Archive for the ‘Clean Coal’ Category

James Fallows was a 1970s Naderite who became President Jimmy Carter’s chief speechwriter – before blazing a now-familiar path of jumping ship and writing a long magazine article about what was wrong with Carter’s Presidency.
 
Fallows landed on his feet, going on to become the principle editor of The Atlantic Monthly. Over the decades he has become an expert on computers, learned to fly an airplane, and made countless trips to Japan and China telling us what’s going on over there. Still, he has never lost that English-major naiveté or that 1970s mentality, which is the only possible explanation for the 8,000-word cover story in this month’s Atlantic which will probably stand as a monument to the American intelligentsia’s failure to grasp the significance of nuclear energy.
 
Briefly, the argument of “Dirty Coal, Clean Future,” is this: We’re going to have to live with coal. There is no other choice. It’s the future. Fallows is being hard-headed here, you see. He’s telling his equally uninformed audience that wind and solar are never going to make it. They’ll never be able to run an industrial society. Thus, the only realistic alternative is to find a way to burn coal without producing carbon dioxide – bury it or something. The Chinese are making a lot of progress in this area. They’re doing better than we are. That’s the story.
 
What happened to nuclear energy?  As far as Fallows is concerned, it exists only on some far distant planet. He makes a few passing references, the first coming from Amory Lovins, which shows you where that is headed. They do seem to use a lot of nuclear in France, don’t they?  Well, that’s not relevant to us.
 
Fallows recounts his various trips to China, name-dropping – Thomas-Friedman-style – the various Chinese officials with whom he has conferred. Yet somehow in all his travels he has never noticed that China is building 30 nuclear reactors, including 20 of their own design. The Chinese have almost completed the world’s first Westinghouse AP-1000, a model for which our Nuclear Regulatory Commission hasn’t even completed design review. Westinghouse has been running big ads about the project – “on time and on budget” – in American magazines. It’s hard to miss.
 
What comes blazing through the entire article, however, is Fallows’ appalling ignorance – even lack of curiosity – about nuclear. Here’s the key paragraph:

[A]fter a century in which medical diagnosis and treatment, computer and communications systems, aerospace and nanotech industries, and nearly every other form of technology have routinely achieved the magical, energy production is essentially what it was in the time of James Watt. With the main exception of nuclear-power plants and the hoped-for future exception of practical nuclear-fusion systems, we mostly create electricity by burning something that was once underground—coal, oil, natural gas—to boil water and turn turbines with the steam. . . . If the power plant of 10 years from now is even slightly more efficient than today’s, that will be a major achievement. . . . A breakthrough is what it would take to move beyond reliance on coal.

Did you absorb all that?  Power plant technology hasn’t really changed since James Watt. Nuclear energy – whatever that is – is some kind of exception, but that’s not important. What we really need is a breakthrough that will allow us to generate electricity without producing all that carbon dioxide. That we get 20 percent of our electricity from nuclear, that France gets 80 percent, that France, Russia, Japan and Korea are selling nuclear reactors as fast as they can to Pakistan, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, South Africa, Brazil, Venezuela – well, that’s somebody else’s issue. Maybe Scientific American can do a story. 
 
Nuclear energy was the most extraordinary scientific discovery of the 20th century. All chemical reactions – including coal burning – involve transformations of matter into energy, according to Einstein’s E – mc2, in the electrons that surround the nucleus. But the electrons comprise less than 0.01 percent of the mass of the atom. The other 99.99 percent is in the nucleus. Therefore, the E=mc2 transformations in the nucleus yield 2 million times as much energy from the same weight or volume of raw material. Does that sound like a breakthrough?  Does the elimination of carbon dioxide and other “wastes” from the process sound like a breakthrough as well?
 
It’s worth remembering that it was Jimmy Carter who got cold feet about reprocessing and saddled us with the everlasting problem of “nuclear waste.”  It was also Carter who promised to give American energy independence by doubling our consumption of coal from 500 million to one billion tons a year by 2000 – a promise that was exactly fulfilled.
 
It’s nice to see Carter’s former speechwriter continuing his legacy.

Read more at the Atlantic

Climate legislation may be over for this year, but it’s worth taking note that it wasn’t likely utility companies that killed it.  This was emphasized yesterday when Charles Patton, in-coming president of Appalachian Power Company, of Virginia and West Virginia, said he regretted that Congress had been unable to enact anything.  “We were disappointed no action was taken,” said Patton. “Power companies need legislation to provide them with certainty about what will be expected, and to give them time to plan new pollution controls or entirely new power plants. We can’t turn on a dime.”

Appalachian Power burns almost 100 percent coal in its boilers. It is a division of American Electric Power, which is 90 percent coal and 10 percent nuclear form the D.C. Cook reactor in Michigan.  Patton complained that the lack of climate legislation leaves utility companies without any certainty of how to proceed. “The dilemma we face as an industry is there appears to be some amount of inevitability that something in the carbon world is going to happen."Instead, he said, the utilities are now likely to be governed by EPA regulatory efforts, which will not allow emissions trading that might produce economies.

Ironically, it was Democratic legislators from West Virginia and other coal-producing states who dealt the death blow to cap-and-trade by siding with the Republican opposition.

Read it at the West Virginia Gazette

While the Calvert Cliffs and South Texas nuclear projects await a federal decision on loan guarantees, the Department of Energy has moved ahead with the nation’s largest “clean coal” project in southern Illinois. The Tenaska project in Taylorville was granted a $417-million federal tax break yesterday to supplement a $2.58 billion loan guarantee awarded last year.

The project still has to be approved by the Illinois State Legislature, which is scheduled to vote in November. It also faces lawsuits form several opposition groups. Taylorville would be the largest demonstration of Integrated Coal Gasification Combined-Cycle (ICGG), an advanced technology that seeks to produce 600 megawatts of electricity using some of the advances in the natural gas industry.  Coal would be gasified and then run through the combined-cycle process, where both the flue gases and the steam from boiling water are used to spin turbines. The energy conversion rate is around 60 percent, as opposed to 30 percent in steam-only thermal plants. During the process, about 50 percent of the carbon content of coal would be captured.

Tenaska was originally conceived to conform to a law requiring that 5 percent of state’s energy come from “clean coal.”  Illinois has abundant coal supplies. Nevertheless, the project has been opposed by a wide range of interests, including consumer groups, the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association and Commonwealth Edison, all of which complain it will raise electrical rates.

From a nuclear point of view, it would be nice to see the project advance – if only to prove that it is still possible to build something in this country, but also to provide an objective bake-off between a clean coal demonstration versus deployment of clean nuclear power.

Read more at Saint Louis Today