COMMERCIAL THORIUM ENERGY
Hospital, Office, College, Residential, and Small
Industrial Complex Heating, Cooling, and Electricity Co-Generation
Heating and
Cooling: Plugging Electricity's "Donut Hole"
Large buildings and building complexes such as hospitals can no longer count on robust electricity grids or stable energy prices. Example: Government energy thought leaders are suggesting plugging hybrid cars into large office building parking lots to make the electricity and storage capacities of the car's batteries available to the building during the day.
This will become imperative in the event most of the building's electricity comes from unreliable renewables.
Even if all energy comes from nuclear electricity, it is impossible to replace a large number of fossil fuel commercial and industrial size boilers with electricity powered boilers. There is a "Donut Hole" in the amount of energy one can obtain via standard municipal 3-phase electrical distribution circuits. That's where the Adams Atomic Boiler comes in.
(Above) The range of high-population
small industrial and commercial boilers.
http://www.atomicengines.com/engines.html Rod Adams has a patented idea for an extremely simple thorium pebble boiler.
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.
What will the "Small Energy" picture be like when all we have is nuclear?
Today's smallest nuclear reactor is still way too big.
There is a huge gap below the 25 megaWatt (electrical) or
70,000 megaWatt (thermal) obtainable from the
smallest commercial reactor that's about to come on the market - the [Hyperion]
http://www.gen4energy.com/
Gen4 -
and what thermal energy may be obtained from a municipal 4kV 3 phase electrical
distribution line.
Most commercial and industrial boilers fall into this gap.
An 800 horsepower boiler consumes about 33,600 Standard Cubic Feet (or 9.8 MegaWatts thermal) per hour in natural gas.
To equal the Gen4 reactor's 70 MW thermal at 13,000 volts 3Φ, would take 3886 amps. This is an impractically large amount of current. 400 amps is about as high as standard copper wire sizes will go without melting their insulation. One can reduce the amps to 366 by increasing the voltage to 138,000 Volts. But then you would need the electrically dangerous tall transmission towers going down business and residential streets in cities.
More to the point, this is using mankind's most versatile energy, electricity, to do energy's most crude function, make heat. A terrible waste of a nuclear electricity station. In the author's opinion, anything that uses over 10 megaWatts of electricity for heat is a misuse of electricity intended for greater public good and should be prohibited by law.
A great little electrical power calculator: http://www.jobsite-generators.com/power_calculators.html
The
How the Adams annular thorium pebble
bed reactor could heat a
conventional boiler.
(Note: The reactor is nowhere as simple as it looks.)
The Large Spectrum Of Small Boilers
Electric Boilers - Typically for heating.
http://www.cleaver-brooks.com/Products-and-Solutions/Boilers/Electric/Index.aspx Their electric boiler catalog.
Electrode industrial boilers:
2 to 56 megaWatt, 4,160 to 25,000 Volts, 100 to 500 psig.
Brochure:
Boiler - Cleaver-Brooks - CB-8162 Electrode Boiler Brochure .pdf
Resistance boilers: 12
to 3,375 kW, 208 to 600 Volts
Brochure:
Boiler - Resistance Boilers - CB-8264_BRO_ElectricBoiler_Nov10 .pdf
Gas and Oil Commercial and Industrial Boilers
Large Industrial Boilers: 1,300 to 2,200 hp, 12.7 to
21.5 megaWatts
Brochure:
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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.
50,000
Natural Gas Burning Electricity Turbines make
about 4% of Global Warming's CO2
1 Million
Large
Industrial Natural Gas Boilers
make about 4% of Global Warming's CO2
100 Million
Small
Commercial Gas Boilers
make about 1% of Global Warming's CO2
1 Billion
Residential Hot Water Heaters, Furnaces,
and Heat Pumps make about 4% of Global
Warming's CO2
Ocean-going ships, which could be nuclear powered, make about 4% of Global Warming CO2.
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 is the
1,100F, 1,000 megaWatt (electrical) thorium-fueled molten salt reactor.
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.
(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
(Above) a typical building complex boiler
house. Click on images for larger view.
http://www.hurstboiler.com/
Hurst boiler brochure .pdf
http://www.cleaver-brooks.com/
(Large smaller than power plant boiler maker. Good line of electric
boilers.)
How does the author know there are more than 10 million boilers in the world?
"The world commercial boiler market rose to $ 1.7 billion and 587,000 units in 2001, growing at 3% per annum. The fastest growing markets are Russia at 9% per annum, followed by China, Turkey and the UK." -- American Boiler Manufacturers Association Magazine
If the boiler replacement market is about 587,000 units per year and, if a typical boiler's life is 25 years, that means there are 587,000 times 25 or about 15 million commercial boilers out there.
BOILERS can be as powerful as a million horsepower, but, as can be seen below, are more often about 600,000 or so horsepower.. Unlike a vehicle, they operate constantly, spewing out Global Warming CO2 into the environment for years at a time. Over time, this really adds up. Its quite understandable they account for about 70% of Global Warming.
Its difficult to understand why the environmentalists haven't made any moves to replace fossil fuel combustion boilers with nuclear fission boilers/steam generators. There are many replacement nuclear boilers coming on the world's markets - some 50 different units from 15 different countries.
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Introduction. 1.7 Billion tons of CO2 per year. That's how much CO2 production could be avoided by switching the world's one billion small commercial boilers and residential hot water heaters and furnaces from natural gas to electricity produced by nuclear power plants.
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100 Million
Small Commercial Natural Gas Boilers
(below
5 boiler horsepower, or 400,000 BTU/hr),
cause
about 1% of
(Right) Small commercial 11.5
million BTU
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Unless you KNOW the electricity you are using is 100% clean, don't convert to electricity heating.
An typical-sized residential
furnace is capable of delivering approximately 80,000 BTU per hour. One
kiloWatt-hour produces 3,412 BTU, so to make 80,000 BTU per hour you will need
23.4 kiloWatt-hours. At 40% efficiency, a power plant can
make about 2,460 kiloWatt-hours of electricity from a ton of coal. The
power plant will have to burn about 19 pounds of coal, making about 40 pounds of
CO2, just to make
Natural gas produces 2/3 as much CO2 per kWh as coal, oil as much CO2 as coal, so don't regard either natural gas or oil power plants as being anything close to "naturally clean." Data Source: http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/FTPROOT/environment/co2emiss00.pdf The DOE-EIA web page (Table 4) saying 1.3 pounds of CO2 per kiloWatt hour (kWh) is made by natural gas-burning power plants. Coal makes about 2.0 pounds of CO2 per kWh.
"Coal has the highest carbon intensity among fossil fuels, resulting in coal-fired plants having the highest output rate of CO2 per kilowatt-hour. The national average output rate for coal-fired electricity generation was 2.095 pounds CO2 per kilowatt-hour in 1999 (Table 4)." - - - U.S. EIA