The large coal burning part
(Faded) gets demolished.
<=======
HOW the modified power plant would work: The reactor (right) is in a sealed underground silo located in the power plant's coal storage yard. The heat comes from the bed (or pile) of atomic pebbles (the little red dots). The pebbles heat helium gas in the reactor to 1,300°F. The hot helium gas is circulated clockwise to carry the heat from the pebbles to the attached helium-to-water heat exchanger (a "fire-tube" water heater). The heated water (red) that exits through the bottom water pipe of the heat exchanger is supercritically hot (1,150°F), and under about 4,500 pounds per square inch pressure to keep the water from turning into steam. The reactor is rated at about 500 megaWatts thermal so even though the water is carrying almost 1,000°F differential of heat, this will be a large volume of water. In comparison, a conventional PWR reactor's supercritical water undergoes a differential of only about 70°F as it passes through its reactor core - utilizing massive water volume and 6,000 horsepower circulating pumps instead.
NEXT, The heat is carried by the water through new, heavily insulated pipes to a new steam generator located in the power plant. The steam generator is also a type of heat exchanger. This time, the 1,150°F supercritical water is used to make the 1,000°F, 2,400 psi superheated steam needed by the power plant's turbine. The steam generator's steam pipes are connected to the three-stage steam turbine (devices 11, 9, 6) that spins the electricity generator (device 5). The "new" steam is identical to the "old" steam that used to be made by the coal boiler.
Two identical special 200 ton storage vault railroad cars, equipped with with elliptically-keyed wheels, (temporarily removed) would be welded to the ground next to the silo to supply and remove pebbles through pneumatic tubes connected to the car bottoms. The Germans used automated pneumatic transport systems on their pebble bed reactors, the U.S. MIT pebble bed reactor design is even more sophisticated. The pebbles would be held in metal clips on a conveyor belt storage system in the railroad cars. A full load of 450,000 pebbles is about 112 tons containing perhaps 9 tons of uranium.
That's all there is to it folks! What a simple way to end Climate Change. The only new items are the reactor, the two heat exchangers, and a small control and service building located in the now-unneeded coal yard. It should be pointed out that power plant water heaters and steam generators, while not trivial devices, are about 30% the size of conventional nuclear power plant steam equipment so they are much less expensive and can be built in several months almost anywhere.
The heavy black line (also lifted away slightly) shows the now unused 10+ story high coal-burning portion of the power plant.
Conversion is that simple. Illustrating the Coal Yard Nuke idea, the above is an anatomically correct simplified coal burning power station schematic diagram from Wikipedia. This sketch shows what I hope PBMR, Ltd. would accept as an alternate application for their reactor. Their design: http://www.iaea.or.at/programmes/inis/aws/htgr/fulltext/29026679.pdf
Wikipedia original sketch image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_plant GNU Free Documentation License
Proposed Demonstration Conversion Projects
A Demonstration Facility will cause a flood of engineering feasibility studies to be made.
If this is a bad idea, it will be caught for sure then.
Michigan: Proposed single reactor demonstration facility at the J. R. Whiting plant near Erie, Michigan. Whiting
Florida: (Left) Full scale demonstration: Add 12 pebble bed conversion boilers to Tampa's huge coal-burning Big Bend power plant. Project outline page: Upgrading Big Bend
According to CARMA, TECO's Big Bend coal-burning power plant makes 30,000 TONs (or 60 million pounds) of CO2 per day. And that 4-unit plant is just one of about 50,000 multi-unit power plants in the world for a total of 143,000 units. Big Bend has about 1 million customers. They own their own coal mine but don't like this either so their additional expansions will be natural gas turbines which are only 2/3s as dirty. Only nuclear can match or exceed all that electricity-generating heat in fossil fuels.
At 1,800 megaWatts, Big Bend is a huge power plant. Areva's biggest and best nuclear plant, the EPR, is only 1,600 megaWatts. It will take about a dozen PBMR 165 megaWatt pebble bed TRISO-fueled reactors to convert Big Bend from coal to nuclear. IMO, Tampa should put in two EPRs next door to Big Bend. There is an excellent transmission line corridor already established along I-75 to feed the entire Florida Gulf coast. Since the ground in that area is already more radioactive than anything Areva's reactors could ever produce (the government won't let Tampons make wallboard out of the area's gypsum due to it's radioactivity), I can't imagine the locals opposing all the money two EPRs would bring in for 50 years.
Climate Change can't possibly be stopped without cleaning up at least the world's 5,000 dirtiest power plants. It's unavoidable. Conversion can be done quickly and should be done first because nothing else will reduce so much CO2 as quickly.
Technical: Nothing new needs to be invented. No new technology advances needed!
Buying
the Reactor: PBMR,
Ltd. won't like this, but
I am suggesting we buy only the reactor made by PBMR,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor as shown at
right, not their entire gas-turbine electricity generation system as shown on their web site.
South Africa's Pebble Bed Modular Reactors, (Pty) Ltd. (PBMR)
make a 1,700°F gas-cooled reactor filled with helium. And, I think
they also have a process heat version designed. Inert and a good
carrier of heat, the helium in the reactor is pressurized to 1,300 psi to further
improve heat transfer. Since there is no liquid-to-gas phase-state change,
there isn't a violent
explosion hazard of
the type steam can produce. This kind of gas pressurization will make a
non-shockwave gas escape like a punctured tire. Both pebble bed and prismatic reactors use
helium at about this pressure.
The author believes no one knows more about how to
make a commercially successful circulating pebble reactor than PBMR. The
PBMR's project is supported by the South African government, Eskom, the
Industrial Development Corporation, and US companies Westinghouse and Exelon.
The commissioning of the first commercial pebble bed plant is scheduled for
2013.
Partner Westinghouse is calling it the first of the Generation-IV reactors.
Gen-III+ is probably most accurate with the VHTR/NGNP being tomorrow's Gen-IV
Pebble Bed.
"Pebble-bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) (Eskom): The
PBMR, which uses helium as a coolant, is part of the HTGR family of reactors and
thus a product of a lengthy history of research, notably in Germany and the
United States. More recently the design has been promoted and revised by the
South African utility Eskom and its affiliates. Westinghouse BNFL is a minority
investor. Prototype variations of the PBMR are now operating in China and Japan.
Eskom has received administrative approval to build a prototype PBMR in South
Africa, but has also been delayed in implementation by judicial rulings
regarding the reactor’s potential environmental impact. Certification procedures
in the U.S. have slowed, but never have been abandoned. At around 165 MWe the
PBMR is one of the smallest reactors now proposed for the commercial market.
This is considered a marketing advantage because new small reactors require
lower capital investments than larger new units. Several PBMRs might be built at
a single site as local power demand requires. Small size has been viewed as a
regulatory disadvantage because most licensing regulations (at least formerly)
required separate licenses for each unit at a site. The NRC also does not claim
the same familiarity with the design that it has with LWRs. Fuels used in the
PBMR would include more highly enriched uranium than is now used in LWR designs.
The PBMR design is considered a possible contender for the U.S. Department of
Energy's Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP) program in Idaho. China has also
indicated interest in building its own variation of the PBMR. China and South
Africa have also discussed cooperation in their efforts." Details
regarding the PBMR design can be found on https://www.pbmr.com/. Information
related to certification of the PBMR can be found at
http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/advanced/pbmr.html
About 2,000 people are currently working on
construction of the PBMR demonstration reactor and it's facilities. It is on
schedule to start up in 2013. Also, at this time, PBMR has only a pilot pebble plant
said to be making
about 270,000 TRISO pebbles a year. TRISO particles can be crushed and the uranium
and thorium inside recycled. For sure, there are downsides and
difficulties associated with pebble bed reactors, some due to the the TRISO pebble itself.
Notice the serrated surface of PBMR's pebbles. The world doesn't realize it yet, but it is in desperate need of billions
of pebbles
every year. France, China, Germany, and the United States have made TRISO
pebbles in the past. Britain, Japan, Russia, and the United States have
also made TRISO prisms in the past.
It should be pointed out that Westinghouse already has a small NRC-certified 300 megaWatt conventional reactor, the IRIS - International Reactor Innovative and Secure, not hot enough to convert a coal-burning power plant but it would be an excellent mass-produced choice for providing the electricity needed to power Shell's clean shale oil recovery system. Hyperion and NuScale have even smaller reactors, Hyperion's is almost hot enough to convert a very small coal-burning power plant.
Key technical items in addition to the PBMR reactor:
(A) Already in common use in conventional PWR reactors, an excellent way to interface a gas-cooled high temperature pebble bed reactor with an existing coal-fired steam plant turbine is to use "SUPERCRITICAL" HOT WATER - water under more than 3210 psi. Supercritical water is a gas with the density of the liquid having a very high volumetric heat capacity (right, olive colored area). Its a way to manage and transport heat energy when using several reactors in parallel to drive a single very large power turbine or a single reactor to drive several older small power turbines with different steam requirements. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_fluid
(B) If steam is above 700°F, and at it's natural pressure, it is usually called SUPERHEATED STEAM.
(C) The supercritical water heater is built as a dual-tube calandria (a drumless fire-tube & water-tube boiler that does not require expensive heavy forgings) in a tub filled with unpressurized liquid lead (green outline in power plant sketch above) to carry the heat between the helium pipes and the water pipes. This design is a work-around that might be a new invention. Because the helium in the reactor is under comparatively low pressure, the liquid lead heat conductor under atmospheric pressure will make water ingress into the reactor impossible in the event of a supercritical hot water leak, a key safety issue in a design that mixes HTGRs and supercritical water. These things always vibrate themselves to failure over their 50+ year life spans so we might as well design them to fail gracefully.
Since the pebble bed's supercritical water is twice as hot as is used in a conventional PWR nuclear plant, a very experienced company such as Babcock & Wilcox should be called upon to make the first few water heaters and steam generators.
1,150
Two identical special 200 ton storage vault railroad cars, equipped with with elliptically-keyed wheels, (temporarily removed) would be temporarily welded to the rails next to the silo to supply and remove pebbles through pneumatic tubes connected to the car bottoms. The Germans used automated pneumatic transport systems on their pebble bed reactors, the U.S. MIT pebble bed reactor design is even more sophisticated. The pebbles would be held in metal clips on a conveyor belt storage system in the railroad cars. A full load of 450,000 pebbles is about 112 tons containing perhaps 9 tons of uranium.
The gray rods sticking into the ground provide a passive conductive, rather than radiative, thermal path into the environment in the event reactor goes into Doppler thermal limiting mode. Also, the standard PBMR reactor has a 1 meter layer of graphite insulation located between the cylindrical vertical pebble chamber and the reactor wall to stop both neutrons and heat. This feature makes the Doppler mode efficient.
The sheet metal loop to the right side of the reactor is a passive chimney-type heat exchanger to keep heat from accumulating in the silo. Using the duct system as the heat exchanger keeps the the silo air from escaping.
Installing and connecting the new steam generator heat exchanger and adding new controls are all that will change in the power plant. There will be a new small, separate, reactor operations building for the pebble bed reactor(s) located nearby in the coal yard. The remotely controlled reactor(s) will provide hot water for making steam as needed by the power plant. The power plant's original steam temperatures and pressures remain unchanged. Much simpler than the full PBMR system as presented in this document: http://www.iaea.or.at/programmes/inis/aws/htgr/fulltext/29026679.pdf
PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THIS: According to PBMR, their reactor is capable of producing 180 megaWatts electrical. The magic of the Coal Yard nuke system is the concept of using them as central supercritical hot water heaters to produce enough heat to power one or more steam generators. Say you have several old, small turbines whose power does not add up to more than 180 MWe. As an example: an old plant with single 25, 50 and 75 MWe units could be powered by one reactor with its hot water output split into 25, 50, and 75 MWe steam generators. If different temperatures are needed, that can be done also. If you have a fairly new big 500 megaWatt electrical unit, three PBMRs running in tandem driving a single 500 MWe steam generator would be needed to max out that puppy. Using supercritical hot water gives us incredible flexibility in matching all those old steam plant turbine combinations.
Plants already running on supercritical steam could have several reactors arranged in a ring around a central boiler.
Nuclear reactors are extremely reliable. Nuclear submarines have only one. Also, since this is a pebble bed, it doesn't have to take a month vacation every other year for refueling.
Unlike conventional nuclear, upgrading a coal burning power plant to pebble nuclear does not increase the amount of cooling water needed. Notice in the drawing above, the turbine steam condensation system remains untouched so the amount of cooling water needed is unchanged. This is due to the fact that pebble reactors duplicate fire, conventional reactors cannot. Also, the stack losses are gone, and since a coal fired plant uses three-stage 1,000°F turbines as compared to conventional nuclear power plant's 550°F two-stage turbines, the efficiency has got to be higher than either of them. Might cover the cost of those expensive pebbles.
Coal Plants have plenty of life left in them.
An excellent investment in our future. Over half the U.S. fossil fuel power plant generating capacity was built after 1980. Since power plant life is considered to be as long as 60 years, we have 40, 50 or even more years of life left in our most recent (and largest) fossil fuel plants. Well worth the cost of conversion. Projecting 1980 through 2006 EIA values (growth = new power plants) to the vertical ordinate, we find about 0.3 + 1.0 = 1.3 T kWh, which, at 2 lb of CO2 per kWh, (Table 4) is about 1.3 BILLION tons of U.S., or 6.5 B World, CO2 every year.
The IPCC has identified 5,000 multi-unit fossil fuel power plants worldwide that are the really big CO2 polluters. If they are very big, they are fairly new. It is critical we concentrate on them first. They should be converted rather than shut down. We can't put our energy-starved mega-cities on an energy diet at a time when we need more electricity for water desalination, plug-in hybrid cars, and summer air conditioning to fight ever-worsening Climate Change.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Original ESKOM Pebble Bed Modular Reactor and Helium Driven Electricity Generator
This sketch is important because it shows the operating temperatures, pressures, mass flows, and heat exchanger and device capacities.
This appears to be an early design. Other PBMR literature indicates a 160 megaWatt generator. More information is available at ESKOM's web site, link below.
(From ESKOM web site.) http://www.eskom.co.za/nuclear_energy/pebble_bed/pebble_bed.html
Power plant coal yards provide
plenty of room for TRISO pebble bed reactors.
(Right, below, Looking North) Big Bend plant,
located on Tampa Bay's big southeast bend, showing it's enormous black coal
yard. Plenty of room for some small PBMR reactors to
be buried underground there. The white warm discharge water seen
just below the stacks is where manatees hang out in the winter to keep warm.
The small light colored building located at the upper right is the water
desalination facility that supplies
25% of Tampa's
drinking water. Desalination facilities consume extremely large amounts of
electricity. (From Google Earth.)
(Left, above, looking southwest) Underground and underwater pump/generators at the 1,800 megaWatt Ludington, Michigan, pumped energy storage facility on Lake Michigan's coast. Enough electrical energy to keep Detroit going for about 8 hours. (Author's photo.)
Low-cost Hybrid TRISO
nuclear power plants made from inexpensive coal plant parts.
Cheap, Fast, Clean
Electricity
The 2008 construction costs for a new coal-burning electricity generating plant in the United States are about $2,000 per kiloWatt. Florida's new Crystal River nuclear plant has been stated (July, 2008) as $17 billion dollars for 3 gigaWatts, or $5,600 per kiloWatt. The author thinks it is unlikely that, subtracting the coal equipment and adding the necessary mass-manufactured pebble bed reactors, the construction cost for a Hybrid nuclear plant would exceed $3,000 per kiloWatt for the 10th Hybrid plant built.
Nuclear
Reactor + Coal Plant Turbine-Generator =
Hybrid Power Plant. Taking advantage of the fact TRISO pebble bed reactors run
1,000 °F hotter than conventional nuclear reactors and can
duplicate coal's very hot steam, this simple, extremely
low cost, new nuclear plant can be quickly built from common coal-burning power plant
parts and a mass-produced pebble bed reactor.
This is the same basic idea as the late 1960s
Scalable and Multi-reactor capable, this hybrid power plant can be either a 180 megaWatt, single reactor facility, or with two reactors running in tandem, it would be a 360 megaWatt power station. With three reactors running in tandem, it would become a very substantial 540 megaWatt facility.
This provides a wide spectrum of inexpensive power plants, all readily available by using very common fossil fuel power plant parts available from many different global suppliers - Translation: Really inexpensive compared to conventional nuclear power plants. And powerful. Two Multi-reactor Hybrids would power most of the world's small to medium cities. They are serious, industrial-strength electric power. Great for incremental growth. 16 of them would easily power all of New York City - an 8 gigaWatt load.
In this form, TRISO nuclear pebbles present an enabling technology for both governments and their citizens. TRISO Nuclear pebbles are a disruptive technology for conventional nuclear power plant manufacturers. Nothing they are making and selling - neither reactor nor turbine - is needed here.
Like the Coal Yard Nuke conversion, this is an obvious idea for power plant engineers but rarely put into because of the radiophobic American public.
Pebble beds offer both the heat and electricity needed to do a clean job of making synthetic gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel from algae. http://www.liquidcoal.com/
Original image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_plant GNU Free Documentation License
Single reactor Hybrid: Since the reactors don't have to be very remote from the steam generator, the supercritical water loop can be replaced with short 1,300 psi helium ducts carrying heat from the reactor to a calandria-type helium heated steam generator (drumless fire-tube & water-tube boiler, but still with liquid lead pressure isolation) being used instead, thereby eliminating the cost of the supercritical water components.
Scalable Multiple Reactor Hybrid: As in the 'Coal Yard Nuke' system, a supercritical water loop would be needed to collect and reconcile the heat from the individual reactors into a common thermal source for driving a single thermal load. Scalable: You could begin with a three-reactor size generator but start at reduced capacity with only one reactor, adding reactors later as needed. Three PBMR reactor/water heaters per steam generator is likely a good economic cut-off point.
Two identical special 200 ton storage vault railroad cars, equipped with with elliptically-keyed wheels, (temporarily removed) would be temporarily welded to the rails next to the silo to supply and remove pebbles through pneumatic tubes connected to the car bottoms. The Germans used automated pneumatic transport systems on their pebble bed reactors, the U.S. MIT pebble bed reactor design is even more sophisticated. The pebbles would be held in metal clips on a conveyor belt storage system in the railroad cars. A full load of 450,000 pebbles is about 112 tons containing perhaps 9 tons of uranium.
The gray rods sticking into the ground provide a passive conductive, rather than radiative, thermal path into the environment in the event reactor goes into Doppler thermal limiting mode. Also, the standard PBMR reactor has a 1 meter layer of graphite insulation located between the toroidial vertical pebble chamber and the reactor wall to stop both neutrons and heat. This feature makes the Doppler mode efficient.
The Hybrid power plant should be
more efficient than either a conventional coal-fired steam
plant that has stack losses of up to 25% of its coal heat or a
conventional nuclear reactor with it's 600°F lower steam
temperature powering a lower-efficiency two, not three-stage,
turbine. Every 100°F increase in steam temperature usually
gets you another 1% in efficiency. A single pebble's
run-down cycle appears to the author to produce much heat energy as about 3.3 tons ($124)
of delivered coal. A PBMR reactor will hold about 450,000 pebbles.
At the commonly used 1 to 3 million ratio, a pebble's 0.3 ounces
of uranium is supposed to equal 30 tons of coal.
See also:
Licensing Coal Yard Nukes and Hybrid Nukes
The
Coal Yard Nuke Supercritical Water Thermal Distribution System.
1.
Conventional nuclear reactors run at
about 550 degrees F. Pebble bed
reactors run about 1,600 degrees F and are cooled using a
gas, often helium. Since almost all coal-fired steam power
plants use 1,000 degree F, 2,400 pounds per square inch steam
(called superheated steam), I have to use
something that is even hotter, so I must use a PBMR
pebble bed reactor since that's the nearest thing to a
catalog item that will do the job. At the Coal Yard
Nuke sketch's extreme right, there is an underground silo
with a pebble bed reactor (the little red dots are
the pebbles) and a helium-to-water heat exchanger (not all
that different in function from your residential gas hot water heater)
with the reactor's very hot 1,600°F helium gas being blown
through it. Because the pebble bed reactor can easily
heat the water to 1,150 degrees F, the water has to be under
very high pressure (3,200 psi) or more to remain water. This
type of water is called "supercritical" water.
"Temperature as energy" is somewhat comparable to
"voltage as energy" if the water volume (or electrical
amperes) remains constant. There are hot
water lines running from the underground reactor silo to a
new steam generating heat exchanger sitting on the boiler
room floor to the right of the blue feedwater
equipment. Think of the
high temperature, high pressure, hot water line coming from
the reactor as a high-voltage power transmission line.
Think of the new steam generator on the turbine room floor
as something like a step-down transformer in an
electrical substation.
The hot water-to-steam generator is designed in such
a way that it duplicates the steam the large original boiler
(device 19 in the sketch) made. Obviously, the analogy
breaks down as soon as you think about increasing
temperature at the expense of volume as if it were a
voltage-amperage tradeoff. But, within it's
limitations, the analogy has some value. A "refresher"
note at the bottom of this web page describes a generic
steam path through boilers and turbines and, as such, is a
good illustration of the complexity of this situation in
real power plants. Old coal power
plants are always a collection of different size boilers and
generators made over a span of perhaps 50 years by different
vendors to meet different budgets. This makes it
extremely important to be able to match a nuclear reactor that
runs best at it's own fixed set of temperatures to
whatever turbine pressures and temperatures the power
company customer happens to be running. Realize the turbine
could be between 5 and 50 years old! Different size
and different temperature boilers in different coal burning
power plants can be duplicated by simply changing the coils
in the water-to-water steam generator. It's not that
much different than changing the secondary coils on a transformer
to get a proper voltage (or temperature) and current (or
steam volume) match. Take a close look at how the coils are
positioned in my sketch. They are almost a mirror
image of the the original coal fired boiler. Duplicating some
boilers will cause the secondary coils to have more turns
for hotter, dryer, higher pressure steam, duplicating other
boilers will cause the secondary coils to have larger
diameter pipes for great volumes of cooler, wetter, lower
pressure steam. Another possibility are several
different types of small turbines all "feeding" off the same
steam generator or several reactors "pooling" their heat to
drive one monster steam generator that, in turn, drives a
monster ex-coal power plant turbine - Big Bend comes to
mind. The key is that
the supercritical hot water be
substantially hotter than any power
plant steam a Coal Yard Nuke system will have to duplicate. 2. Coal Yard Nukes might also be pushing the envelopes of both steam and nuclear power plant
thermodynamics. Heat exchangers always exact a penalty but it may
be insubstantial in a Coal Yard Nuke compared to the overall efficiency
improvement. If we duplicate those Riley boilers
exactly, the load on the plant's turbine condensing tubs will remain the same and the
retention of untransferred BTUs in the reactor's helium loop instead of
going up the smokestack (25% of heat?) means a boost in plant efficiency in addition to
eliminating CO2 along with all those other noxious coal emissions.
This
idea will eliminate about 60% of Global Warming's CO2 every year while improving power plant efficiency.
What more could the world ask for?
Power Plant Steam Path
The following describes a generic fossil fuel power plant's steam turbine
connected to a hybrid nuclear power station's pebble-heated steam generator
instead of a coal-heated boiler. - It is almost identical to a coal plant's
steam path. (A) The new steam generator makes
identical
steam pressures (1,000°F and 2,400 pounds per square inch) for the high
pressure turbine stage (device 11) of the power station's electricity generator (device 5, above).
Depending on heat availability and power needs, the steam is either expanded through the
high pressure turbine (device 11, above) or by-passed and sent back to the steam generator for
reheat. (B) Either way, the steam is then returned to the steam generator for a
reheat pass to become intermediate pressure steam
(1,000°F, 552 psi, again, no change) for the intermediate pressure turbine (device 9, above). (C) After leaving the
intermediate pressure turbine, the steam, now expanded to
low pressure, goes immediately into the double-ended low pressure
turbine (device 6, above), exiting both ends of it's bottom at a slight vacuum into the condensing tub
(device 8). (D)
There, in a cool environment that no longer supports steam, the
spent low pressure steam will flash condense
back
into boiler feed water so it can be
turned back into steam again by repressurizing it to 2,400 pounds per square
inch (device 7) and pumping it back into the bottom of the steam generator.
Big Bend's boilers do this at the rate of 23 tons, or 750 cubic feet - a 9
foot cube - of water a minute. (E) The condensing tub is kept cool by a loop of
75°F in, 95°F out, cooling water
(circulated by device 2) from
either a 60°F
cooling tower or a 60°F cooling body of water (as shown on the extreme left on the diagram). (F) The electricity produced
by the electrical generator (device 5) is carried by the 3 electrical phase wires to a step-up
transformer (device 4) located next to the power plant. It takes
about 1,000 volts per mile to efficiently push high-current electricity - so the
step-up transformer will have to transform the three-phase electricity from the
generator's perhaps 5,000 volts to perhaps as high as 500,000 volts to send the
electricity via the high voltage transmission line system (device 3) to a load
as much as 500 miles away. Lesser distances mean lesser losses. Original power plant image:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_plant
GNU Free Documentation License
The Coal2Nuclear
concept:
"A terrific application for several [nuclear] heaters that can
produce 400 MW thermal at about 800 C is to replace similar sized boilers at
coal fired power plants. Like Jim Holm, I think that
Coal2Nuclear is the best way to make use of the investment at existing coal
fired facilities for items like steam plants, electrical distribution, and
cooling water. I think the conversion would be a heck of a lot cheaper than
trying to install the chemical facilities and plumbing required to capture and
sequester CO2. Preventing pollution is often cheaper than trying to cure it." --
Rod Adams,
http://www.atomicinsights.blogspot.com/
"Coal Yard Nuke" describes a general idea - not a particular type of coal storage yard or nuclear reactor.
More: In addition to the TRISO Pebble Bed MiniNuke reactor
shown above, there are other possible Coal Yard Nukes:
1. Hyperion™ TRIGA MicroNuke.
Most cities have multi-building college, hospital, office, or factory complexes
that are burning coal or natural gas to power both their heating and air
conditioning systems.
Look for
smokestacks near you.
2. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor is a very
low-cost, mud puddle simple reactor that has what it takes to be a Coal Yard Nuke. There are
no commercial versions at this time.
You may wish to read Coal, Section A, Part Three, "Why Coal2Nuclear," to get some background as to how the author arrived at the idea of converting coal power