I think you have to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal to see this, but I'll excerpt the relevant bit:
North Carolina regulators balked at a big power project fueled by coal, which furnishes half of U.S. electricity but is on the defensive over worries about pollution and global-warming gases.
The state utilities commission gave Duke Energy Corp. permission to build only one of two requested coal-fired power plants there and said it must spend millions of dollars on energy-efficiency programs to tamp down growing demand.
A commissioner at the North Carolina Public Utilities Commission said it was the first time in the state that approval of a major power plant had been tethered to a requirement that a utility help consumers reduce energy use through energy efficiency and conservation. Duke must plow 1% of utility revenues, about $50 million a year, back into demand-reduction programs and mothball four old plants.
Comments
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EliRabett Posted 1:43 pm
02 Mar 2007
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Zarkov Posted 5:34 pm
02 Mar 2007
Why?, because it pumps water into the atmosphere as well as carbon dioxide... yes the other nasties are nasty and should be scrubbed out....
Carbon dioxide you say ????? yes, a greenhouse gas, but this will also cause the air to hold more water. We must rehydrate the atmosphere to create clouds.
The petroleum oil in the surface marine micro-layer is reducing water evaporation into the atmosphere.
So in part burning coal (greenhouse gases) is holding severe consequences at bay.
Remove this buffer and well..full blown drought will surely follow
No food, no water, no hope... what will the population of the world do then ???
WAR, plain and simple.
Get the facts straight, y'all are in TOTAL DENIAL.
see http://omegafour.com/forum/
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randino Posted 11:05 pm
02 Mar 2007
I am waiting by my phone for Hollywood to call me for my script!
Randy Cunningham
Randy Cunningham
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caniscandida Posted 12:26 am
03 Mar 2007
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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randino Posted 12:46 am
03 Mar 2007
Somebody stop me!
Randy
Randy Cunningham
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caniscandida Posted 1:35 am
03 Mar 2007
Still, George C. Scott was a brilliant casting-against-type. Whom else might we consider, with that range? Billy Bob Thornton? Patrick Stewart? Tommy Lee Jones? Jack Nicholson?
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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randino Posted 3:11 am
03 Mar 2007
Randy
Randy Cunningham
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Sam Wells Posted 3:39 am
03 Mar 2007
If you're worried about fine particulate, acid rain, regional haze, and toxics such as mercury you might want to regulate large coal-fired power generation stations.
But the fact is carbon in, CO2 out. I don't care what kind of fuel you use.
Now there may be some technology to "squester" CO2 but I haven't heard of it, and I'm in the business. I think what most people want to do is simply "turn the smokestack upside down" and inject the exhaust gases into the ground.
I'm having a "duh" moment here because that just don't work, folks. To inject any gas into the ground one needs enormous pumps that require HUGE pump pressure capacities of over 1000 psi. Hey um, doesn't that require more power?
Take a look at what the oil & gas folks use for "fracturing pumps." That's one 6-8 inch diameter oil and gas well that require 4 to 6 of 1,000 HP diesel engines.
Now let's try the same thing with a stack several meters wide. Sequester my arse, we spend billions of dollars converting toxic carbon monoxide into CO2, and now we have to inject it in the ground. It is ridiculous, folks, simply ludicrous! Show me how you can take a large power plant and turn the stack upside down ... or maybe reconsider your argument.
/Sammie
Onward through the fog
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EliRabett Posted 5:21 am
03 Mar 2007
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Zarkov Posted 6:47 am
03 Mar 2007
Twiddle your thumbs, discount science and fantasise on into the coming desert. Better take your hat and sunscreen, LOL, heat is nasty but nice, ah but what you forgot is that it is the cold at night that kills you in a desert.
It is coming as fast as a rowed boat across the bay, but just as surely.
Coal is the only way out, but the oil on the water MUST be removed SLOWLY
The overburden of heat in the seas will precipitate an ICE AGE, just like that!!!!
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GreenEngineer Posted 7:29 am
03 Mar 2007
From here I pulled these figures:
# coal (average) = 25.4 metric tonnes carbon per terajoule (TJ)
# oil (average) = 19.9 metric tonnes carbon / TJ
# natural gas (methane) = 14.4 metric tonnes carbon / TJ
Coal even varies alot, depending on the grade. The older, denser stuff is much cleaner burning (in terms of all pollutants, not just carbon). Lignite vs. anthracite, but I don't recall which is which off the top of my head, and I'm going to go garden on this beautiful afternoon rather than look it up. :)
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GRLCowan Posted 8:44 am
03 Mar 2007
As you say, that's probably pretty hard, and the 102 GW(e) of coal plant that started up in China last year aren't going to be doing it any time soon. Nuclear retrofit will be politically workable if environmental concern takes hold in China.
But there are minerals that are hungry for CO2 and can spontaneously suck it out of 0.0004 mole fraction in the atmosphere; we may end up with central atmospheric garbage collection to take those 102 GW of plants' CO2 back out, and billions of cars' too. One would not use Rhode Island to zero the rate of increase of the whole atmosphere's [CO2] that the race's current fossil fuel habit is causing, but it's about the right size, according to the area estimate given at that site.
You may be "in the business" of burning fossil fuels without considering the atmosphere to be finite; because government makes so much money on fossil fuels, they're not going to rough you up too much for proceeding on that false basis, so you haven't needed to know this stuff, but your successors do.
--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around B fire, car goes
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Sam Wells Posted 9:04 am
03 Mar 2007
Your point about carbon (as CO2) per unit of enery is well taken, and it is true that natural gas is possibly the cleanest in that regard. However, when consumed, about 5-10 percent of the natural gas / mathane is not burned but is exhausted up the stack or out the tailpipe, and methane is a greenhouse gas.
I like to appear fuel-neutral when is comes to any fuel, since to me it is the technology that is the key. For example, natural gas engines and boilers can be very efficient, leading to high Oxides of Nitrogen (including nitric oxide, another GHG) as a trade-off. So computer technology can be used to make these devices LESS efficient so as to moderate the emissions of certain contaminants. Stack after-treatment catalysts can also help moderate the emission releases as well.
I DO think we can solve some of the problems with technology ... look at what we have done with gasoline car emissions over the last 25 years. Sure, they have catalytic convertors and oxygen sensors to operated "stoichiometric" but the computer controller was key ... the air / fuel ratio was varied between rich and lean so as to optimize emissions in terms of cycles per second, really cool.
That said, coal STILL sucks. I fear its impacts on the environment, not just the air just what we have done to the land and our waters. Much of the trace emissions found in Artcic ice core samples can be directly linked to burning coal (e.g., using Carbon 14 radioactive data as an indicator). It is some really cool science but the results are quite depressing.
Back to the butterfly garden, my friend. :)
/sammie
Onward through the fog
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dotcommodity Posted 2:35 pm
03 Mar 2007
Look at Australia now for our future
http://www.news.com.au/sundaymail/story/0,,21189976-50053 ...
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planetthoughts Posted 10:30 pm
03 Mar 2007
David Alexander
PlanetThoughts.org
Love your Planet.
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Delay And Deny Posted 1:49 am
04 Mar 2007
Isn't it amazing that while we slap ourselves on the back about all the progress of mankind, we're still burning stuff to heat water (to make electricity).
I mean seriously, it's all just too primitive to even care...
The Texeme Construct offers international text memetics construction and textcasting services.
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Zarkov Posted 4:30 am
04 Mar 2007
Absolutely, SALT is the way forward, no footprint.
>> it's all just too primitive to even care. >>>
Indeed it is, but will anyone listen ?
And unless you are a big polluter who has the money to take these primitive practices to task.
The Big Oil group should be stripped of assets, and fined until skint, then that resource needs to be invested in salt.
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Sam Wells Posted 7:16 am
04 Mar 2007
I mean, I was a "green" hippie in 1976 so some of that hurt.
Hey, I enjoy the positive spirit of wanting to get into policy and to actually do something about this mess. I just call them like I see them right now. We are currently about 10 years behind the Europeans in promoting awareness, new energy sources, and even life-style changes. Having a rather quirky Bush administration did not exactly help. But it's incredibly complex and one simply does not "convert" a coal powerplant over to nuclear power. Unfortunately, the Bush policy is to cap GHG emissions at the rate of population growth. Like all business, it can be frustrating. /sammie
Onward through the fog
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Nucbuddy Posted 9:31 am
04 Mar 2007
Sam, one simply converts a coal powerplant over to nuclear power.
.
jimholm.com/#Ending_the_Climate_Change_threat_quickly
Rather than build hundreds of new, large nuclear electric power plants, it's much quicker and much less costly to retrofit all the world's existing coal-burning power plants with small, aircraft-carrier size nuclear boilers. In fact, some coal burning power plants have already been repowered with natural gas and while that's an improvement, natural gas is much more expensive than coal and also produces 50% as much carbon dioxide as coal so it still doesn't really get the job done.
Existing power plants already have ample land, railroad tracks, cooling water, and are already wired to our cities - no new construction costs or delays there, either.
[...]
The "RAPID-RETROFIT" Plan:
Everything needed to repower coal-burning power plants can be purchased today. Here's what to buy and why:
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Sam Wells Posted 12:34 am
05 Mar 2007
And of course all coal-fired power plants can be converted to batural gas or oil. How do you think they start one up? That's right, natural gas is typically used for start-up purposes, before powerderized coal is introduced to the boiler.
Sam
Onward through the fog
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Nucbuddy Posted 1:45 am
05 Mar 2007
Design pre-certification (standard Design Certification), 50 percent fewer valves, 83 percent less piping, 87 percent less control cable, 35 percent fewer pumps, and 50 percent less seismic building volume does not make any difference in construction time? How are nuclear power plants being built in South Korea and Japan in only 3-5 years?
.
world-nuclear.org/info/inf41.html#perspective
New reactor construction [in the USA] is expected to start about 2010, with operation in 2014.
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