Industrial
Molten Salt Reactors
5-1
5-3
http://www.cospp.com/index.html Cogeneration and On-Site Power
Production magazine
http://www.cogeneration.org/ Midwest Cogeneration Association - Mostly
very small diesel units.
Increasing energy costs are causing many heavy industries to wither
and die.
Thorium offers the
opportunity to obtain very low cost electricity from 2,000 times cheaper than
coal energy
and to build very large, very low cost, power plants on your site or nearby
sites from generic coal power plant components.
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You don't worry about oil, coal, or natural gas being available when you need them. The same should be true for electricity.
Left, One month of wind electricity in Germany. Center, One day of scattered cloud solar electricity in Southwest U.S. Right, One month of nuclear electricity in the U.S. (Click on images for details.)
(The blue line on the Pacific Northwest linked plot is wind
electricity.)
Electricity Quality. As you can see, no electricity source is 100% available 100% of the time, that's why electricity grids are always powered by multiple electricitygenerating units. In the United States, electricity voltage has to be within 10% of where it should be all of the time for the grid and most large electrical devices in the home to function properly without burning out before they are worn out.
In addition, the grid in the United States is "tuned" to run at a frequency pitch of 60 cycles (or Hertz, Hz) (that hum you hear around big electrical equipment) and electricity generating sources must be within 1/2 cycle of that pitch or they cannot contribute electricity to the grid.
Just as your car gets poor gas mileage, wears out faster, and makes excessive amounts of emissions in stop-and-go traffic, your power company experiences the same degradations if it has to add stop-and-go electricity from herky-jerky wind and solar sources into the electricity it is supplying to the grid feeding your house. This is why wind electricity, which has been around since 1900, has not been used as a source of electricity.
In the author's opinion, if we want to add wind and solar electricity to the grid mix, these sources should be used to pump water up into nearby pumped water energy storage facilities. Hydro is jet-engine quick. Wind + hydro makes one of the most perfect renewable electricity generating systems ever devised.
(Above, right) Pumped water energy storage facility. Green is taking energy in, red is sending energy out. Notice it is well suited to track changes in wind and solar generation to smoothly meet electricity user needs.
Electricity Cost. As you can see, nuclear electricity has the lowest production cost of any source. (Click for details.)
Unfortunately, spending years in court fighting the antinuclear environmentalists causes nuclear to have the highest build costs of any electricity generating technology.
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Basic electricity distribution components. Below, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_distribution Notice all circuits are 3 phase (Φ), 60 Hz.
(Above) Higher-voltage transmission lines are more typical of a grid several hundred miles in diameter. kV = kiloVolts or thousands of Volts.
What will the "Small Energy" picture be like with nuclear?
There is a huge gap between the 25 MWe obtainable from the smallest commercial reactor that's about to come on the market - the Hyperion - and what thermal energy may be obtained from a 4kV 3 phase electrical distribution line.
An 800 boiler horsepower boiler consumes about 33,600 SCF or 105 MegaWatts thermal per hour in natural gas.
To do 70 MW thermal at 4,000 volts 3Φ, would take 4,000 amps. This is an impractical amount of current. 400 amps is about as high as we can go.
A great little electrical power calculator: http://www.jobsite-generators.com/power_calculators.html
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