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Stopping Global Warming's Advance
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coal2nuclear.com
Stopping Global Warming's Advance
Radiophobia - Keeping Us Afraid Of Ending Global Warming
Average Americans are much more afraid of radiation than they need to be. When you are afraid, you are much easier to both paralyze and manipulate.
You know how the Republicans and the Democrats go at each other with attack ads? They are not unique nor are they the first to do so. It's a tradition that's been around ever since man invented words.
With 22% of the world's uranium market, Australia's uranium mining future looks bright indeed. Plenty of work for miners, if not the coal companies.
Rod Adams is a strong believer in the idea that the fossil fuel industry has been indirectly furthering Global Warming by supporting anti-nuclear fear mongers.
"Daniel sent me a scan of an advertisement that appeared in the Courier-Mail out
of Queensland, Australia in November 2007. it is a very straightforward effort
by the coal industry to scare people about nuclear power - not really so much
about the typical aspects of nuclear power that some try to use to instill fear,
but the threat that nuclear power poses to coal mining jobs."
http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2008/08/better-than-smoking-gun-straightforward.html
Is the item above a reason for the item below?
Are
Environmentalists To Blame For Global Warming?
"Had the United States gone on with its nuclear power plant building program after Three Mile Island, it's likely there would be no climate change crisis today."- Dr. James Lovelock, (World's top environmental advocate, author of the GAIA theory.) His papers
Exceptionally eminent figures in the environmental movement such as James Lovelock have long since recognized that, whatever the challenges of nuclear power, they are as nothing compared to those of global warming.
Reasoning anything nuclear must be bad, combined with their very understandable
By helping to prevent a general evolution from coal electricity to nuclear electricity, environmentalists inadvertently helped to bring about Global Warming.
By about 1995, climatologists identified dirty electricity from coal-burning power plants as being the cause of 2/3 of the accumulating CO2 problem.
Real anti-nuclear advocates will continue doing all they can to oppose nuclear technology in any form except when they personally need nuclear medicine.
Environmentalist opposition to nuclear electricity has become the biggest single barrier to solving the Global Warming CO2 crisis.
Environmentalists must decide whether the environment or their continued opposition to CO2-free nuclear electricity is most important to them.
"When people fight against fission, they are - either knowingly or unknowingly - fighting FOR combustion." -- Rod Adams
Why
use nuclear pebbles instead of conventional nuclear reactors?
A 550°F conventional nuclear reactor can't power a 1,000°F coal plant . . . It simply isn't hot enough.
Coal can produce heat over 2,000°F. Coal power plants use 1,000°F steam for high efficiency. Conventional nuclear reactors cannot produce steam hotter than 550°F, so conventional nuclear reactors cannot be used to produce coal's 1,000°F steam.
1,700°F high-temperature pebble bed reactors will work just fine.
Nuclear Pebbles: The air pollution-free replacement for lumps of coal. Pebble heat is roughly equivalent to coal heat. And that's saying a lot.
Also:
Why steam?: Water is a wonderful way to turn heat energy into mechanical energy because when you turn water into steam it changes state, expanding its volume 1,600 times. If the steam is not allowed to expand freely in volume, its pressure will go up drastically. That's where all that piston-pushing power in a steam locomotive comes from. If the steam is turned back into water by cooling it changes state again, this time contracting in volume 1,600 times, creating a powerful vacuum. Steam has quite different properties at different temperatures and pressures.
Fact Sheet on US Nuclear Powered Warship NPW Safety - fact0604.pdf
Licensing Coal Yard Nukes and Hybrid Nukes
Fighting Climate Change with a "War Footing" mindset: The way our government certifies nuclear reactors and licenses their use makes it obvious we need to have a "One reactor type and installation fits a heck of a lot, if not all." solution. This means using several reactors in tandem to upgrade huge coal-burning generating units, and, when practical, power several small coal-burning generating units from one reactor. The supercritical hot water interface provides us with a very flexible way to achieve this goal. This approach should drive standardization and quality up while driving unit cost and time needed to build and install down - essential since we are faced with upgrading at least 20,000 of the world's 138,000 different coal, oil, and natural gas power plant generating units. Standardization will also make the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's job easier.
Because of the additional safety margins in a pebble
bed reactor, Hybrid Nukes and Coal Yard Nuke plants might be run by nuclear
technicians rather than nuclear professionals in a manner not
unlike a nuclear medical facility or the nuclear navy. I
understand nuclear operators spend a great deal more time in training as compared to commercial pilots who
typically upgrade train on a simulator one week each year.
Test drive a conventional nuclear reactor yourself:
Standardization and NRC Certification: As with the 'Coal Yard Nuke' above, the Nuclear-Conventional Hybrid would be an extension of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's certification of the basic PBMR design with it's own facility criticality codes.
The Hybrid power plant points out the need for a second and possibly third tier of smaller nuclear reactor certification and licensing in the United States.
Other reactors that appear to the
author to clearly fall outside what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is paying
attention to: A typical coal-burning electricity generating power plant produces between
100 and 400 megaWatts electrical - mWe. Holland's NEREUS and Rod Adam's
Atomic Engine fall into the
power category of a shipboard diesel engine, about 10 to 30 megaWatts electric,
hot enough, but too small by a factor of 10 to power an existing 100+ megaWatt municipal power plant. Nuclear
"batteries" such as the 10 to 50 mWe
Toshiba's 4S and the new,
$25+ million, 25
mWe, 1,000°F uranium hydride
Hyperion "Triga"
reactor are a bit too cool and quite a bit too small to be considered as
possible replacements for coal's fire in a typical power plant.
Several dozen Triga reactors are now operating around the world.
Closer to our needs, but not yet available, is a pebble bed that's been under development by MIT's Andrew Kadak. It is a pebble bed that falls between the PBMR and the GT-MHR in size. There is also a Generation-IV Very High Temperature Reactor being developed at the Idaho National Laboratories but it won't be a prototype for several more years.
Both Hyperion and Nu-Scale are privately funded and, like the large diesel engine market, represent a world-wide market of thousands of $50 million units per year. If we allow them to go offshore, say to China, it will be an industrial loss comparable to loosing the aircraft industry.
It's becoming apparent the government may be ossifying our energy future. The NRC might be aware of this emerging flock of small reactors but I'm not reading anything about them encouraging their development. Perhaps it's time for Congress to enable the NRC to establish a small division for small reactors.