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Chapter 12.
Residential Natural Gas
Nuclear Electricity for One Billion Small Residential
Hot Water Heaters, Furnaces, Pool Heaters, Saunas

 (Right) Classic American 40,000 BTU natural gas burning residential hot water heater. - - A O Smith Corporation
 (Right) Classic American 80,000 BTU natural gas burning furnace. - - Trane

 

Part 1    Small Commercial Boilers.
Part 2    Hot Water Heaters and Furnaces.
Part 3    Biogenic heating fuels. Twigs of wood, dried cow, buffalo, or camel dung.
Part 4    Available nuclear and other CO2-free electricity.
Part 5    Repowering Hot Water Heaters and Furnaces to nuclear electricity.
Part 6    A closer look at boilers.
Further Information.

 

 

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Introduction.  1.7 Billion tons of CO2 per year.  That's how much CO2 production could be avoided by switching the world's one billion small commercial boilers and residential hot water heaters and furnaces from natural gas to electricity produced by nuclear power plants.

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 Part 1:  Residential Hot Water Heaters and Furnaces, small Commercial boilers   Small Commercial Boilers.

 

 

Part 2:  Residential Hot Water Heaters and Furnaces, small Commercial boilers   Hot Water Heaters and Furnaces.

1 Billion Residential natural gas furnaces and hot water units (under 100,000 BTU/hr) account for about 3% of Global Warming's CO2 (1.2 billion tons CO2/year or 1.2 tons CO2/yr/unit).  Heating boilers, furnaces, and hot water heaters are found in every substantial residence in the world.  Much of the United States (but not the world) is heated and cooled by electric heat pumps and electric hot water heaters.  Most natural gas or oil heated residences can be very inexpensively repowered by adding electric heating elements to the existing furnace.  Suggested nuclear energy source: Conventional nuclear power plant electricity. 

(Right, up) Classic American 40,000 BTU natural gas burning residential hot water heater. - - A O Smith Corporation
(Right, down) Classic American 80,000 BTU natural gas burning furnace. - - Trane

 

 

 

 

Residential Heating and Hot Water Units

 

How small is too small?  The typical modern residential electrical service drop is certainly a natural low-end cutoff point for nuclear boilers. Usually it is 220 volts, single phase, at 200 amperes.  At 746 watts per horsepower, that's about 60 horsepower.  That's 220 Volts times 200 Amperes or 44,000 watts, 150,000 Btu per hour, or 1 gallon of heating oil or about twice the BTUs of the average Chicago residential furnace.

Replacing Furnaces -  Nibbling at Global Warming from the bottom up.

Unless you KNOW the electricity you are using is 100% clean, don't convert to electricity heating.

[Obligatory background note: In non-science United States, the commonly used unit of heat is the BTU, or British Thermal Unit.  It is the amount of heat needed to heat one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit.  One Watt of electricity will produce 3.41 BTU if run one hour.  A hundred Watt light bulb will produce 341 BTU if run one hour.  WHAT'S a WATT ??  One Volt pushing one Ampere through one Ohm of electrical resistance is one Watt of electrical energy being turned into heat.  Volts times Amps equals Watts.  Wires have Ohms in them.  That's why you need about 1,000 Volts to efficiently push electricity one mile.  Some electrical transmission lines are several hundred miles long.  Stay far away from them wires.]

An ample-sized residential furnace is capable of delivering approximately 80,000 BTU per hour.  One kiloWatt-hour produces 3,412 BTU, so to make 80,000 BTU per hour you will need 23.4 kiloWatt-hours.  At 40% efficiency, a power plant can make about 2,460 kiloWatt-hours of electricity from a ton of coal.  The power plant will have to burn about 19 pounds of coal, making about 40 pounds of CO2, just to make 23.4 kiloWatt-hours of electricity -   And that's for just one hour of full-on heat.

Natural gas produces 2/3 as much CO2 per kWh as coal, oil as much CO2 as coal, so don't regard either natural gas or oil power plants as being anything close to "naturally clean." Data Source:  http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/FTPROOT/environment/co2emiss00.pdf  The DOE-EIA web page (Table 4) saying 1.3 pounds of CO2 per kiloWatt hour (kWh) is made by natural gas-burning power plants.  Coal makes about 2.0 pounds of CO2 per kWh.

"Coal has the highest carbon intensity among fossil fuels, resulting in coal-fired plants having the highest output rate of CO2 per kilowatt-hour. The national average output rate for coal-fired electricity generation was 2.095 pounds CO2 per kilowatt-hour in 1999 (Table 4)." - - - U.S. EIA

Since a coal, natural gas, or oil-burning power plant is only about 33% efficient, you will cause about 3 times the fuel to be burned at the the power plant as your furnace.  Things from the Jurassic age - coal, natural gas, and oil - are fossil no-nos.

This will only change when your electricity is 100% nuclear, hydro, carbon-neutral (i.e., wood), or renewables which are virtually CO2-free.

Heating and cooling with conventional nuclear electricity:  A lot of the country (but not the world) is already heated and cooled by electric heat pumps and electric hot water heaters.  Most of the rest of the country's natural gas or oil heated residences can, and will, be very inexpensively repowered with electric heating element conversion units. 

Repowering your furnace: Just install heating elements in your furnace's bonnet (above the "A" coil, if the house has central air conditioning).  Most houses built less than 30 years ago have 200 Ampere, 110/220 Volt service drops - that's 220 Volts times 200 amperes or 44,000 Watts or 150,187 BTUs - and a large electric heating element is 18,000 Watts - 61,440 BTU, so most everyone already has an adequate service drop.  If the house is older, it probably has a 100 Ampere, 110/220 Volt or 22 KW - 75,000 BTU - service drop.  In that case, the house and electric hot water heater should be on a 15 minute alternating interlock so that the service drop is never overloaded.  Adding electric heat produces a dual-fuel heating system.  Probably not a bad idea considering how our pandering politicians are trashing our electricity systems.  (A portable electric room heater is usually about 1 KW or 3,410 BTUs.)

Repowering your hot water heater: All you can do here is buy a new electric heater when your old gas heater burns out.

Cooking heat: Electric heat made by nuclear electricity.  Cooking is very intermittent, so cooking on a gas flame is an extremely small CO2 source.

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Residential Hot Water Heaters and Furnaces, small Commercial boilers  Part 3: Biogenic heating fuels. Twigs of wood, dried cow, buffalo, or camel dung.

Under international greenhouse gas accounting methods developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, biogenic carbon is part of the natural carbon balance and it will not add to atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. - IPCC

BIOGENIC CARBON   Wood-burning stoves, fireplaces, and forest fires, carbon-neutral since they use modern carbon, rather than Jurassic carbon, are exempt.  In a similar way, 1/3 or 2 billion of the world's population subsist by cooking and heating on twigs of wood or dried cow, buffalo, or camel dung.  These fuels are also "carbon neutral."  Carbon-neutral, one more time.   (More) 
 

Wood-burning stoves, fireplaces, and forest fires, carbon-neutral since they use modern carbon, rather than Jurassic carbon, are exempt.  In a similar way, 1/3 or 2 billion of the world's population subsist by cooking and heating on twigs of wood or dried cow, buffalo, or camel dung.  Not "Living Better Electrically" means their average life expectancies are around 43 years.  These fuels are also "carbon neutral."  Carbon-neutral, one more time.   (More) 

(Right) A straw bale stoker boiler for burning carbon-neutral straw.  The electricity to power the stoker boiler comes from a wind turbine.  This works out well since wind turbine electricity is not usually available in quantities sufficiently large enough and cheap enough for heating.

 

 

 

Carbon is the 4th most common element in the universe.  Over the years nature has buried in the ground and under the oceans 90 times the carbon found in all life.

If the world ends all coal and natural gas burning, Nature should be removing slightly more CO2 from the air than Man is making.

   http://www.greenspirit.com/trees_answer.cfm 

 

 

Cutting-edge machine makes big bales of energy: The new biomass machine cuts brush to burn while opening habitat for sharp-tailed grouse and deer.
Mar 13 - Duluth News-Tribune (Duluth, Minn.)   By John Myers, Duluth News Tribune, Minn.
Steve Traeger drove the 200-horsepower, all-wheel-drive tractor into a wall of willow and alder and never flinched.   Brush and small trees bent and snapped, and the BioBaler towed behind the tractor was chewing it up and packing it tightly into half-ton bales as if it were hay.   "When you turn on your lights next week you'll be burning these bundles,'' said Paul Sandstrom of the Laurentian Resource Conservation and Development office, a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Duluth.

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Residential Hot Water Heaters and Furnaces, small Commercial boilers  Part 4:  Available nuclear and other CO2-free electricity.

 

A closer look:

Heating With Conventional Nuclear Energy
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors 

Nuclear energy provided 2.1% of the world's energy and 15% of the world's electricity as of 2005.

Conventional nuclear reactors are all very large - 1,800 MegaWatts or larger - slow-neutron water moderated and water cooled reactors that typically run at about 550°F, producing medium quality steam that is used to drive a two stage turbine-generator.

In the past, the United States (PWRs, BWRs) and Russia (VVERs), and to a lesser extent, Canada (CANDUs), were the world's main producers of commercial nuclear electricity generating power plants.  The United States is now effectively out of the game, having sold virtually all of its nuclear infrastructure to foreign interests, mainly Japanese and French.

http://www.platts.com/Products.aspx?xmlFile=worldelectricpowerplantsdatabase.xml    World's electricity power plant database.

Large conventional reactors are not positioned to play any innovative roles in the future, but the U.S. alone needs another 150 to 200 in the next decade for "On Demand" baseload electricity to end the CO2 being made by our share of the world's 1 billion small commercial and residential boilers and furnaces.

There are reactors intended to be used for all kinds of heat applications like the Hyperion and the PBMR, most of the others are intended for making electricity with a few other types intended for powering ocean-going ships, medical treatment and basic research.

Cleaner Coal - Carbon Capture         Backgrounder about all the ways power plants are being modified to reduce their CO2 emissions.

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Residential Hot Water Heaters and Furnaces,  Part 5:  Repowering Hot Water Heaters and Furnaces to nuclear electricity.

Repowering Hot Water Heaters and Furnaces to nuclear electricity.
Nibbling at Global Warming from the bottom up.

Unless you KNOW the electricity you are using is 100% clean, don't convert to electricity heating.

[Obligatory background note: In non-science United States, the commonly used unit of heat is the BTU, or British Thermal Unit.  It is the amount of heat needed to heat one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit.  One Watt of electricity will produce 3.41 BTU if run one hour.  A hundred Watt light bulb will produce 341 BTU if run one hour.  WHAT'S a WATT ??  One Volt pushing one Ampere through one Ohm of electrical resistance is one Watt of electrical energy being turned into heat.  Volts times Amps equals Watts.  Wires have Ohms in them.  That's why you need about 1,000 Volts to efficiently push electricity one mile.  Some electrical transmission lines are several hundred miles long.  Stay far away from them wires.]

An ample-sized residential furnace is capable of delivering approximately 80,000 BTU per hour.  One kiloWatt-hour produces 3,412 BTU, so to make 80,000 BTU per hour you will need 23.4 kiloWatt-hours.  At 40% efficiency, a power plant can make about 2,460 kiloWatt-hours of electricity from a ton of coal.  The power plant will have to burn about 19 pounds of coal, making about 40 pounds of CO2, just to make 23.4 kiloWatt-hours of electricity -   And that's for just one hour of full-on heat.

Note Well: Natural gas produces 2/3 as much CO2 per kWh as coal, oil as much CO2 as coal, so don't regard either natural gas or oil power plants as being anything close to "naturally clean." Data Source:  http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/FTPROOT/environment/co2emiss00.pdf  The DOE-EIA web page (Table 4) saying 1.3 pounds of CO2 per kiloWatt hour (kWh) is made by natural gas-burning power plants.  Coal makes about 2.0 pounds of CO2 per kWh.

"Coal has the highest carbon intensity among fossil fuels, resulting in coal-fired plants having the highest output rate of CO2 per kilowatt-hour. The national average output rate for coal-fired electricity generation was 2.095 pounds CO2 per kilowatt-hour in 1999 (Table 4)." - - - U.S. EIA

Since a coal, natural gas, or oil-burning power plant is only about 33% efficient, you will cause about 3 times the fuel to be burned at the the power plant as your furnace.  Things from the Jurassic age - coal, natural gas, and oil - are fossil no-nos.

This will only change when your electricity is 100% nuclear, hydro, carbon-neutral (i.e., wood), or renewables which are virtually CO2-free.

Heating and cooling with conventional nuclear electricity:  A lot of the country (but not the world) is already heated and cooled by electric heat pumps and electric hot water heaters.  Most of the rest of the country's natural gas or oil heated residences can, and will, be very inexpensively repowered with electric heating element conversion units. 

Repowering your furnace: Just install heating elements in your furnace's bonnet (above the "A" coil, if the house has central air conditioning).  Most houses built less than 30 years ago have 200 Ampere, 110/220 Volt service drops - that's 220 Volts times 200 amperes or 44,000 Watts or 150,187 BTUs - and a large electric heating element is 18,000 Watts - 61,440 BTU, so most everyone already has an adequate service drop.  If the house is older, it probably has a 100 Ampere, 110/220 Volt or 22 KW - 75,000 BTU - service drop.  In that case, the house and electric hot water heater should be on a 15 minute alternating interlock so that the service drop is never overloaded.  Adding electric heat produces a dual-fuel heating system.  Probably not a bad idea considering how our pandering politicians are trashing our electricity systems.  (A portable electric room heater is usually about 1 KW or 3,410 BTUs.)

Repowering your hot water heater: All you can do here is buy a new electric heater when your old gas heater burns out.

Cooking heat: Electric heat made by nuclear electricity.  Cooking is very intermittent, so cooking on a gas flame is an extremely small CO2 source.

_______________________________________________________________________

 

Residential Hot Water Heaters and Furnaces, small Commercial boilers  Part 6:  A closer look at boilers.

A closer look:

About Boilers

Power Plant Boilers:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiler

Pulverized Coal Boiler:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulverized_coal-fired_boiler

Co-generation Boiler:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration 

Energy Recycling Boiler:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_recycling 

Condensing Boiler:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condensing_boiler 

Electric Boiler:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_water_boiler 

Hot Water Heating:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_heating 

Boiler Explosion:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiler_explosion 

Boiler Licenses.pdf

 

Hot Water Boilers,  Steam Boilers

There are over 1 billion boilers in the world.  Why do we use boilers?

Ancient Romans used boilers to provide heated water for their bath houses.  Most of the world's boilers are used to provide heated water rather than steam.

Why use a liquid to transport heat?

A cubic foot of water will carry about 3,000 times as much heat as a cubic foot of air. 

Why use steam boilers?

Modern Man has been using steam boilers for about 300 years to convert heat energy into mechanical energy.  The first use of a steam boiler for mechanical power was the engine devised in 1710 by Thomas_Newcomen  for pumping water out of mines.

Water is a wonderful way to turn heat energy into mechanical energy because when you turn water into steam it changes state, expanding its volume 1,600 times.  If the steam is not allowed to expand freely in volume, its pressure will go up drastically.  That's where all that piston-pushing power in a steam locomotive comes from. 

A steam explosion is one of the deadliest forms of explosion known to Man.  Boilers have to be competently built, installed, maintained, and operated.

When the steam is turned back into water by cooling, it changes state again, this time contracting in volume 1,600 times, creating a powerful vacuum.  This is extremely helpful when discharging steam from the final stage of a steam turbine.   Steam has quite different properties at different temperatures and pressures.

How does the author know there are more than 10 million boilers in the world?

"The world commercial boiler market rose to $ 1.7 billion and 587,000 units in 2001, growing at 3% per annum. The fastest growing markets are Russia at 9% per annum, followed by China, Turkey and the UK." -- American Boiler Manufacturers Association Magazine

If the boiler replacement market is about 587,000 units per year and, if a typical boiler's life is 25 years, that means there are 587,000 times 25 or about 15 million commercial boilers out there.

BOILERS can be as powerful as a million horsepower, but, as can be seen below, are more often about 600,000 or so horsepower..  Unlike a vehicle, they operate constantly, spewing out Global Warming CO2 into the environment for years at a time.  Over time, this really adds up.  Its quite understandable they account for about 70% of Global Warming. 

Its difficult to understand why the environmentalists haven't made any moves to replace fossil fuel combustion boilers with nuclear fission boilers/steam generators.  There are many replacement nuclear boilers coming on the world's markets - some 50 different units from 15 different countries.  Small Reactor Buyer's Guide 

 

This site is advocating replacing fossil fuel boilers with high temperature nuclear boilers to end Global Warming.

Why use high temperature - instead of conventional - nuclear reactors to replace coal boilers?

A 550°F conventional nuclear reactor can't power a 1,000°F coal plant . . . It simply isn't hot enough.  Coal can produce heat over 2,000°F.  Coal power plants use 1,000°F steam for higher efficiency.  Conventional nuclear reactors cannot produce steam hotter than 550°F, so conventional nuclear reactors cannot be used to produce coal's 1,000°F steam.  High-temperature nuclear reactors will work just fine. 

Further Information.