engine and then the exhaust is used to heat water for steam turbines.
If you just replace coal with natural gas in the same plant to heat the water it is not significantly less CO2, though it will likely be less other pollutants.
, said the addict.
Well, Coal is very high in carbon, little hydrogen. Natural gas has a CH4 has 4 hydrogen to 1 carbon. Thus one CH4 burns to CO2 and 2-H2O
The heat from the H combustion adds no CO2 to the air and coal is over 90%(varies a lot with hard/soft coal - google that). In addition, the combustion of hydrogen makes more heat per mole than the combustion of carbon.
That was then. Today we have settled on standardized new-generation plant designs that avoid this problem.
What's really needed is a change in our legal system to eliminate the disproportionate power that small groups of activists have to disrupt construction. Their strategy is to raise costs by imposing phony legal delays on construction after the initial approval.
That's the problem with you "environmentalists".
* You don't like coal because it emits soot and C02
* You don't like gas because it still emits C02, even though it's way better than coal
* You don't like nuclear because, well, you name it. Excuse after excuse after excuse.
* You don't like Hydro because of the fishes.
* Some of you don't like large solar because of he turtles or whatever else crawls on the ground and will be denied the Sun.
* Some of you don't like wind because...hell, I don't know. The fact that some of you do is hilarious considering the trubines regularly kill endangered birds.
You pretty much don't like anything. You don't have a solution except austerity/rationing/restrictions/taxes.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The problem with nuclear, without even going close to the radiation boogeyman, is that:
- it requres huge investement before nothing happens
- it takes years to construct a power plant
- the nuclear plants require a lot of sweet water for cooling, 24/7, and the world is running out
I'm a fan of the mini-nuclear reactors. These are about the size of a bus, can be mass-produced to make them cheaper, and require no maintenance or cooling. They are extremely fault-tolerant - they only operate in a narrow thermal band, if they get too hot or too cold the reaction shuts itself down. One produces enough energy to power a small city, or a large neighborhood in a big city. You sink them in a concrete vault and forget about them for a decade or so. When their nuclear fuel is spent, you pull them out, get rid of the waste (about the size of a softball) refurbish and refuel the reactor and put it back in the ground.
The bonus side-effect is a more stable and efficient electrical grid with fewer long-haul high voltage power lines running all over the place, more redundancy and less centralization.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
It wasn't always this way. In John Steinbeck's day, leftists celebrated the huge infrastructure projects of the New Deal, because they meant construction jobs now and an improved economy later with cheaper transportation, electricity and water. The left chose to turn anti-himan in the Seventies, which is why progress today has to wait until that generation ages out of political relevance. Fortunately for the rest of us, their youthful drug use is catching up with them.
"We couldn't let it happen. We would lose our tax base, we would lose our jobs, we would lose our future," said State Sen. Catharine M. Young. "This agreement saves us. It gives us a foundation on which to build our economy."
It seems to me that if they were going to use the local power plant as a foundation for building the local economy, they might have gotten around to that by now. The plant has been there for decades, right? Looks to me like they squandered their chance as diversifying their tax and employment base - why should they be given a second chance to squander?
This is a temporary Measure at best. I see alot of anti-liberal and pro-conservative posts here. Let me make myself absolutely clear:
I'm not pro-development, I'm anti-living-in-the-past and reactionary-ism.
I don't think that cars are a bad thing in and of themselves. I think that cars burning petroleum is a bad thing. We should have cars, everyone needs cars, modernity is built around people having cars. But our cars should not be burning Petroleum. They should run on Electricity or some other Fuel source. There are companies working on that very idea.
Another idea is generating electricity in general. Electricity should be everywhere. We should use many methods to generate it as possible, Hydro Electric damns, Fusion plants, Solar panels, Next Generation Nuclear Fission Plants (not necessarily unsafe ones where the fuel can be weaponized to make an Atomic Bomb.) Wind Turbines, and any number of things, the one thing we shouldn't be doing, is mining and burning Coal.
I never thought Slashdot would become a Michael Savage Bastion of Conservative Clap-traps but it has.
SOME greenies. Making massive generalisations like that demonstrates you're not making rational assumptions.
The more massive generalisations you make the less people should listen to you. You are merely projecting your own ideas of what an environmentalist is to you, and the battering it to death with a bizarre take on logic.
Environmentalists like power sources which don't adversely affect the environment. The clue is in the name. Rants like yours are simply embarrassing.
while I do not disagree, what would you like us to do in the interm?? have half the population freeze to death because they cant afford alt fuels???
this is a great stopgap to hold things over until alt fuels and battery storage become cheep enough for the avg american
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Ha!
Environmentalists don't consider ANY power source to not adversely affect the environment. You mention any power source and I could probably find some environmentalists group that has objections.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
the problem is he is correct. not all of them, but the vocal ones who actually push for regulating everything.
So let me ask you something dave, what energy sources do you believe can replace coal and oil in the next 5 years and not cost more than we pay now? because in my experience just as the previous poster its impossible to get a real answer out of an environmentalist on what we should be doing, they only know what we shouldnt be doing.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Yeah...they'd just have to dig one up and cart off all one hundred tons of it off in the middle of the night when no one is looking.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I bet they are all about reliable and inexpensive energy now that their oxygen pumps and other medical equipment relies on it.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Nah, he told the true. You can find an environmentalist who likes wind but not solar, or nuclear but not hydro. The enviro movement, if I can call some so diffuse that, cannot collectively agree on anything. The only thing they can agree on are environmental regulations to stop something so they can cater to the one segment who doesn't like that something. The consequence is the polyglot energy systems we do have.
I believe in environmental regulations. However, choices have to be made. The biggest threat is global warming due to CO2. So start accepting nuclear and the rest and STFU already.
just guessing here - Fracking?
Get up!
the problem is none of us disagree with you
We disagree with the speed in which you expect it to be done. It will take time to bring the price of all those other things down to be affordable for the masses. a tesla model S, while I would LOVE to own one is simply out of my, and most others price range at this time. Not to mention if we all switched to electric cars overnight, what does that do the the power grid? increased demand means increase in energy needed to be produced. how do we get there?
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I would use the term Schizophrenic.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
That was then. Today we have settled on standardized new-generation plant designs that avoid this problem.
What's really needed is a change in our legal system to eliminate the disproportionate power that small groups of activists have to disrupt construction. Their strategy is to raise costs by imposing phony legal delays on construction after the initial approval.
As a guy who very recently was involved in selling new power station equipment, I can say with 100% confidence that there is no such thing as a standardized power plant design in the USA. I was selling turbines to Duke, Southern Company, Exelon, Luminant, and many others. Every customer wanted something different. Some of them wanted triple redundant instruments on valves, and some were happy with dual redundancy. Some of them wanted the generator protection system to be redundant on 2 different vendor's kit, and some wanted redundancy with identical cabinets from the same vendor. Some wanted a stainless steel oil tank, and some were fine with the carbon steel + epoxy coating tank. Some of them wanted to have a large turbine deck to make maintenance easier, and some were cutting that cost since they were going to flip the plant anyway. We went into great detail about even the most mundane of things. Some of the customers wanted to have all our equipment numbering changed to their (internal and proprietary) numbering standard so that all the plants they owned had the same numbering scheme. No matter what our "standard" design was, someone had a problem with it. These guys know what they want and if it isn't included in your "standard" design, they want a price to make it happen.
This is a different philosophy from Europe and Asia, where standard designs are common and even preferred. But that's the US power market. Toshiba/Westinghouses' standard AP1000 plant isn't good enough for any of the US utilities who can afford to build such a thing. All the customers have their little quirks of wanting to be a little more safe in one area, or a little more convenient to operate, or a little cheaper to build. None of those changes affect the core safety principles of the design, they are just different. They do, however, drive up the build cost. Additionally, these plants don't get build often enough to keep the same crew on each job. By the time you build Unit #2, 10 years has gone by and a lot of the people who built Unit #1 have changed jobs or retired. It is difficult to keep such specialized experience in the economy if it is needed so rarely.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Not everyone needs cars. Just pointing that out. Where I live many people don't have or need cars, because public transportation is so well developed. The public transportation uses electricity, which reduces the amount of pollution in the city center, and the electricity itself is created through environmentally-friendly means.
I think if you said "everyone needs transportation" that would be more accurate, but we could point out people that don't need transportation, and get nowhere :) No pun intended, of course.
That's just not true. If I were to, say, grow a forest and burn it for fuel (biofuel/biomass) I would be adding not a gram of net carbon to the atmosphere.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
What need of a comet? Species are already dying off at rates not seen in hundreds of millions of years.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... ...and then formulate your opinion. It seems you're coming to your conclusions without inputting any facts to guide you....
And yet there are news stories all over the place about how BECAUSE OF the mass switch to natural gas, my electricity bill is going up double digits...
Sounds like a lot of ordinary construction projects I've been involved in. For example, a large, 3-story anchor store in a shopping mall decided to move the escalator after the structure had been erected. And a famous business machine company suddenly realized that they couldn't put their remote backup service in the high rise office they were remodeling because the reception of the satellite dish on the roof would be blocked by their own building next door. And yes, sometimes regulations are involved, such as changes to completed work because of building inspectors' rulings.
You're making a "I can find an idiot" argument, and expecting people to be bowled over by your amazing cognitive powers. You then take the existence of those idiots as an excuse for a "you'll never be happy" strawman.
CO2 is causing problems, right now. Real problems. Whatever bullshit objections you imagine someone might raise, the ones about excessive fossil fuel consumption are valid and every simplistic pro-fossil fuel argument you make needs to take that into account.
Period.
What I'm saying is whatever idiots you think you can find out there, none of them justify you being an idiot.
I'm sorry, but who is opposing big infrastructure projects such and putting peopel to work through new incarnations of the WPA and CCC in the wake of the recession?
It was the GOP that shot down those proposals.
Yes...we're so antihuman that we want to decrease pollution because its not good for human health, not good for the planets health.
I cant believe you are seriously making the statement that preferring solar/wind over fossil fuels is somehow anti-human.
You and your ilk repeatedly make these same sorts of claims, as if there is no alternative to burning coil and oil.
Just how ignorant on this issue are you? Are you just completely unaware that there are other sources of energy? Are you totally unaware that the amount of solar energy that lands on the Earth in a single hour is more than all of humanity consumes in an entire year?
Our energy consumption is only 0.01% of what's available from the sun, and its based on burning the converted solar in the form of fossil fuels. But why should we continue to dig it out of the ground to line someone else's pocket and impair our health, and imperil our planet, when such vast sums of energy beyond imagining are free for the taking?
There is no reason, none, not one, to continue to be reliant on fossil fuels. We could entirely end that dependence in our lifetimes, even with the next decade. We have the technology, we have the manpower, we have the resources, we have the capabilty. It's simply a matter of will (political and economic).
And how in the world did someone mod you insightful?
When you have somehting coherent and logical to state, get back to me.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
"you'll never be happy" is not a Strawman. Its existence is proven by this very topic...They want to convert the coal plant to natural gas and the environmentalists aren't happy...some strawman eh? Careful, this one walks, talks and files lawsuits.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Around here (Western New York) much of our natural gas is obtained through fracking. How do we factor the unknown long term effects on the groundwater supply into the cost/benefit equation? Not just unknown, but unknowable, because the extraction companies refuse to divulge the chemicals they use. But the issue is a $150M conversion of an antiquated power plant from coal to natural gas. After conversion it's still antiquated, still prohibitively expensive to operate, and still has environmental impact. The only reason the conversion is moving forward is politics: the community wants to keep the jobs and the tax base, and they seem to have the political muscle to push it through. And the reason this power plant has so many jobs is the obsolete technology it utilizes.
Ignoring the rest of your points...
No, they don't.
1) It's quite possible to build a nuclear power plant that has a closed-loop coolant system. The navies of the world have been doing it for better than half a century.
2) You don't want pure H2O in the coolant loop in a reactor. Hot water is quite corrosive, so you add chemicals to lessen the corrosive effects of the water. The navies of the world have been doing this for better than half a century too.
3) Depending on design, you can use a secondary cooling system (that cools the water in the primary cooling system) that uses cooling towers, or that just uses sea-water. The navies of the world have been doing the latter for the last half century also.
Note that there are arguments against using sea-water, but the alternative (using fresh water) is, as you say, biting into a rather more limited resource.
P.S. Oh, by the way, it's quite possible to design a reactor that can respond to transient power demands. Navies of the world have been doing that for half a century or so also....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Their behavior is consistent with an overly-emotional ruling class clique than with sociopathy.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Low-density, high-impact shit like solar panels and hydroelectric dams? Sure, let's bulldoze the environment.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Keep pushing that canard. No activist has stopped the construction of a new power plant. The problem is financing. Banks don't want to lend the money because of the cost over-runs. That's why the nuclear industry has been pushing the government to guarantee those loans.
Like it's a waste of money to refit the power plant.
"Dunkirk's operator, NRG, wanted to mothball the plant in 2012, saying it was not economical to run. "
"The utility, National Grid, said shutting it down could make local power supplies less reliable, a problem that could be fixed by boosting transmission capacity—at a lower cost than repowering Dunkirk."
The issue the Dunkirk was refitted was because of political reasons. It had nothing to do with energy needs. So your argument holds no water.
Yeah because Congress listens to environmentalists....*eye roll*
"The utility, National Grid, said shutting it down could make local power supplies less reliable..."
Hugh says it could be fixed by boosting transmission capacity.
Hmmm...The Utility or Hugh? Utility or Hugh?
I think I'll go with the Utility on that one.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
And I'm sorry, but what doesn't hold water is an argument that the Sierra Club is interested in saving anyone money.
They want the plant shut down, period.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Natural gas produces just as high a greenhouse gas effect as coal.
http://environmentalresearchwe...
This gas fever needs to get real.
The more massive generalisations you make the less people should listen to you. You are merely projecting your own ideas of what an environmentalist is to you, and the battering it to death with a bizarre take on logic.
Who is listening to environmentalists these days? There's still a mass of laws and regulations they use to gum up the works constantly, but folks are starting to realize most environmentalists don't care so much about the environment as much as they hate their fellow man and his enjoyment of modern life.
Of course, you folks have your own tinpot dictator in the White House, who is a law unto himself and will probably service his ideological base with economy-crushing diktats.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Keep pushing that canard. No activist has stopped the construction of a new power plant. The problem is financing. Banks don't want to lend the money because of the cost over-runs. That's why the nuclear industry has been pushing the government to guarantee those loans.
1. Shoreham.
2. When building a power plant will involve hundreds of millions of dollars in lawyers fees to keep your sort at bay, that tends to increase cost over-runs. Which your sort then uses as a further argument against nuclear power. (Yes, there are plenty of non-lawyer related cost overruns.)
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Do I also get to make sweeping generalizations about conservatives because you don't like government interference except to:
- control what I do in my bedroom
- control my social life
- control what I talk about
- control who I do business with
- control where I go
- control what I believe
- control what business I'm allowed to engage in
Just asking whether the "idiots are everywhere" and "generalizations are fun" rules can be abused in the other direction as well.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I would use the term, "group".
EPA, CARB, yeah...they do
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Funny you should say that since the Libs want to:
- control what I do in my bedroom
- control my social life
- control what I talk about
- control who I do business with
- control what I believe
- control what business I'm allowed to engage in
It's time to reassess your opinion on who wants to to micromanage your life.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
And incessant lawsuits.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Then why is fear of science and its applications the default position of today's left whenever something new comes along? If fossil sources pollute, why won't you let us have nuclear? If spent nuclear fuel is piling up, why didn't you let us build recycling facilities, as the French did years ago, to make it into new fuel? If nuclear recycling is more expensive than mining under present conditions, why didn't you let us open that storage facility in Nevada, the one we spent $5 billion preparing, so that we can store spent rods safely until we come down the learning curve on recycling?
You want solar, you said? Then why, when California built a solar farm in the emptiest part of the Mojave Desert, did "environmentalists" try to stop it every step of the way, and even now are complaining about the occasional bird that gets fried flying through the tiny concentrator focus next to the collector towers? By imposing delay after delay on the plant with their vacuous lawsuits, they inflated the cost of the project to $2.2 billion - a cost about the same as one of our Arizona nuclear reactors that has three times the power output, and 24/7.
Republicans are interfering with infrastructure projects, you say? They weren't around in 2008, when Obama got $17 trillion to stimulate the economy. But knowing the power of the Luddite lobby, the infrastructure part of his stimulus spending all got piddled away on "shovel ready" street widenings and traffic signals. He had the political capital to go Roosevelt that year, to build something like an energy independence Apollo, but he didn't want to provoke the Greens. So we continue to fight in the Middle East.
CO2 is causing problems, right now. Real problems.
Actually Crop production is at near record highes, in part because the necessary nutrient CO2 is available in increased amounts. Both Arctic and Antarctic sea ice is increasing, and there hasn't been any statistically significant Global Warming/Climate Change for 18 years; so please feel free to be more specific. If you'd go outside and actually experience some enviroment, you'd realizes that it's pretty fucking cold outside and we still have 4 weeks to go before winter starts.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
After all those years of one-off nuclear projects that kept being redesigned in the middle of construction, the US came up with the AP-1000 as a standard. If we fixed our legal system to make standard infrastructure designs immune to junk lawsuits, what utility wouldn't want to build to the standard? Even as things are, the newest plants just permitted in the US are AP-1000s. This is also the design that China is now using.
There are now much stricture environmental limits on metals emission like toxic mercury. Not having to add expensive scrubbers is as much of motive for converting to natural gas as cost. 40% less CO2 emissions per megawatt is not a primary motive but a beneficial side effect.
You think you're refuting the GP's argument but you're actually bolstering it. GP says you shouldn't make sweeping generalizations about any one group. You show that's exactly the case because there is plenty of disagreement/contradiction within those generalized groups with your (somewhat dubious IMO) edge cases.
Your perfect solution sounds perfect. Are there any working models in use?
I'm all for nuclear but what you're describing (no maintenance?!) doesn't exist. Please prove me and the rest of the world wrong. Right now it looks like the most promising candidate for your mini reactor is Lockheed's new fusion design. If they really get it up and running in 10 years we might have a chance of sustaining the environment our society has evolved to thrive in (assuming we also do CO2 sequestration because we're already at the tipping point). Otherwise we're in for a couple centuries of painful adjustment to a brand new climate.
Just like a lot of Military base closings, It's all politics, it's the rule of reciprocity and what makes modern society even possible. Favors owed are favors to be repaid, without reciprocity your money would be useless, because basically all your money is worth is what it can buy and at the end of the day you can't eat gold. About the power grid, it's brittle, Northeast blackout of 2003 was one tree brushing against one transmission line and one software bug. Everything effects everything, taking out a power plant reduces redundancy in the system, You should watch Great Britian to see whats likely to happen this year because they don't have enough reserve capacity in their power grid and are depending on renewables for a significant portion of the power supply.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Wow I guess all of the Nuclear Aircraft carriers are chugging around on unicorn farts and pixie dust!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
It's time to stop listening to the dramagreens.
John Hillerman, the guy that played Higgs in "Magnum PI" had a better moustache.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
And why don't *you* like austerity?
The turbines block the view of the ocean from their Cape Cod mansions.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Congratulations, CaptainLard gets it. Sycodon doesn't. I'll make another sweeping generalization: "conservatives can't read". This is fun! I can do this all day.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Actually Crop production is at near record highes
so far true
part because the necessary nutrient CO2 is available in increased amounts.
Oh look denier talking point that's been debunked a million times and has nothing at all to do with agricultural productivity.
Seriously, it's like you've never had a freshman biology or chemistry course, and then you amplify the basic ignorance about plant biology through a thousand implicit assumptions.
Heat and/or water tend to be the primary throttles on photosynthesis.
Keep pushing that canard. No activist has stopped the construction of a new power plant. The problem is financing. Banks don't want to lend the money because of the cost over-runs. That's why the nuclear industry has been pushing the government to guarantee those loans.
1. Shoreham.
Technically, no. Shoreham's construction was completed - it actually ran low power tests. What happened was not it was not permitted to begin commercial operation -- due to its singularly poor siting on Long Island, and Long Island Sound after the local community and state had had time to reflect on the wisdom of this particular license. In light of Fukushima, safety concerns about the siting of one of these first generation nuclear power plant designs were quite reasonable. This was a plant that should never have been built.
Plants more distant from major population centers and critical transportation corridors have not had this problem.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
I'm an environmentalist. I think converting coal to natural gas is a great idea. So, your general claim is disproven.
This was a Sierra Club lawsuit. The SIerra Club does not equal "all environmentalists".
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
These are about the size of a bus, can be mass-produced to make them cheaper, and require no maintenance or cooling.
Not quite true. They do require cooling. Fairly substantial infrastructure surrounds one of these things. Steam cycles don't happen in a shoebox if you want megawatts out of them. Concept art from one of the companies proposing them can be seen here. So yeah, the reactor itself is the size of a bus, but the infrastructure surrounding it is the size of a substantial electrical substation. It's not exactly trivial.
Low-density, high-impact shit like solar panels and hydroelectric dams?
Hydroelectric dams I'll give you. Insofar as there is anything to give. All useful rivers that can be dammed for power already have been, on this continent. There will be no more hydroelectric dams built in North America.
But solar panels? Solar panels are not high impact, despite being low density. There are 100 million roofs in the US. Factor in all the deficits and that's still a monstrous amount of power. We just have to use it. And the roofs are already there, so the deployment impact is zero. Manufacturing impact isn't zero, but it's basically the same as all those electronic toys people love so much, and Intel's chip fabs operate in the US, under US environmental regulations, and there's no big disaster happening there. They're primarily made out of sand. We've got lots of sand. Silicon is the second most abundant element the Earth is made of, after oxygen. Nobody will notice the bulldozing required to get enough of it. It's a very tiny drop in a very large bucket.
Them and their China Syndrome. And then the commies tried to top that with operating a nuke with a lunacrous design that just HAD to blow up some day.
Yucca Mountain is the best we've come up with, and it's a disaster any way you look at it. And plan B is...what exactly?
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
There are plenty of ways to make cars better without going all-electric-all-the-time. Firstly they need to close all the loopholes in the fuel economy regulations that give free passes to big gas guzzling SUVs and crossovers (like the one that doesn't count them for fuel economy purposes if they happen to be capable of running on E85 even though most of them will never see a drop of E85 in their lifetime or the loophole that made the ugly-as-sin PT Cruiser count as a truck when it clearly wasn't or the regulation that allows big pickups and SUVs to gain weight to avoid fuel economy regulations and guzzle even more gas)
Not really. Only once-through nuclear plants require large amounts of fresh water continuously. Most plants use cooling towers instead. Some plants don't even use water in the recirculating parts of the cooling systems (e.g. molten salt reactors).
Also, once-through reactors, if designed to do so, can use salt water instead of fresh water.
Only because they aren't designed to do so. You can significantly reduce the output of a plant very quickly, but you can't speed it up quickly, currently, because of the buildup of Xenon-135 as a fission byproduct, which is a strong neutron absorber, and the only way to get beyond that is to pull the fuel rods out far more than is safe, and once the uranium fission restarts, the Xenon is quickly destroyed, resulting in a rapid increase in neutron levels in the core, which would overheat the reactor before you could bring it under control.
However, there are a couple of designs that don't suffer from that problem—integral fast reactors and molten fuel reactors both allow the xenon to be separated from the fuel. And I think pebble bed reactors could also be readily made to be largely immune to this effect by cycling in different fuel pellets in while the xenon in the recently used pellets slowly decays.
I think your numbers are way off. According to David MacKay, spread over a 25-year lifespan, it only comes to about 1.4 grams of CO2 per kWh. In other words, it offsets its construction cost compared with coal in just a little over a month, by my math.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
the issue is that most crossovers and suvs are not much more fuel efficient. Hell our kia sorento gets over 30MPG and my pontiac grand am barely gets 20 for example
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
You say that and you are correct, but when the best solution we have right now, nuclear, is mentioned the greenies freak the hell out and star screaming and running around in circles. Until we actually embrace what is possible to do and stop wishing on new technology to catch up, we'll be stuck here for a while.
Just get a tremendous calamity such as tornado, snow storm, earthquake around the area served by that plant, and be grateful it is there as a secondary source of power.
Managing a distributed solar infrastructure is a nightmare. The companies that do so charge as much as your main utility.
Support my political activism on Patreon.