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The United States produces about 1/4 of the world's Global Warming CO2.   (From "Earth Lights" - NASA)
 

INTRODUCTION

Energy is the master resource without which nothing else gets done.
Without ample cheap energy we cannot access our technologies.

This web site is about replacing ALL fossil fuels with several different kinds of nuclear energies and carbon-neutral oil.

Elsewhere on this web site is strong evidence that converting coal burning power plants to nuclear is the only measure that will lead to the end of Global Warming.  Power plants are 10-story high automated coal burners that eat a mile-long train of coal every day.  They are weapons of mass combustion.  Most of the world's coal burning power plants have about 50 years of life left in them and they are producing about 70% of the accumulating Global Warming CO2.         (Conway rail yard, Pittsburgh, PA.)

Converting coal-burning power plant boilers to MiniNuke nuclear destroys their ability to burn coal.  Immediately.  A much "greener" policy than waiting 50 years for the coal-burning power plant boilers to wear out.  Conversion is a quick and economical way to get 50 years of clean electricity without having to build new power plants.

Ending the burning of natural gas will end another 35% of the accumulating Global Warming CO2.  Natural gas is used mainly to generate electricity and for heating.  Conventional nuclear electricity can largely replace natural gas.

The best energy is electricity made from nuclear heat.  Electricity is the safest, cleanest, and most incredibly versatile energy form ever made available to the average man.  Our quickest way out of the Global Warming crisis is to use electricity for every stationary energy need. 

Our personal transportation needs will always require large amounts of the quick, precision energy that only oil can provide.  The environmentally clean and economically practical way to end oil's Global Warming CO2 and shortage crisis is to switch from fossil crude oil made from ancient Jurassic Age algae to carbon-neutral crude oil made from modern hydrogenated algae.  Switching to carbon-neutral oil could end as much as another 70% of the accumulating Global Warming CO2.  Getting an idea of what a nuclear powered algae hydrogenation refinery might be like.

ROLLING BACK GLOBAL WARMING: All three - coal, oil, and natural gas - add up to 175% of what it takes to stop Global Warming’s advance.  This means not only can Global Warming be stopped; the pool of excess CO2 that has accumulated in the atmosphere over the years could be reduced by natural CO2 sequestration at an annual rate of 75% of its current growth. 

At this rate, our damaged atmosphere would be restored to normal in about 60 years.

Here is how we can make it happen

Ending all power plant coal burning while doubling our electricity production.  

This dual goal task is unavoidable.  The CO2 from the world's 141,000 power plants will always overwhelm all other efforts to end Global Warming.  We cannot deal successfully with Climate Change's chaos without substantial additional electrical energy.

"MiniNuke" - Think about the reactors being used to power aircraft carriers and submarines.  Submarine reactors are the size of a desk.

3 different nuclear options we could implement concurrently.

1. Quickest: Convert coal boilers to TRISO MiniNuke boilers.  (Coal Yard Nukes) 
   

This is the only way to destroy our ability to burn coal.

"Coal Yard Nuke" - a coal burning power plant that has been converted to nuclear by powering it with a PBMR TRISO MiniNuke pebble bed reactor.
(Wikipedia coal power plant image edited by author.)

2. Quick: Build new inexpensive TRISO Hybrid 100 to 500 MWe nuclear power plants from coal-burning power plant parts.

Add HYBRIDs to existing coal power plant sites, new small city sites.

"Hybrid" power station built out of easily obtainable and inexpensive coal power plant parts but powered by a PBMR TRISO MiniNuke pebble bed reactor.
(Wikipedia coal power plant image edited by author.)

3. Slowest: Build new Westinghouse and Areva 1,600 MWe conventional nuclear power plants along with sufficient nuclear waste-burning General Electric - Hitachi PRISM 622 MWe nuclear power plants to completely consume all nuclear waste.

Big electrical power for big American cities.

General Electric - Hitachi PRISM Reactor. 
Notice they like the idea of in-ground reactors also.
(Image from GE-H Promotional Brochure .)

Once it's been in a power reactor for a couple of years, spent nuclear fuel (SNF) contains a variety of whole and "broken" atoms.  Just like with crude oil, these fission products can be refined out in a recycling process for specific uses.

As the author understands it, the plutonium in nuclear fuel that has been in a running power reactor for more than about 90 days is so contaminated with plutonium-240 that bombs made from this contaminated plutonium will not explode predictably.  (Plutonium-239 is the good stuff.)   Pu-240 has a high rate of spontaneous fission, which can cause a nuclear weapon to predetonate.  Isn't this exactly the stuff we want terrorists to steal?  Why isn't this factoid more widely known?

The above concept is designed to minimize the substantial risks and dangers of having to transmit city-size amounts of electricity long distances through the electrical grid.  Due to their very nature, exposed for hundreds of miles, grids - dumb, smart, or average - are always the Achilles heel of utility electrical systems.

Our unwanted obligation

So many lights, so little time.  The lights in the image below are powered mostly by coal.  Lights consume about 10% of a country's electricity.  To put things into some perspective, the New York City-Long Island complex alone is an 8-gigawatt electrical load - the entire U.S. is a 760 gigawatt load. 

Renewables are, by a factor of 100, too weak to ever do the job.  The biggest wind turbine - a Vestas V90-3.0 MW averages 1/1,000 of a gigawatt. 

Pound for pound, nuclear is 3 million times more powerful than coal, causes 1% the CO2 and, if recycled down to near nothingness, leaves long term waste no more radioactive than natural uranium ore in the ground.

No matter what the problems of nuclear, they are as nothing compared to the problems we are facing with Climate Change.

Every time we convert a coal-burning power plant to nuclear we destroy some of man's ability to burn coal to make more Global Warming CO2.

We might not want to do this, but we must do it and continue doing it until all fossil fuel burning machinery in the world has been stopped and replaced with either nuclear-electric or carbon-neutral powered machines.

The family of nuclear reactors now available are the only real stepping-stones available to mankind for ending Global Warming and endowing Energy Independence to every country.

It's obvious the nuclear reactors and the other necessary equipment are available to us now, are safe and are affordable.  Conversion is much less wasteful than simple abandonment of power plants.

It's less obvious how we can make what we need now from what we can get now. 

That is why this web book is being written.

(From "Earth Lights" - NASA)