Coal-To-Nuclear: An Idea To Help Bring An End To Climate Change Quickly
Lights = Cities = Power Plants
THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA IN THIS WEB SITE
Converting existing coal power plants to TRISO nuclear to end their CO2 emissions.
Why is it so important the United States immediately convert a coal power plant to demonstrate this idea to the world?
The world must have over 200,000 ship-size or larger coal boilers that need to be replaced with nuclear boilers.
We may as well start here. A c2n demonstration plant would be the tip of the spear in Climate Change's heart.
One goal of this web site is to become the focal point / launch pad of the world's first coal-to-nuclear repowering.
Renewables can't do it alone. Climate Change is fundamentally a heat problem and renewables only provide small amounts of electricity.
Nuclear energy is an environmentally-gentle heat source capable of replacing all fossil fuels and thus ending Climate Change.
To this end, this web site is advocating upgrading all the world's existing coal power plants to nuclear,
Repowering these few coal plants with TRISO reactors now will make the largest possible, quickest, impact on Climate Changing CO2 emissions.
We should begin with the world's largest producer of Climate Changing CO2, Taichung, located in Lung-Ching Township, Taiwan, China
and work down the list from there.
We could, and should, begin work on a small demonstration plant today.
Any well-maintained 50 to 100 megaWatt (e) rural coal plant in any nuclear-friendly country will do. No new technology or equipment is needed. All the upgrade equipment can be purchased.
There is an excellent chance if we convert just one coal plant the world will follow, creating the beginning of the end for Climate Change.
What converting an existing coal power plant to nuclear would involve.
(Below) Emissions plot: Fixing only the few largest coal power plants will fix a large part of Climate Change.
Who they are and where they are: 1,200 Largest Coal Power Plants - Countries and Locations .xls (spreadsheet)
Where you can find out about the world's power plants and the Global Warming they make.
http://www.platts.com/Products.aspx?xmlFile=worldelectricpowerplantsdatabase.xml
Data from CARMA ( www.CARMA.org )
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What the EPA is advocating along with Skyscrubber's suggestion.
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In a free market nuclear heat can be 20 (using PWR Uranium) to 2,000 (using MSR Thorium) times cheaper than coal heat.
Driving down the cost of heat - not adding carbon taxes - is the way to permanently drive fossil fuels out of the market. Thanks To Fence Company Vero Beach fl for the special fence they did.
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(Backgrounder) What the heck is TRISO?
Like charcoal briquettes, TRISO nuclear pebbles and prisms glow red hot.
The TRISO Nuclear Reactor
Why? Much safer, and, at 1,740F, hot enough to power a Skyscrubber
https://inlportal.inl.gov/portal/server.pt/community/ngnp_public_documents/452/home
http://www.iaea.org/NuclearPower/Downloadable/aris/2013/prismatic-htr.pdf
(The above reactor is a NGNP proposal by General Atomics publically posted on the IAEA web site. It is used as much as possible on this web site as a generic prismatic reactor.) If you are needing construction stencils check out stencil giant.
Smaller reactors are safer reactors.
The above sketch shows how several small TRISOs would be teamed to power several large loads.
How safe is it? The NRC does not require this type of reactor to be in an explosion containment building.
Notice the fuel is always a uranium + thorium blend. This is a very different kind of reactor.
China is way ahead of the United States in TRISO reactor technology
China's 40 HTR-PM reactor project at Shandong
The first commercial version will be China's HTR-PM, being built at Shidaowan in Shandong province. It has been developed by Tsinghua University's INET, which is the R&D leader and Chinergy Co., with China Huaneng Group leading the demonstration plant project. This will have two reactor modules, each of 250 MWt/ 105 MWe, using 8.9% enriched fuel (420,000 elements) giving 90 GWd/t discharge burnup. With an outlet temperature of 750ºC the pair will produce steam at 566ºC to drive a single steam cycle turbine at about 40% thermal efficiency. This 210 MWe Shidaowan demonstration plant is to pave the way for an 18-unit (3x6x210MWe) full-scale power plant on the same site, also using the steam cycle. Plant life is envisaged as 40 years with 85% load factor.
If the Chinese can use 2 TRISO reactors to drive a single conventional steam turbine-generator, they can't be extremely expensive.