US Pulls Plug on Low-CO2 Powerplant Project 360
Geoffrey.landis writes "The administration announced plans to withdraw its support from FutureGen. FutureGen was a project to develop a low CO2-emission electrical power plant, supported by an alliance of a dozen or so coal companies and utilities from around the world. The new plant would have captured carbon dioxide produced by combustion and pumped it deep underground, to avoid releasing greenhouse-gas into the atmosphere. It had been intended as a prototype for next generation clean-coal plants worldwide. Originally budgeted at about a billion dollars, the estimated cost had "ballooned" to $1.8 billion, according to U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman."
Re:Money well spend? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Money well spend? (Score:5, Informative)
WARNING: GNAA (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, there can (Score:5, Informative)
If you're pumping the CO2 into a depleted gas field, that gas field captured natural gas for many millions of years. Another type of disposal site that's been proposed is deep saline acquifers, in which case the CO2 will dissolve in the water, which has also stayed where it is for millions of years.
Finally, if you're really paranoid there's mineral sequestration, where you react the CO2 with various types of rock to form carbonates, which are very stable compounds (they're rocks, basically).
Re:Money well spent? (Score:5, Informative)
The objection that I have to this program was that it was an experiment, a costly one, with no guarantees of future success. Nuclear energy isn't a panacea or necessarily the best of ideas, but the risks and challenges are well known and it can already be used to produce energy in a cost effective manner.
Most of the complaints people have about the current Fission reactors is that they are unsafe and the waste is toxic and hard to handle. But the reality is that it is really hard to get a nuclear reactor to reach a meltdown. Even the plant in Chernobyl which was being run in the least competent manner imaginable, was able to keep from reaching the really serious point where there's a sustained uncontrolled nuclear reaction. 3-mile island, the nuclear material was completely unable to make it past the huge amount of concrete that the facility was made of.
The amount of waste from a reactor tends to be exaggerated, it is significantly less material than is created by coal plants, with the ability to reprocess the majority of the radioactive material for another plant. The amount of waste that is created in the US would be reduced significantly if it were subjected to the sort of reprocessing that happens in other parts of the world.
Re:No big deal. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Money well spend? (Score:5, Informative)
Rubbish. Over in Britain the royal academy of engineering compared costs of nuclear ( yes, including decommissioning costs) to that of various energy sources: http://www.countryguardian.net/generation_costs_report2.pdf [countryguardian.net] . Essentially, while nuclear is expensive to build, the overall cost is comparable to coal fired power plants due to the low cost of fuel, and if you add on carbon capture and storage then the cost of coal overtakes nuclear rapidly.
A further thing to take into consideration is that increased energy consumption across the world combined with decreasing oil reserves is likely to drive up the price of coal/uranium. Since the fuel is a much lower proportion of the cost of nuclear power than it is for coal power this is likely to have a much lower impact upon the cost of nuclear power than for coal.
Finally, since nuclear power technology is advancing rapidly at the moment ( High temperature reactors around 2016 , breeders by 2025 , high efficiency hydrogen estimated 2030 ) the cost of nuclear plants is likely to drop ( per kilowatt generated ), while the cost of coal plants is likely to spike due to tighter emission standards.
The capture and storage research is worth it mainly because we can't expand other energy sources quick enough. In the long term it is not going to be economically competitive.
Re:Who cares (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I'd like to note (Score:1, Informative)
Your overall point is pretty good, but your numbers are vastly inflated and this tends to weaken your point rather significantly.
Re:I'd like to note (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Money well spent? (Score:3, Informative)
My understanding is that reprocessing spent fuel rods creates fissionable material suitable for creating atomic weapons. My guess is that we can't 100% guarantee these reprocessed fuel rods won't end up being used as weapons and that's the reason the US doesn't do this.
Re:No big deal. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:In the other news... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Informative)
And as far as the fact that it may someday come up, methane (natural gas) is a much more powerful greenhouse gas and we go to great lengths to get it out of the ground. If we put the CO2 in those deep geological formations, we would be no worse off than we were previously.
Re:Money well spent? (Score:4, Informative)
As the laws now stand, you could drive a flotilla of aircraft carriers through the loopholes. For starters, pre-1970 coal burning powerplants were effectively grandfathered in under the Bush era laws. Those powerplants don't have to be upgraded to meet current regs as long as the owner only performs "routine maintanence".
The EPA defines "routine maintanence" as anything that doesn't exceed 20% of the powerplant's value.
In 5 years you could rebuild that powerplant doing nothing more than EPA approved routine maintanence.
Re:Money well spend? (Score:4, Informative)
Just to put it into perspective.
Re:Modest Plea: stop abusing WHATCOULDPOSSIBLYGOWR (Score:3, Informative)
Other than that I agree, some big corporations can get away with crime more easily than individuals as they have leverage on governments. It's no surprise that a monopoly a justice produces justice that sucks.