The Carbon Dioxide Dilemma Promising Technologies and Policies (2003) / Chapter Skim
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Advanced Research and Development and Engineering Processes
Advanced Research and Development and Engineering Processes
Pages 71-104
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Advanced Research and Development and Engineering Processes
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In the last 15 years, essentially no new coal plants have been built for two reasons environmental laws and cheap natural gas.
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For meaningful worldwide reductions in CO2, there are really only two places to look energy intensity and carbon intensity in the world's two 800-pound gorillas, the United States and China. The United States accounts for 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.
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The win-win situation for reducing carbon emissions in power generation is increasing energy intensity. There are two ideologically opposed approaches to higher efficiency.
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Those are very real problems. Compare the 30-percent annual load factor produced by wind turbines with the 85-percent load factor produced by coal plants.
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In a carbon-constrained world, the price of natural gas would go way up. A more exciting idea is retrofitting existing coal plants.
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The cogeneration and gasification expertise already used in Chinese ammonia plants is twice as efficient. The United States also has to change many things, starting with addressing the issue of old, inefficient coal plants.
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To avoid going above a target concentration, we need a carbon budget. To stabilize carbon concentrations, as called for in the 1992 Climate Convention, only a fixed amount of carbon can be put into the atmosphere.
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A possibly "safe" cumulative emissions budget for this century is 600 gigatons. The bad news is that the midrange reference forecasts for carbon emissions in the next hundred years are 1,500 gigatons way above a safe budget.
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The EIA forecasts nearly 200 gigawatts of new coal capacity in just three countries: 100 in China, 65 in India, and 31 in the United States. Unless we change our policies, almost all of that will be from conventional coal plants rather than from gasification plants.
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From page 82... ...
So when we build a new power plant, we must assess how long it can operate without limiting its carbon emissions. To be comfortable with new commitments to conventional coal plants, we would have to assume we will find a magic bullet to bring down costs for those plants so that their carbon can be captured.
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From page 83... ...
programs, focused largely on gasification and sequestration thanks to some quiet advocacy by the environmental community rather than to efforts by the coal industry or the electric generating industry. However, the money for R&D is offset by much more lavishly funded policies, federal tax production incentives amounting to a billion dollars or more over the next 10 years to patch up existing, old, conventional coal plants, the very plants that should be replaced.
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The White House released graphics about greenhouse gas emissions, but they don't include dates for emissions increases to end. Our calculations of the implied dates, based on available information, shows that the United States must basically get to zero growth in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 (Figure 3~.
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FACES EIA (energy an Ad~n~on~ 2002. Texan Energy OuOook 2002.
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Indeed, the CO2 level in the air in the geologic record is one of the weaker determinants of globally and seasonally averaged temperature. If one nevertheless wishes to maintain global climate at its current temperature level or at the somewhat higher level that characterized the Holocene Optimum several thousand years ago or at the lower value of the Little Ice Age of three centuries ago or at any other reasonable level then the purposeful modification of the basic radiative properties of Earth (i.e., active management of the radiative forcing of the temperature profiles of Earth's atmosphere and oceans by the Sun)
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From page 88... ...
The comparatively rudimentary atmospheric and oceanic circulation models currently used to predict climate variability with time predict increases in mean planetary temperature of between ~1.5 and ~5 K, for doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations from the current level of ~350 ppm to ~700 ppm (and associated changes in the mean concentrations of atmospheric water vapor, other greenhouse gases, such as CH4 and N2O, aerosols of various compositions and sizes, Earth-surface and atmosphere reflectivity, and radiative transport changes, etch. Temperature changes of this magnitude would also be induced by a change in either solar heating or terrestrial radiative cooling of about 2 W/m2, which is of the order of 1 percent.
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(in press) have shown that fractional removal of insolation uniformly over the entire surface of Earth not only results in temperature changes of the predicted amounts in the space-and-time average, but also preserves the present climate in its seasonal and geographic detail, at least down through the mesoscales in space and time that are treated more or less aptly by present-day global circulation models.
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From page 90... ...
Insolation-reducing means that have been demonstrated twice in the past two decades (by the eruptions of E1 Chichon and Mount Pinatubo, two large tropical volcanoes) and that were noted in the NRC study illustrate the simplest kind of radiative forcing management Rayleigh scattering by aerosols of dielectric materials although in a grossly nonoptimized way.
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From page 91... ...
would greatly outweigh the costs. Metals are greatly superior to dielectrics in the specific efficiency with which they scatter radiation, and the several particular means we considered for using metals in the management of radiative forcing reflect a 10-fold to 100-fold mass savings over dielectric aerosols.
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Overall, these novel materials appear to offer mass budgets a few-fold lower than the most interesting metallic scatterers but have operating costs comparable to dielectrics. This novel type of climate stabilization probably would be used to attenuate the near-UV solar spectrum, and thus the net economic costs would again be negative.
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From page 93... ...
Active technical management of radiative forcing would entail expenditures of no more than $1 billion per year, commencing about a half-century hence, even in worst-case scenarios.3 Thus we might just put a sinking fund of $1.7 billion into the bank for use in generating $1 billion per year forever, commencing a half-century hence, and proceed with business as usual. All of Earth's plants would be much better fed with CO2 and much less exposed to solar UV radiation, kids could play in the sun without fear, and we would continue to enjoy today's climate, bluer skies, and more beautiful sunsets until the next Ice Age commences.
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We therefore suggest that the U.S. government would be well advised to launch an intensive program immediately to address all of the salient issues in active technical management of radiative forcing, including well-designed subscale experiments in the atmosphere.
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World energy demand is growing at about 2.7 percent per year, driven primarily by underdeveloped countries. Because world supplies of fossil fuels are reaching their predictable limits, this growth is driving up prices; in addition concerns are growing about the global effects of increasing air pollution on human health and rising greenhouse-gas emissions on climate.
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They must enable geological waste repositories to accept nuclear wastes from substantially more megawatt hours of nuclear plant operations by producing less waste and reducing the decay heat of waste from the open (so-called once-through) fuel cycle.
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, the high capital cost and financial risk of constructing new nuclear power plants is a significant deterrent, especially in deregulated energy markets. To be competitive in the future, nuclear energy must meet several criteria: overall competitive life-cycle and energy-production costs through innovative advances in plant and fuel cycle efficiency, design simplification, and perhaps, plant sizes matched to market conditions reduced economic risk through a reduction in regulatory uncertainty and the development of innovative fabrication and construction techniques production of other products, such as hydrogen, fresh water, and other process heat applications, to open up new economic markets for nuclear energy Safety and Reliability Safety is the key to worldwide public acceptance of nuclear energy.
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From page 98... ...
has three programs to address challenges to the continued use and growth of nuclear power: the Nuclear Power 2010 Program; the Generation IV Advanced Reactor Program; and the Advanced Fuel Cycle Program. Nuclear Power 2010 Program In February 2002, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham unveiled the Nuclear Power 2010 initiative in response to recommendations of the DOE Nuclear Energy Research Advisory Committee (DOE, 2002~.
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Generation IV Advanced Reactor Program The Generation IV International Forum (GIF) was founded in 2000 for the purpose of facilitating international cooperation in the design, development, and deployment of next-generation advanced nuclear energy and fuel-cycle systems.
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Advanced Fuel Cycle Program One of the most important issues facing nuclear energy is the disposal of nuclear wastes and spent nuclear fuel. Since the late 1970s, the policy of the United States has been to dispose of these materials geologically and not to process or recycle the remaining fuel constituents in spent nuclear fuel.
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effort to reduce its dependence on foreign oil. Currently, hydrogen is produced from the steam reforming of natural gas with incumbent emissions of greenhouse gas.
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Nuclear power can respond to the challenges associated with rising world energy demand, diminishing fossil energy resources, and growing concerns about environmental quality and emissions of greenhouse gases. The current U.S.
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However, as the preceding examples illustrate, nuclear energy, as a major source of electrical energy and a growing source of hydrogen transportation fuel, can have a significant impact on future greenhouse-gas emissions.
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