Coal-To-Nuclear: An Idea To Help Bring An End To Climate Change Quickly


Coal-To-Nuclear: An Idea To Help Bring An End To Climate Change Quickly

Lights = Cities = Power Plants      

THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA IN THIS WEB SITE
Converting existing coal power plants to TRISO nuclear to end their CO2 emissions. 

Why is it so important the United States immediately convert a coal power plant to demonstrate this idea to the world?

The world must have over 200,000 ship-size or larger coal boilers that need to be replaced with nuclear boilers. 
We may as well start here.  A c2n demonstration plant would be the tip of the spear in Climate Change's heart.
One goal of this web site is to become the focal point / launch pad of the world's first coal-to-nuclear repowering.

Renewables can't do it alone.  Climate Change is fundamentally a heat problem and renewables only provide small amounts of electricity.

Nuclear energy is an environmentally-gentle heat source capable of replacing all fossil fuels and thus ending Climate Change.
To this end, this web site is advocating upgrading all the world's existing coal power plants to nuclear,


Of the world's 30,000 coal plants, approximately the 1,200 largest are making 30% of all Climate Changing CO2 (see emissions plot below).
Repowering these few coal plants with TRISO reactors now will make the largest possible, quickest, impact on Climate Changing CO2 emissions.

We should begin with the world's largest producer of Climate Changing CO2, Taichung, located in Lung-Ching Township, Taiwan, China
and work down the list from there. 


We could, and should, begin work on a small demonstration plant today.  The world has about 30,000 coal power plants. 
Any well-maintained 50 to 100 megaWatt (e) rural coal plant in any nuclear-friendly country will do.  No new technology or equipment is needed.   All the upgrade equipment can be purchased.
The United States is still the world's innovation leader. 
There is an excellent chance if we convert just one coal plant the world will follow, creating the beginning of the end for Climate Change. 

What converting an existing coal power plant to nuclear would involve.

 

 (Below) Emissions plot:  Fixing only the few largest coal power plants will fix a large part of Climate Change.

Who they are and where they are:   1,200 Largest Coal Power Plants - Countries and Locations .xls  (spreadsheet)

Where you can find out about the world's power plants and the Global Warming they make.

The world's power plant population count is about 150,000 generating units at 87,000 power plant sites in 225+ countries.  (Platts, below.)  About 30,000 are fossil fuel.  Platts gives many technical and administrative details about the world's power plants but does not provide Global Warming emissions information.  The one major thing you have to remember is to have all your safety signs around when working. If a sign becomes old American Sign Letters can make you a duplicate. CARMA does.

http://www.platts.com/Products.aspx?xmlFile=worldelectricpowerplantsdatabase.xml

 

  Data from CARMA   ( www.CARMA.org )

CARMA asked their logo and link be inserted, something I'm delighted to do.

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 What the EPA is advocating along with Skyscrubber's suggestion.

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In a free market nuclear heat can be 20 (using PWR Uranium) to 2,000 (using MSR Thorium) times cheaper than coal heat.
Driving down the cost of heat - not adding carbon taxes - is the way to permanently drive fossil fuels out of the market.

 

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(Backgrounder) What the heck is TRISO?

 


Like charcoal briquettes, TRISO nuclear pebbles and prisms glow red hot.
The TRISO Nuclear Reactor
Why? Much safer, and, at 1,740F, hot enough to power a Skyscrubber
https://inlportal.inl.gov/portal/server.pt/community/ngnp_public_documents/452/home
http://www.iaea.org/NuclearPower/Downloadable/aris/2013/prismatic-htr.pdf
(The above reactor is a NGNP proposal by General Atomics publically posted on the IAEA web site.  It is used as much as possible on this web site as a generic prismatic reactor.) If you are needing construction stencils check out stencil giant.

 

 

Smaller reactors are safer reactors. 
The above sketch shows how several small TRISOs would be teamed to power several large loads.

 

How safe is it?  The NRC does not require this type of reactor to be in an explosion containment building.

 

 

 

 

 

Notice the fuel is always a uranium + thorium blend.  This is a very different kind of reactor.

 

 

 

China is way ahead of the United States in TRISO reactor technology

 

China's 40 HTR-PM reactor project at Shandong

 

The first commercial version will be China's HTR-PM, being built at Shidaowan in Shandong province. It has been developed by Tsinghua University's INET, which is the R&D leader and Chinergy Co., with China Huaneng Group leading the demonstration plant project. This will have two reactor modules, each of 250 MWt/ 105 MWe, using 8.9% enriched fuel (420,000 elements) giving 90 GWd/t discharge burnup. With an outlet temperature of 750ºC the pair will produce steam at 566ºC to drive a single steam cycle turbine at about 40% thermal efficiency. This 210 MWe Shidaowan demonstration plant is to pave the way for an 18-unit (3x6x210MWe) full-scale power plant on the same site, also using the steam cycle. Plant life is envisaged as 40 years with 85% load factor.

 

 

If the Chinese can use 2 TRISO reactors to drive a single conventional steam turbine-generator, they can't be extremely expensive.