coal2nuclear.com                      A Plan For Our Planet
    Home          CONVERSION CONCEPTS          Directory 

New Nuclear Technology Opportunities
General nuclear repowering technology concepts

Profit by Converting Your Coal Power Plant to Nuclear !

The Prize: Marketing energy really is a zero sum game.  The first power plant in a market to pick up extra capacity by "Overpowered Repowering" gets the additional prize of added revenues in a tight supply market.

How much would "Overpowered Repowering" mean?

If a power plant with four 450 MegaWatt generating units, such as Tampa’s “Big Bend” (Right, click for larger image.), were repowered with four  ORNL-MT-1060 at 1,000 MW each, the extra electricity produced would be:

1,000 MW minus 450 MW (for repower) or 5500 MW per new unit.

Times four new units = 2,200 MegaWatts new electricity

That’s more additional electricity than you can get from a new conventional nuclear power plant !  At 10 cents per kiloWatt-hour and 90% capacity factor, that’s 1.4 billion dollars in additional revenue every year!

Plus, you’ve just ended 10 million tons of CO2 per year from the old coal boilers. 

 At Vattenfall’s average estimated Carbon Capture price of $50 per ton of CO2, $500 million – or ˝ billion – dollars of carbon tax was avoided.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Real life repowering.   Wow, do we have options or what?

If the government is going to give the carbon capture folks a break on the CO2 that slips past their equipment, it will only be fair that a CO2 per kWh allowance would be given those who elect to repower with nuclear technology instead of carbon capture and storage.  Initially, leakages of up to 50% are acceptable in the Waxman-Markey Bill.

Waxman-Markey Bill - as of May 18 - P46 to 97 .pdf

When you look at the combinations of CO2 leakage in Carbon Capture technology and match them up with the CO2 produced by heating saturated steam with natural gas to get superheated and reheated steam, a whole bunch of possibilities jump out at you.

Then, if you decide that replacing your turbine's high pressure stage with another intermediate stage is a possibility, an almost infinite combination of ways to repower almost any size and type of coal burning steam plant becomes obvious.

We don't have to wait for the 1,000°F next-generation reactors such as the 25 MWe Hyperions, 311 MWe PRISMs to show up in the United States market.  We'll soon have several 550°F reactors to choose from: The 40 MWe NuScale, the 125 MWe mPower, and the 600 MWe IRIS, all of them with multiple steam generators for running either the reactors or the turbines in tandem to match sources with loads.

 

 

Nuclear electricity produces less than 1% of fossil fuel's carbon dioxide.

Vattenfall, the Swedish energy company, produces electricity from Nuclear, Hydro, Coal, Gas, Solar Cell, Peat, and Wind energy and has produced accredited Environment Product Declarations for all these processes.  Vattenfall finds that, averaged over the entire lifecycle of their Nuclear Plant including Uranium mining, milling, enrichment, plant construction, operating, decommissioning and waste disposal, the total amount of CO2 emitted per KW-Hr of electricity produced is 3.3 grams per KW-Hr of produced power.  Vattenfall measures its CO2 output from Natural Gas to be 400 grams per KW-Hr and from Coal to be 700 grams per KW-Hr.  Thus nuclear power generated by Vattenfall emits less than one hundredth the CO2 of Fossil-Fuel based generation. In fact, Vattenfall finds its Nuclear Plants to emit less CO2 over their lifecycle than even green energy production mechanisms such as Hydro, Wind, Solar, and Biomass.  
GHG Emissions from Electric Supply Technologies DanielWeisser.pdf   Also: http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2011/01/overcoming-mythology-real-analysis.html 

(Above) From Daniel Weisser's paper.  The two boxes are actually a single graph with the right hand box being an expanded-scale continuation of the left hand graph.  This was done because the CO2 emissions from nuclear and the renewables is so much smaller than the fossil fuels.  (Data sources in Daniel Weisser's paper.)