From: "John McCormick" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Newsgroups: gmane.science.general.global-change To: "globalchange" <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2007 11:16 AM Subject: [Global Change: 2202] Re: The House Energy and Environment Committee
> > > Don, you asked: > > [Today's coal question: how can we avoid > the harmful consequences of burning it?] <...> > What I am about to suggest is definitely neither state of the art nor > commercially viable but the chemistry is known and the back-end > component (Fischer-Tropsch) is commercially available. Reacting CO2 > with hydrogen to obtain CO as the F-T feedstock will, with sufficient > research and testing, be a means to partially answer your question. > South Africa is aggressively pursuing pebble bed modular reactor > commercialization and its SASOL coal-to-liquids facilities provide 30% > of the nation's liquid fuels. > <...> > The following link is to a paper written by folks at General Atomics. > It deserves a read. There are possible answers for you, Don. > > SYNTHESIS OF HYDROCARBON FUELS > USING NUCLEAR ENERGY > by > K.R. SCHULTZ and S.L. BOGART > > > http://web.gat.com/pubs-ext/MISCONF07/A25725.pdf > > I never cease to be amazed at the variety of technical innovations waiting for a problem to solve. Using nuclear power to synthesize liquid fuels seems like a good load-leveling strategy that would improve nuclear plant economics (using cheap off-peak power to store energy in a useful, marketable form). Production of liquid fuels from coal would offer an alternative to petroleum, but what of the effluents? I can't quite tell if the process you describe is carbon neutral, but if the source of CO2 is coal, then it most certainly isn't. Why not just electrify the train track with nuke juice rather than produce FT-diesel for the locomotive? -dl --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Global Change ("globalchange") newsgroup. Global Change is a public, moderated venue for discussion of science, technology, economics and policy dimensions of global environmental change. Posts will be admitted to the list if and only if any moderator finds the submission to be constructive and/or interesting, on topic, and not gratuitously rude. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
