Effective Global Warming
coal2nuclear.com
Effective Global Warming
(Below: From "Earth Lights" - NASA)
You are
looking at the reason we have Global Warming.
All these lights mean billions of people are living well.
There are
The United
States produces about 1/4 of the world's Global Warming CO2.
(From "Earth Lights" - NASA)
Energy is the
master resource without which nothing else gets done.
Without ample cheap energy our technologies are not very
beneficial.
This web site is about replacing ALL fossil fuels with several different kinds of nuclear energies and a carbon-neutral oil.
Electricity
Ending Coal Burning To Make Electricity Will End 70% of Global Warming's CO2
Immediately.
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.
And filthy .
. . In
addition to adding about 2 billion tons of Global Warming CO2
to our air each year, U.S. coal plants are pooping out about 130 million tons of
toxic solid waste material each year - including enough uranium to make it profitable to
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 and their supporting transmission lines, substations, cooling water systems, roads, and railroads.
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. Electricity, a higher, "secondary" form of energy, is the safest, cleanest, and most incredibly versatile energy form ever made available to man. Our only way out of the Global Warming crisis is to use electricity for every stationary energy need.
OIL . . . 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.
Ending Coal Burning To Make Electricity Will End 70% of Global Warming's CO2 Immediately.
Unavoidable task: Ending all power plant coal burning while
doubling our electricity production.
1.
The CO2
from the world's
2. We cannot deal successfully with Climate Change's chaos without substantial additional
electrical energy. Energy supply is more important than Climate Change.
Additional Electricity You and Your Family Will Be Needing to cope with Global Warming: ... Plug-in Hybrid cars - (A 40 mile overnight charge-up will easily take 20kWh - as much electricity as a whole-house air conditioner cycling 24/7.) ... Very clean CARBON-NEUTRAL hydrogenated algae gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel ... Reverse osmosis water desalination plants like the one Tampa already has ... Toilet-to-tap drinking water purification - good to the last drop? (you'll want all the electricity those sterilization ozoneators can use for this one) ... powerful air conditioning for potentially deadly Global-Warmed southern super-summers ... and lots of cheap electric heat - not expensive gas or oil - for weird northern winters ... and the hundreds of other appliances and gadgets you are already powering with electricity.
Three exciting new nuclear electricity opportunities.
("MiniNuke" - Think about the small reactors being used to power aircraft carriers and submarines. Submarine reactors are the size of a desk.)
1. End Global Warming by cleaning up existing coal-burning electricity power plants:
Convert coal-burning power plant boilers to TRISO MiniNuke boilers - Coal Yard Nukes.
Coal Yard Nukes are the world's ONLY
alternative to Clean Coal's "Carbon Capture and Sequestration" - (CCS).
Don't dismiss Coal Yard Nukes lightly. 
Worldwide, there are 141,000 boilers that need retrofitting.
Converting boilers demolishes 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 or Chinese equal.
(Wikipedia coal power plant image edited by author.)
Coal is obsolete. Coal burning power plants use 1,000°F steam, conventional nuclear reactors can't make steam hotter than 550°F. TRISO nuclear fuels can go as hot as 3,600°F, and their reactors typically cruise around 1,700°F, easily hot enough to replace coal's heat.
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.
Conversion of our coal-burning power plants into MiniNuke power plants is quicker and much less wasteful - avoiding the major loss of electricity that simple shut-down and abandonment of coal-burning power plants would bring.
As far as the author knows, there has never been a
coal power plant converted to nuclear.
2. Expand electricity for middle and rural America:
Build
new, low cost TRISO
Hybrid
100 to
500 MWe nuclear power plants from inexpensive
coal-burning power plant parts.
Add electricity by adding Hybrid nukes to existing coal power plant 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.)
The Hybrid idea has been floating around for quite a few years. Coal's more favorable economics, combined with public antipathy toward things nuclear have not been kind to Hybrids.
The THTR-300 was a 300 megawatt TRISO pebble bed Hybrid built by the Germans.
http://www.thtr.de/index.htm
It ran full power into the German grid for a couple of years until a pebble
jammed. The Chinese
are currently building 19 HTR-PM dual 100 megawatt TRISO pebble bed reactor,
single turbine, Hybrids at Rongcheng, China.
Many smaller power plants will make our electrical grid tougher by having a less centralized power plant population.
3. Add more large-load electricity for our mega-cities:
A, Build new large Westinghouse AP1000 and Areva EPR conventional nuclear power plants.
B,
Build sufficient
nuclear waste-burning
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
Nuclear waste-burning?
The United States' population has been told spent nuclear fuel is a problem, we believe it, ignoring the fact the rest of the world has been recycling spent nuclear fuel down to nothingness for decades. The ARC PRISM approach compliments nuclear recycling, is more advanced, and even more efficient.
Planet Earth has billions of tons of uranium and thorium. Recycling will extend them by at least a factor of 10. We really do have enough nuclear fuel to last forever.
This section in greater detail sidebar
So many lights, so little time.
Except for France, the lights in the image below are still powered mostly by coal, not renewables like wind or solar.
Renewables have failed, by a
factor of 100, to do the job of replacing coal. We were warned by
climatologists we had about 50 years before Global Warming would reach a
self-propelling "Tipping Point" beyond which nothing man could do would stop
Global Warming's progression. 25 of those years have been spent on
renewables and all they are producing is 1% of the world's electricity. I
don't think we want to squander our remaining 25 years on renewables.
(
How big a task are we facing now? Say we wanted to stop the 70% of Global Warming that fossil fuel power plants make in 25 years or 9,125 days. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) says the world's total installed fossil fuel electricity generating capacity in 2006 was 2,752,000 megaWatts.
To replace the world's fossil fuel electricity with wind, using the largest wind turbine on the market today, the Vestas V90-3.0 MW, which averages 1 megaWatt, we would have to install 300 wind turbines a day for 25 years. If, instead, we converted the fossil fuel power plant boilers to MiniNuke boilers using the smallest MiniNuke, the Hyperion TRIGA "Hot Tub," rated at 25 megaWatts electric, we would have to convert 16 boilers a day for 25 years to do the entire world. Larger MiniNukes might mean fewer MiniNukes per day would be needed.
The United States averaged 72 armored vehicles a day during World War II and the U.S. 30-ton M4 Sherman medium tank is roughly comparable in mass and complexity to a Hyperion MiniNuke reactor - so 16 Hyperions a day looks easy. Jump to calculations sidebar
Ending Global Warming in time is still very possible if we are willing to go nuclear.
No matter what the problems of nuclear, they are as nothing compared to the problems we are facing with Climate Change.
So many lights, so little time.
Except for France, the lights in the image are still powered mostly by coal, not renewables like wind or solar.
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 oil powered machines.
(From "Earth Lights" - NASA)
The huge, costly, and relatively inefficient nuclear electricity power plants in use today are the earliest members of what has become a large family of nuclear reactor types and sizes that have been developed over the last 60 years.
Our conventional nuclear electricity plants may have grown too large and too expensive to be practical.
The more modern and advanced MiniNukes are the less costly, safer, and more practical energy stepping-stones mankind can use to end Global Warming while endowing Energy Independence to nearly every country.
(From "Earth Lights" - NASA)
Conversion of our coal-burning power plants into MiniNuke power plants is much less wasteful - avoiding the major loss of electricity that simple shut-down and abandonment of coal-burning power plants would bring.
It's obvious the MiniNuke nuclear reactors and the other necessary equipment that we need now are safe, affordable, and available now.
It's less obvious how we can economically convert existing coal-burning power plants into MiniNuke power plants to end Global Warming.
That is why this web book is being written.
(From "Earth Lights" - NASA)
You may be interested in exploring the other parts of this web book further.