Our Nation's Carbon Footprint:  Total U.S. Fossil Fuel Use     

Build 500 additional new TRISO "Hybrid" nuclear plants out of low-cost coal power plant parts to eliminate the use of natural gas for heating. 

This is our big chance to end much of our CO2 production while also avoiding the trap of "NegaWatt" fossil fuel energy conservation.

KEY: Ending CO2, Coal, OIL, and Gas: It's very important we understand that we need to make much more nuclear electricity in the near future than we ever did fossil fuel electricity in the past because the time has come for the world to shift as much of its energy burden as possible to non-Global Warming electricity.

All countries have a "National Carbon Footprint Grid."

The "United States' National Carbon Footprint Grid" (right) by Jeffery Winters clearly shows big opportunities where we might substitute nuclear electricity for CO2-producing fossil fuels, often that fuel is oil.  The chart shows in great detail the carbon dioxide (and equivalent warming from other gases) emitted across the entire United States economy, as determined by a draft report of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released in February, 2007.

Each square represents 10 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions and there are 726 of them for just the United States. 

(This chart would make an excellent educational table place mat at environmental and energy conferences.)

In 2006, the United States was 20% of the entire world's economy.  That gives you some idea of how much of the world's oil could be saved and fossil fuel CO2 eliminated if the entire world both converted to, and then grew, its nuclear electricity energy base.  Above chart from the April, 2007, Mechanical Engineering Magazine feature article "Carbon Loaded" by Jeffery Winters.  Read his idea-filled article: http://www.memagazine.org/april07/features/pwindow/pwindow.html

If we fail to move to Carbon-Neutral vehicle fuels, after being displaced by electricity, those large "re-assigned" petroleum components, while still ending up making CO2 in the transportation sector, won't increase the transportation CO2 and will help the world substantially in its efforts to reduce its dependence on pumpable oil. 

Nature is absorbing about 20 billion tons of man-made CO2 each year (per NOAA).  KEY: If we get rid of ALL 11 billion tons per year of the CO2 that is being unnecessarily produced by fossil-fuel power plants while making electricity, nature might then be able to absorb CO2 from other combustion engine sources that cannot function efficiently without emitting some CO2 - such as automobiles, trucks, and airplanes. 

This seems quite feasible since road and air transportation produces about 15% (perhaps 2 billion tons per year) of the world's man-made CO2.  Electric trains are common and practical for busy tracks. Large ships, which currently consume about 5% of the world's oil and produce about 3% of the world's CO2, could easily be powered by pebble bed reactors.

Further, converting the world's fossil fuel power plants to nuclear for CO2 emissions mitigation, along with building additional generating units at existing plants, will enable the world to practice oil consumption mitigation by shifting stationary consumption of energy from fossil fuels to electricity.

KEY: Residential, commercial, and industrial heating can be shifted from natural gas and oil to electricity very rapidly and inexpensively - just as we shifted rapidly from coal to natural gas for heating immediately after WWII - if sufficient inexpensive electrical energy were available.  In addition to reducing CO2 emissions, Peak Oil demand, and the need for a big fleet of liquefied natural gas tankers from the mid-east to keep our natural gas pipelines full, nuking our heating needs would have a rapid beneficial impact on the Consumer Price Index while also keeping dollars in the United States.

TRISO heat can be used to make synthetic oil from coal without producing massive amounts of CO2.

There must be two parts to our synthetic oil program: 1. Sufficient TRISO heated coal-to-oil conversion equipment for 200% of military oil energy needs running at all times with unneeded synthetic oil being sold into the civilian market. (At about 500,000 barrels/day, the U.S. military uses as much oil as the entire country of Greece), 2. Sufficient electrically heated coal-to-oil conversion equipment for 100% of civilian oil energy needs built, tested and ready to run at all times.

 

Just One Example: Many city buses have already moved from oil to electricity.

Electric Trains give an enormous payback: "Twenty BTUs of diesel fuel for one BTU of electricity is the energy trade by shifting from heavy trucks to electrified railroads.  Replacing 2 million barrels/day of heavy truck diesel fuel will take just 1.4% of US electricity." --- Quote and photo from:  LightRailNow.org 

 

 

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Chapter Five, Part Two:   (Copied from Chapter Three.)

Low-cost, quick to build, New Hybrid TRISO Power Plants
Cheap, Fast, Clean Electricity

 

If you do nothing else, check out the history of the first hybrid - the Fort St Vrain, Colorado, prismatic high temperature reactor:  Fort St Vrain  

 

Nuclear Reactor + Coal Plant Turbine-Generator = Hybrid Power Plant. Taking advantage of the fact TRISO pebble bed reactors run 1,000 °F hotter than conventional nuclear reactors and can duplicate coal's very hot steam, this simple, extremely low cost, new nuclear plant can be quickly built from common coal-burning power plant parts and a mass-produced pebble bed reactor.

This is the same basic idea as the late 1960s Fort St Vrain  Colorado, plant but using a 40-year newer pebble bed reactor.

Scalable and Multi-reactor capable, this hybrid power plant can be either a 180 megaWatt, single reactor facility, or with two reactors running in tandem, it would be a 360 megaWatt power station. With three reactors running in tandem, it would become a very substantial 540 megaWatt facility. 

This provides a wide spectrum of inexpensive power plants, all readily available by using very common fossil fuel power plant parts available from many different global suppliers - Translation: Really inexpensive compared to conventional nuclear power plants.  And powerful.  Two Multi-reactor Hybrids would power most of the world's small to medium cities.  They are serious, industrial-strength electric power.  Great for incremental growth.  16 of them would easily power all of New York City - an 8 gigaWatt load.

In this form, TRISO nuclear pebbles present an enabling technology for both governments and their citizens.  Nuclear pebbles are a disruptive technology to conventional nuclear power plant manufacturers.  Nothing they are making and selling - neither reactor nor turbine - is needed here.

Like the Coal Yard Nuke conversion, this is an obvious idea for power plant engineers but rarely put into writing for the public.

Pebble beds offer both the heat and electricity needed to do a clean job of making synthetic gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel from coal.   http://www.liquidcoal.com/ 

Original image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_plant   GNU Free Documentation License 

Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.

Single reactor Hybrid: Since the reactors don't have to be very remote from the steam generator, the supercritical water loop can be replaced with short 1,300 psi helium ducts carrying heat from the reactor to a calandria-type helium heated steam generator (drumless fire-tube & water-tube boiler, but still with liquid lead pressure isolation) being used instead, thereby eliminating the cost of the supercritical water components. 

Scalable Multiple Reactor Hybrid: As in the 'Coal Yard Nuke' system, a supercritical water loop would be needed to collect and reconcile the heat from the individual reactors into a common thermal source for driving a single thermal load.  Scalable: You could begin with a three-reactor size generator but start at reduced capacity with only one reactor, adding reactors later as needed.  Three PBMR reactor/water heaters per steam generator is likely a good economic cut-off point.

Two identical special 200 ton storage vault railroad cars, equipped with with elliptically-keyed wheels, (temporarily removed) would be temporarily welded to the rails next to the silo to supply and remove pebbles through pneumatic tubes connected to the car bottoms.  The Germans used automated pneumatic transport systems on their pebble bed reactors, the U.S. MIT pebble bed reactor design is even more sophisticated.  The pebbles would be held in metal clips on a conveyor belt storage system in the railroad cars.  A full load of 450,000 pebbles is about 112 tons containing perhaps 9 tons of uranium.

The gray rods sticking into the ground provide a passive conductive, rather than radiative, thermal path into the environment in the event reactor goes into Doppler thermal limiting mode.  Also, the standard PBMR reactor has a 1 meter layer of graphite insulation located between the toroidial vertical pebble chamber and the reactor wall to stop both neutrons and heat.  This feature makes the Doppler mode efficient.

The Hybrid power plant should be more efficient than either a conventional coal-fired steam plant that has stack losses of up to 25% of its coal heat or a conventional nuclear reactor with it's 600°F lower steam temperature powering a lower-efficiency two, not three-stage, turbine.  Every 100°F increase in steam temperature usually gets you another 1% in efficiency.  A single pebble's run-down cycle appears to the author to produce much heat energy as about 3.3 tons ($124) of delivered coal.  A PBMR reactor will hold about 450,000 pebbles.  At the commonly used 1 to 3 million ratio, a pebble's 0.3 ounces of uranium is supposed to equal 30 tons of coal.

See also: Licensing Coal Yard Nukes and Hybrid Nukes

 

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Chapter Five, Part Three:                                                  

The REALLY BIGGEST picture: Excellent IPCC diagrams showing all the world's major energies and the CO2 they make:    2004 .pdf   2030 .pdf
The above is downloadable information.

 United States Energy Sources in Quads

(A Quad is a unit of HEAT.  One Quad = 10¹⁵ BTU or about the heat from 167 million barrels of oil.  The United States uses about 1/4 Quadrillion BTUs each day.)

(The above charts would make excellent educational table place mats at environmental and energy conferences.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

US Energy Flow - 2002.pdf

We will need abundant ELECTRICITY to survive climate change.  Examples: Air Conditioning, Plug-in hybrids, Toilet-to-tap water purification, Water Desalination.

Please note you can clearly see the 'Second Law of Thermodynamics' impact on efficiency as expressed in "Lost Energy" (top, far right). 

This always occurs when heat energy is converted to mechanical energy.  Unavoidable thermodynamic losses are why we will always need huge amounts of heat to move the machines that provide our food, transportation, and electricity.  A 100% efficient heat engine will have an exhaust temperature that is the same as the air being drawn into it.  Heating a house with a modern high-efficiency furnace is almost 100% efficient as is demonstrated by the presence of cool-running plastic exhaust pipes.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics 

In the United States, 10 calories of fossil fuel are consumed by all the various machines involved in the production of 1 calorie of food. 

A gallon of gasoline contains about 31,000 calories.

 

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ExxonMobil’s massive refinery in Baytown, Texas. With a capacity of 562,000 barrels per day, it’s the nation’s largest.

 

End Of Chapter Five, Replacing Natural Gas