Halting_Global

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Map Restoring Our Oil Independence
HALTING GLOBAL WARMING

Everything organic on Planet Earth is inextricably part modern and part fossil carbon.

This is why people who are concerned about Global Warming have failed miserably. Not knowing how to fix the fossil fuel industries that make Global Warming, they are telling them to commit suicide. You can't tell an industry to commit suicide.

Re-channeling vehicle fossil fuels so they are "Green" was worked out in detail about 5 years ago by NETL, the US Energy Department's National Energy Technology Laboratories. One thing that stopped them was they did not have the necessary heat source to power the processes needed to make fossil fuels green.

I think the molten salt reactor has both the temperature and the bulk energy to do the job.

Moving from less profitable markets such as heat in preference to more profitable markets such as vehicle fuels is something any fossil fuel company will gladly do.

That is what the author is suggesting.

Defining "Halting Global Warming"

James Hansen pointed out that ending one pound of CO2 emissions does not stop one pound of CO2 from being added to the atmosphere.

How much benefit will reducing CO2 emissions produce?

(Right) About 46% of man's CO2 emissions ends up in the air. This implies that only 46% of any REDUCTION in CO2 emissions will be reflected in measurements of the air.

The important thing to remember is that we have pushed up Planet Earth's thermostat. For the last 12,000 or so years, we have been running at about 235 watts per square yard. The additional heat we are getting is just two more watts per square yard and it will take hundreds of years for Planet Earth to reach the new set-point.

Meantime, any additional burning of fossil fuels we do from now on just pushes the thermostat still higher. As you can see in the CO2 decay diagram, (left), dropping our CO2 emissions to about 2/3 of today's level will only cause the CO2 concentration to stabilize.

"Top Down" halting.

The world's largest producer of Global Warming carbon dioxide is "Taichung," a coal-burning power plant located on Taiwan. Just 1,200 of world's 30,000 fossil fuel power plants make over 30% of ALL Global Warming. These coal burning "Mega-Plants" (bright red in diagrams at left and right, click to enlarge) were built after the environmentalists persuaded the world that equal sized nuclear mega-power plants were not acceptable.

Examine James Hansen's graph (above). Notice how the rate of Global Warming, which had largely flat-lined during the late-80s as nuclear mega-power plants were coming on-line, took a sharp turn for the worse as coal-burning mega-plants began coming on-line. Mega-Sized Power Plant List .pdf

The coal-burning boilers in these 1,200 mega-power plants can be quickly replaced with small, ultra-safe, molten salt nuclear boilers. That would immediately end about 30% of ALL Global Warming. Converting the boilers on the world's remaining 29,000 fossil power plants would end about another 6%.

This engineer would suggest the first thing that should be done to halt Global Warming is to undo what the environmentalists have done.

"Bottom Up" halting.

The environmentalists appear to be suggesting: "Change your incandescent light bulbs to high efficiency fluorescent and hope something good happens."

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2) Global Warming's Sources and Sinks

The diagram below shows the world's carbon flows into and out of the atmosphere as carbon dioxide in metric billions of tons. As you can see, vegetation on land and the ocean's water naturally remove some of the carbon dioxide from the air. As you can also see, man's ability to add carbon dioxide to the air is overwhelming nature's ability to remove it, leaving an accumulating excess in the air of about 12 billion tons per year (Red Bar). It is estimated that since man first began to overwhelm nature's ability to remove all of man's CO2 from the air about 1 trillion tons of extra CO2 have accumulated in the air.

The stacked bar chart on the right shows man's major CO2 sources (the fossil fuels) and how nature is dealing with it (CO2 sinks). The author got the coal, natural gas, and oil CO2 source amounts from the gray CO2 waste bins on this IPCC diagram pdf United States only Deforestation by subtracting fossil fuels.

Bottom Line: An additional 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide is accumulating in air every year (Red Bar).

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3) Where does most Global Warming come from?

Boiler-driven machines make 2/3 of ALL Global Warming

The "CO2 Sources and Sinks" diagram from the "Global Warming Today" page is repeated here with another diagram that shows the "Sources" matched up with the "Fossil Fuel Emitter" machines that make and emit the CO2.

Most of coal, natural gas, and a little oil is used to heat boilers.

Most of oil is used to power vehicles with a little being used as feedstock for plastics and fertilizers.

Deforestation is associated with wood harvesting and "slash and burn" agriculture.

The important thing to notice is that much of fossil fuel boiler heating is for making electricity..

Fossil fuel boilers can be replaced by nuclear fuel boilers of about the same physical size. And, since nuclear heat is 1/3 to 1/20th as expensive as fossil heat, nuclear heat as a general source of heat may prove to be far less expensive in the long run.

MAKING ALL KINDS OF HEAT, NOT JUST ELECTRICITY GENERATION
Is the Largest Source of Global Warming.
2/3 of all Global Warming is made in boilers, most Global Warming CO2 happens in boilers

Only by ending fossil fuel boilers can we possibly end Global Warming.

Where are we burning most of our fossil fuels? We are burning 2/3 of our fossil fuels in boilers.

What fossil fuels are we burning in our boilers? Almost all Coal and Natural Gas.
Source: http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=environment_where_ghg_come_from

Note: On the left, a unit of heat, the BTU is used. BTU stands for British Thermal Unit - about the amount of heat you get by burning a wood match completely - a BTU is precisely defined as the amount of heat needed to raise a pound of water one degree Fahrenheit. On the right, a unit of weight, the Metric Ton is used. A Metric Ton is 1,000 kilograms or 2,200 pounds.

In the diagram below you can see how much heat is being used various sectors of the United States' population and, on the right, the carbon dioxide emissions that result from that use.

What this shows is that all U.S. boilers combined make about TWICE the CO2 as all U.S. vehicles combined.

                                                                                                    Transportation = 1,851

                                                                                         Electricity Generation = 2,147 (Does not include hydro and renewables)
Industrial, commercial boilers, hot water heaters, furnaces combined = 1,407

                                                                                   All Boilers = 2,147 + 1,407 = 3,554

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4) What can we do about fossil fuel boilers?

Coal and natural gas boilers can be repowered with nuclear boilers.

Fossil Fuel Boiler Awareness
Most coal and natural gas is burned in boilers so most Global Warming could be considered to be happening in boilers.

Hidden away, largely forgotten, all over the world, perhaps a billion huge-to-tiny boilers, hot water heaters and furnaces are silently making most of the Global Warming CO2 that's overwhelming Nature. All day, every day.

Click on pictures for larger images.

230 feet high, open-air for cooling, a pair of Babcock & Wilcox supersized coal burning power plant boilers. - Photo: B&W Brochure

Boiler awareness: Boilers Produce over half of all Global Warming

      7,000 Supersized Coal Burning Boilers in 1,200 supersize power plants are making about 30% of Global Warming's CO2
  150,000 Conventional Sized Coal Burning Power Plant Boilers make about 7% of Global Warming's CO2
       50,000 Natural Gas Burning Electricity Turbines make about 4% of Global Warming's CO2
1 Million Large Industrial and Commercial Natural Gas Boilers make about 4% of Global Warming's CO2
1 Billion Small Commercial Gas Boilers, residential hot water heaters, and furnaces make about 4% of Global Warming's CO2
Ocean-going ships, which could be nuclear powered, make about 4% of Global Warming CO2.   Concrete production, which could be nuclear fired, about 3%.

There are currently around 16,000 registered vessels in the world with output above 10 MW of power. The entire global commercial shipping fleet is considered to account for between 4-5% of global carbon emissions.

EPA: The United States has 200,000 industrial boilers, heaters and incinerators. (US has about 20% of the world's boiler and heater infrastructure.)

Notes:
1. Boiler population numbers are 2005 world-wide counts or estimates.
2. The advanced nuclear boiler that can replace supersized coal boilers - the ORNL-TM-1060.

(Right) Classic American natural gas burning 800 horsepower industrial boiler. Click on image to see a cutaway of this boiler - which is the same concept as a classic steam locomotive fire-tube boiler. - - Hurst Boiler & Welding Hurst boiler brochure .pdf

(Above) a typical building complex boiler house. Click on images for larger view.

The Boiler "Donut Hole"

Currently there are no nuclear boilers smaller than 75 megaWatt (thermal) on the horizon. Dr. Peterson test ran a 15 megaWatt (thermal) uranium hydride reactor for his patent, but nothing about that reactor has been published in the last couple of years. Due to wire and transformer limitations and losses, there is an upper limit on how powerful an electric boiler can be.

This represents what is currently commercially practical in electric boilers.

From the Electric Resistance Boiler section of the Cleaver-Brooks boiler web site:
http://www.cleaver-brooks.com/Home.aspx http://www.deanboiler.com/home.htm

Clean operation - no emissions, no stacks, no fuel piping, no combustion air requirements.

Capacities for steam:

15 to 250 psig design pressure.
12 kW through 3375 kW [1.2 boiler horsepower - 344 boiler horsepower].
Model CR package with integral water feed system.

Capacities for hot water:

30 psig to 250 psig design pressure.
12 kW through 3360 kW [1.2 boiler horsepower - 342 boiler horsepower].
Model IWH for instantaneous water heating.

In accordance with ASME, the boilers are built to ASME Section IV bearing the "H" Stamp or ASME Section I bearing the "S" Stamp.

Each standard unit is UL Listed and labeled.

High turndown.

Voltage standards of 208, 240, 380, 480, or 600 three phase.

Full and part load efficiencies @ 99%.

Extremely quiet operation, no fan noise or combustion noise.

Gas Package Boilers

What are these industrial boilers like? Here is a view of a typical 800 bhp (boiler horsepower) natural gas fired industrial boiler (inside view) Brochure .pdf From the Hurst Boiler Company brochure, their Series 200 natural gas 800 bhp (boiler horsepower) boiler burns 33,600 standard cubic feet of gas (a scf of natural gas has 1,005 BTU) every hour making 33.7 million BTU every hour.

Hurst's Web Site: http://www.hurstboiler.com/biomass_boiler_systems "Hurst Boiler & Welding Company, Inc. has been manufacturing, designing, engineering and servicing gas, oil, coal, solid waste, biomass & hybrid fuel-fired steam & hot water boilers since 1967. The Hurst Product Line includes Packaged boilers: 6 to 2000 hp, pressures to 450 psi. Fire-tube, water-tube & feedwater equipment for all heating & process applications including: schools, dry cleaning, hospitals, universities, military & all commercial/industrial operations. Hurst is a custom manufacturer of engineered packaged boilers & boiler systems, biomass boiler systems, boiler controls & accessories. Low NOx modular boilers & burner configurations are available for all models, starting at 9.5 hp, meeting all state environmental requirements, including SCAQMD." - - from "About Hurst Boiler & Welding Company" on the Hurst web site.

Going Green. To make 33,700,000 BTUs of heat in an hour using electricity from any source, you would need about 11 million electrical watts for an hour (it takes a watt an hour to make 3.41 BTUs).

What will the "Small Energy" picture be like when all we have is nuclear? Small stores would be well served by electrical heat and cooling; "Big Box" stores, like WalMart and large single schools, natural gas; hospital campus, school campus, office complex, shopping mall, etc., with small nuclear "heat modules" such as the Hyperion reactor.

There is a huge gap between the 25 MWe (about 70 megaWatt thermal) obtainable from the smallest commercial reactor that's about to come on the market - the Hyperion - and what thermal energy may be obtained from the typical 4kV 3 phase city electrical distribution line.

The classic American 800 boiler horsepower boiler consumes about 33,600 Standard Cubic Feet (SCF) of natural gas (33,768,000 BTU) or 11 MegaWatts thermal per hour in natural gas.

A Cleaver-Brooks CEJS 4200 25 kV electric boiler, rated at 56 megaWatts (173 million BTU), is 1616 amps with a power factor of 0.8. This is as much power as some small rural coal power plants make.

To do 70 MW thermal at 4,160 volts 3Φ, would take 12,144 amps at 0.8 pf. Loads over 400 amps on a typical city distribution line is an impractical amount of current. 400 amps is about as high as we can go. So a typical 4160 V, 400 amp drop is good for 2.3 megaWatts or about 7 million BTU per hour with a 0.8 pf. is more like it. This should cover small individual stores.

A typical large load would be a hospital campus, school campus, office complex, shopping mall, etc. What would make operational and economic sense is to get one or more Hyperion nuclear heat modules (right), use the heat for heating, cooling, and generating electricity. Today's windmill and solar cell electricity feed-in rules should make it easy to sell any occasional dispatchable electricity into the local distribution grid.

A great little electrical power calculator: http://www.jobsite-generators.com/power_calculators.html

How electricity gets from power plants to your house.

How electricity gets from power plants to your house.
It takes about 1,000 Volts to efficiently push commercial volumes of electrical energy 1 mile. 1,000 Volts is typically called: "1 kV"

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.

A Zero-Emissions Synthetic Oil Refinery for Making Net-Zero Emissions Transportation Fuels

This is the difficult part. By using high temperature nuclear heat instead of coal heat to make coal-to-oil, you are painting with a different palette.

The RAND Corporation studies indicate that complete capture and disposal of CO2 emissions would add less than $5 to a barrel of CTL oil, burning coal to make oil.

Co-generation of electricity by burning unusable process gas is the major source of CTL's Global Warming emissions. Since this is no longer acceptable, this gas must be kept inside the product stream or become part of the CCS disposal stream.

If coal-to-oil is to be done squeaky-clean, we will have to use high temperature nuclear heat and capture the inevitable streams of CO2 and H2S. This will take more processing, more expensive heating equipment such as Westinghouse-plasma electric torches with 1,000 hour electrode life to vaporize the coal feedstock.

But it can be done. The author has a 2002 Westinghouse Plasma Corporation paper about a "next-generation" Plasma Gasification Reactor study with a capacity of 360 tons/day. 42 of these gassifiers would vaporize the 15,000 tons of coal per day. At 1/2 billion dollars.

The biggest hit will be the additional energy needed to make clean happen. But, heat from thorium is so cheap it is almost free. That's the trade-off.

And nuclear promises even cleaner, more energetic synthetic fuels (higher miles-per-gallon) than today's fuels if we can manage to cleanly obtain the hydrogen available from water to upgrade the oil molecule even more. "A nuclear source of hydrogen coupled with nuclear process heat would more than double the amount of liquid hydrocarbons from the coal and eliminate most CO2 emissions from the process." - http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf116_processheat.html

The coal-to-oil conversion process produces ultra-clean clean fuels with all of coal's solid pollutants being trapped in the coal's solid waste char and gas pollutants captured during refining. Coal-to-oil conversion is a well-known process, and its environmental aspects are well-documented by many sources. (Click to enlarge.)

Environmental impact. Converting our 286 largest power plants from coal to nuclear to make both electricity and synthetic oil would end about 40% of ALL U.S. Global Warming emissions. If the solid waste, CO2, and H2S (sulfur) from the coal refining process is sequestered, then there should be no objections about use of ultra-clean synfuels produced from coal.

Replacing all of America's imported oil would consume a little more than ALL the coal the U.S. is currently burning to make electricity.

To make this all environmentally sane, the EPA should make the allowable combined power plant and coal-to-oil refinery emissions equal to or lower than had the power plant alone converted to "Carbon Capture and Sequestration" emissions control instead, i.e., an 80% or more reduction in ALL emissions, including CO2 (carbon dioxide). CCS backgrounder: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage

Upgrading and refining synthetic crude oil made from coal and biomass. Crude oil made from coal + biomass from all sorts of sources will be very pure but composed of a wide variety of different molecule weights that will have to be broken down (cracked) into vehicle-ready fuels. The 1,300°F heat from the reactor will hit the spot for catalytic cracking of some oil molecules; other synthetic oil molecules will need hydrocracking which, in a conventional oil refinery, uses hydrogen from natural gas, a process that produces large amounts of carbon dioxide.

Small amounts of hydrogen can be obtained without Global Warming emissions from electrolyzers. If large amounts of hydrogen are needed, the extremely high temperature water-splitting sulfur-iodine process will have to be used. The reactor's 1,300°F heat isn't quite hot enough to drive the water-splitting process, but when another 350°F is added via electrical heat booster elements, the FLiBe heat transfer salt should be hot enough to get the job done. Both electrolyzers and calrod heat boosters consume a lot of electricity. Being located at the power plant, they avoid costly electricity transmission costs.

The US has virtually endless feedstock for making oil, but we also need endless, clean, very hot heat to make endless clean oil. While we do have 27% of all the world's coal, we can't burn coal or natural gas because they are our feedstocks, it is becoming obvious coal is so valuable we simply can't afford to burn coal to make the necessary heat for producing electricity or synthetic oil. Coal reserves expectancies chart:

Windmills are clean and endless but don't make heat. That leaves only nuclear heat. (Click to enlarge image at right.)

THE BAD NEWS: The nuclear reactors we are using today are simply not hot enough at 550°F to do anything much beyond boiling water to make electricity.

THE GOOD NEWS: Another type of reactor, the air cooled 1,300°F high temperature Molten Salt Reactor is hot enough to replace the coal being burned in power plants and also to convert that coal into crude oil. This much safer reactor has little in common with today's reactor.

Reality Check: At the present time, there are no molten salt reactors in operation. The US government abandoned molten salt reactors about 1972 when it was understood that thorium had near-zero nuclear weapons value. That was then, this is now. You wouldn't be reading this if liquid thorium were not being "taken back off the shelf" in many places for many reasons.

For the purposes of showcasing a Molten Salt Reactor on this web site, the author has chosen the 1 gigaWatt (electrical) [2.5 gigaWatt (thermal) reactor and confinement cell combination designed by EBASCO.

Molten salt reactors have little in common in physical size, cost, or the way they work when compared to the solid uranium reactors in worldwide use today. The most commonly suggested nuclear fuel for this type of reactor is thorium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor

"Carbon-Neutral" means burning the biogasoline neither hurts nor helps Global Warming.

Coal + Biomass refining technologies for cheap, environmentally friendly transportation fuels

"Indirect" conversion of coal into synthetic oil opens the door to environmentally friendly gasolines, diesels, and jet fuels. By using Liquid Thorium nuclear energy to power the "Coal and Biomass to Liquid" (CBTL) process, a substantial additional Global Warming benefit can be achieved. Chart:

If the coal + biofuel blend folks are correct, it may be possible to come up with identical or better (and cheaper) gasoline, diesel, and jet fuels having net zero lifecycle CO2 emissions with surprisingly small percentages of biofuel in the blend if liquid thorium instead of coal burning is used to power the CTL conversion and if carbon capture technology is used to prevent the CO2 emissions normally associated with the CTL process from being vented to the air.

In addition to cellulosic biomass feedstock (grasses, woods), municipal solid wastes (MSW) and sewage are potential sources of carbon-neutral carbon. Plasma arc waste disposal, which gasifies municipal solid wastes using a device called a plasma converter, are a practical source of carbon-neutral feedstock producer gas. The useable syngas is drawn off the top off the gassifier, the slag and metals from the bottom. The non-metal solid wastes can be added to the wastes from the coal gassifier and placed in played-out mine shafts.

America's sewage alone can supply almost 10% worth of gasifiable carbon-neutral feedstock for America's vehicles. In these feedstock blends, coal is used as the sequestered (plant root) carbon component (See "Comparing Fuels.")

http://www.corebiofuel.com/ Core Biofuel produces a 100% cellulosic biogasoline that is "greener" than carbon-neutral but burns to provide the energy to drive the process, thus reducing the "green-ness" of the final product.

http://www.sundropfuels.com/ Sundrop fuels are building a cellulosic biomass + natural gas synthesis plant that should be able to make exactly carbon-neutral biogasoline at a better than natural crude gasoline price.

What is being suggested by Restoring America's Oil Independence is far "Greener," than Core's or Sundrop's technology since the energy needed to make its biogasoline will come from extremely cheap CO2-free nuclear. It can blend coal + biomass for a variety of "green" or cheap biogasolines. (See "Comparing Fuels," right.)