This is a parody gone mad. Green advocates howl about the issues of nuclear waste storage, arguing that nuclear energy becomes impractical due to the need for long term safe storage, in some cases tens of thousands to millions of years, or as the EPA puts it “25,000 generations”. The Yucca Mountain project was shut down in April 2010 because nobody seems to have the will to actually store nuclear waste below ground. Meanwhile, the nuclear industry stockpiles used fuel rods near major cities in holding pools, and they are running out of room. Are we safer this way? I think not. Thanks Obama.
It seems that ‘Carbon storage’ faces the same dilemma. Can it be safely stored for thousands of years? Or will it turn into a tree killing zone like this one below?
Tree Kill Zone, near Mammoth Mountain CA
More here from USGS on the Mammoth Lakes CO2 leak.
CO2 sequestration illustrated below, relies upon putting CO2 directly into underground storage. Ironically, using salt domes, just like Yucca mountain, and even less secure coal mines.
‘Carbon storage’ faces leak dilemma: Study
CCS supporters say the sequestered carbon would slow the pace of man-made warming. It would buy time for politicians to forge an effective treaty on greenhouse gases and wean the global economy off cheap but dirty fossil fuels.
Critics say CCS could be dangerous if the stored gas returns to the atmosphere. They also argue that its financial cost, still unknown, could be far greater than tackling the source of the problem itself.
The new research, published by the journal Nature Geoscience, wades into the debate with an estimate of capturing enough carbon to help limit warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the figure set in last December’s Copenhagen Accord.
…
The gas will have to be stored for tens of thousands of years to avoid becoming a threat to future generations, a scenario similar to that for nuclear waste, it says.
This means less than one percent of the stored volume can be allowed to leak from the chamber per 1,000 years.
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Gee, where have we heard this before?
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Duncan and Geoff Sherrington have said all that’s need to be said on this item Just let us get on with building nuclear.
One thing floors me about the carbon sequestration debate, why in heaven’s name are people talking about storing liquid CO2 under ground when its been sequestered quite effectivly for hundreds of millions of years as limestone or dolomite. Stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon and I believe about half the verticle height is limestone and that sedimentary geologic layer extends for hundreds if not a thousand miles. Is there anywhere you can go around the world and not run into limestone at some point if you dig straight down deep enough? Mother nature is increadibly good at sequestering this stuff, she does it at room temperature using living organisms and once its gone, its not coming back unless its through some subduction mechanism at the edge of a continent. Remeber, the atmosphere started out in the 7000 ppm range hundreds of millions of years ago. We are standing on much of this.
Gail Combs says:
June 28, 2010 at 5:16 am
Thank you for the interesting link. I think pretty much the same applies to exposure to UV. People who live at higher altitudes don’t seem to suffer from the higher exposure (I wait to be corrected!).
There is a cheaper process called “compost making”, by mixing chopped global warmers with leaves, some water, and let it decompose, we could get a valuable mixture of humic substances for agricultural use.
They would replace manure:
http://turf.lib.msu.edu/1930s/1930/3009162.pdf
Yucca Mountain is not a salt dome. Yucca Mountain is actually a long ridge made of volcanic ash (long since turned into rock).
I lived in southern Nevada for a few years and Yucca Mountain hysteria was in full swing at that time. One thing you need to understand is Yucca Mountain was picked for it’s political and geographic properties, not it’s geological properties.
Nevada is a state with a small population and not much political power. Both with Democrats in power and the senior U.S. Senator from Nevada as the Senate Majority Leader, the project was killed, with no replacement location or new nuclear waste strategy to replace it
The Yucca Mountain project was years behind. The mountain is just not geologically suited for the purpose of storing nuclear waste for thousands of year. There are other places better suited for this purpose, but these were passed over for political reasons.
The real problem with Yucca Mountain was the strategy of burying nuclear waste. The smart thing to do is the reprocess, reuse and recycle nuclear waste as other countries do (here’s one thing we should be learning from the French).
Billy Liar says:
June 28, 2010 at 10:22 am
Their skins become “conveniently and robustly” coloured brown or black, as melanin increases.
I think it was Alvin Weinberg, the original inventor of the light water reactor, who once said:
“Nuclear waste is not a substance, it’s an action. Wasting valuable nuclear materials is something stupid governments do”.
I did not find the answer to this question at the USGS site: How does too much CO2 kill a tree? What concentrations are deadly to plant life?
Slow leaks of sequestered CO2 may kill a few trees – as the gas rises through the soil, flushing out the air that the roots of most trees need to breathe – and perhaps a few people from time to time as it collects in hollows, but there is also the possibility of catastrophic eruptions, like a volcano.
In a worst-case scenario, CO2 leaks gradually from its deep reservoir, filling the pore spaces of the overlying rock most of the way to surface. Assume that as well as porous strata, there are strata sufficiently impervious that the upwards migration is slow allowing the gas pressure to approach (or at any rate reach the same order as) the isostatic pressure throughout much of the depth. Now let the deep reservoir – stressed by the CO2 pressure or wracked by an earthquake – fracture abruptly. Containment fails catastrophically all the way to the surface; as the CO2 escapes upwards it expands explosively, blasting pulverised rock into the atmosphere and releasing tens of millions of tons of CO2 over the course of a few hours or days. This is essentially the mechanism of explosive volcanic eruptions, except that in volcanoes the explosive driver is mainly superheated steam (plus CO2). Here, the escaping CO2 is not hot but cold – cooled by its largely adiabatic expansion. This makes things worse. Unlike a magma volcano, in which escaping CO2 is mostly hot enough, and therefore buoyant enough, to billow up into the sky and be safely dissipated, such a “CO2 volcano” will produce a tidal wave of frigid CO2 flooding over the landscape, asphyxiating everything for miles around.
In a concrete, though entirely fictional scenario – I hope – imagine the electricity plants of New York city feeding CO2 into leaky reservoirs down to ~4km beneath Long Island for ten years, when the reservoir fails. Queens becomes a 10km diameter crater a few hundred metres deep, ash fills up the East River and Harlem River and buries Manhattan 10m deep. The CO2 cloud covers the entire metropolis out the the west of Newark. Fatalities ~5-15 million, depending on how quickly people flee the initial eruption. (OK, this makes assumptions about the particular geology of Long Island that probably aren’t valid and which I haven’t bothered to check, but I hope it helps you appreciate how dangerously CO2 sequestration could go wrong if it were sufficiently badly managed. Of course, no one would ever do something as daft as this, would they … ?)
If we still want CO2 sequestration (it’s completely unnecessary), I suggest it would be better to look into biological sequestration methods; eg., let CO2 enriched air flow through long hydroponic polytunnels, with additional CO2 being fed in along their length, for food or biomass yields enormously higher than obtainable from open field agriculture. There’s more than enough open land between Jersey City and Newark, say, to use up the aforementioned CO2 from the metropolis’s electricity production – both safely and productively.
@ur momisugly GrumpyOldMan, re Duncan and Geoff Sherrington and nuclear power plants.
Not such a good idea, actually. The Nuclear Death Spiral happened before, and will most certainly happen again if more nukes are built in the USA. see
http://energyguysmusings.blogspot.com/2009/06/coming-nuclear-death-spiral.html
“Roger Sowell says:
June 28, 2010 at 11:49 am
@ur momisugly GrumpyOldMan, re Duncan and Geoff Sherrington and nuclear power plants.
Not such a good idea, actually. The Nuclear Death Spiral happened before, and will most certainly happen again if more nukes are built in the USA. ”
That’s very interesting, Roger. I foresee a similar death spiral happening in Germany over the next 5 years as the Solar Energy feed in tariff will drive the cost of a kWh up and up and up. Germans were not prone to self-generation in the past but that was because we had no reason to. When nuclear power got big here – in the 70ies – the energy generation sector was still public and prices were held low by decree. This is different now, and the very technologies that make small scale PV installations work are the ones we will need to decouple from the grid.
Very interesting prospects for us…
When I first heard of CCS a few years ago, I immediately thought of Lake Nyos in Africa.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_nyos
Thought to have been caused by a nearby landslide, in 1986 the lake “burped” a large cloud of carbon dioxide which killed 1700 locals by asphyxiation (as well as livestock and other fauna). I only wonder how similar geological events would affect a CCS site.
Is this any different from the Green Energy death spiral? It seems to me if customers have the choice to use expense electricity or inexpensive electricity, they will almost always choose the latter.
@Atomic Hairdryer, how much detail on GenIV reactors using “spent fuel” do you want?
You see, alternative energies create a chain reaction of printing money, and then, a black hole of poverty, folowed by transfer of wallets content to the “chosen ones”elites.
Correct it for me its wrong or point me to some more info if its right , but I have been told that there is some relatively cheap and safe reactor technology available that would use those nuclear wastes as a fuel for electricity generation eliminating 90% of them in the process and an leave the remaining 10% in a a state that would only require a century or so in storage for it to become harmless, and the only reason that it is not in common use is that it is not PC.
“Enneagram says:
June 28, 2010 at 1:09 pm
You see, alternative energies create a chain reaction of printing money, and then, a black hole of poverty, folowed by transfer of wallets content to the “chosen ones”elites.”
Well, it works a little different but you have the direction right…
How can anyone who reads this blog still believe that CO2 is so dangerous that it needs sequestration? What part of ‘ the warming effect of CO2 is strongly logarithmic’ do you not understand?
How has it come about that spent nuclear fuel and CO2 are being labelled as a similar problem? That article is bonkers. I have to remind myself that half the population has IQ’s of less than 100. One of those must be responsible for such rubbish, and others equally endowed no doubt read it and take it seriously.
However, interesting and worrying at the same time and good material for Quote of the Week. Many thanks as always.
Wasn’t there a paper late last year or early this year, the gist of which was that to sequester the CO2 from one coal fired power plant would take nearly the entire output of that plant?
DaveE.
The trees were not killed by CO2 directly. that is why it quote of the week.
All tree roots need oxygen to respire. when oxygen falls below 10 – 15 % rootgrowth is inhibited at 3 -5% growth stops. Air spaces in the soil are being filled by CO2, hydrogen sulphide or methane.
Trees die for sinilar reasons if ground becomes saturated with water.
All of this is entirely irrelevant to CCS technology.
I live near a Geothermal Power Plant that provides me and a lot of other people in the area with both hot water and electricity we use, and while it is far lower on the CO2-sins totem pole than the Coal/Oil/Gas type plants there is some CO2 in its exhaust, and it was recently hooked up to a plant that uses the exactly that same stuff as raw material to produce metanol , that can then be used as a fuel for e.g. all kinds of automotive contraptions powered by IC engines ( or Fuel Cells even ). See here
http://www.carbonrecycling.is/isp.html
for further info if you are interested. Note this is an industrial scale plant not an experimental pilot plant unit and supposed to turn out 2 million litres of the stuff this year and 5 million a year when it has gotten up to full steam, and I think it is not being publicly subsidized, so I assume its economically viable on its own merits.
Of course the methanol is a carbohydrate and when that is used as a fuel some of it ends up in the athmos, in the end, but its less than the amount that would end up there if exhausted directly, and probably more “ecofriendly” than making corn booze
for the same purpose.
Björn says:
June 28, 2010 at 2:52 pm
“[…]
year and 5 million a year when it has gotten up to full steam, and I think it is not being publicly subsidized, so I assume its economically viable on its own merits.
”
Please don’t forget we are living under Kyoto economics in Europe. From the page you linked to:
“Emissions of CO2 will become more expensive as the European Trading Scheme for carbon dioxide matures in Europe.”
So they made this investment planning for future increases in the price of emissions. Also, this plant needs energy to work – geothermal energy in this case. Surely a nice thing, and i think that synthetic fuel makes more sense ATM as an energy carrier than batteries, but without an abundance of geothermal energy it wouldn’t work.
Unfortunately they don’t say which process they use, or what the efficiency is, they have this fuzzy statement: “Carbon Recycling International has developed clean technology which enables direct conversion of renewable energy to fuel at small or large scale plants and which can take advantage of distributed energy systems.”
on their “Technology” page.
They belong to Mannvit. This page says they’re using some catalytic process:
http://www.mannvit.com/RenewableEnergyClimate/BiogasandBiofuel/MethanolfromCO2/
They also mention electrolysis, so they’re extracting hydrogen from water, along the lines of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Methanol_Synthesis
Still nothing about efficiency. Hmmm…. It looks like they’re using a process like this one:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/g5286177543341xx/
My google search was
“methanol synthesis efficiency electrolysis catalyst”
and yielded this snippet in the Saito paper:
“Methanol synthesis from CO2 and H2 over Cu/ZnO-based catalysts was extensively studied under ….. sources, for H2 production by water electrolysis using … Energy efficiency=35% bty a fuel cell/combined cycle power plant …
”
Of course, we still don’t know what efficiency the Icelandic plant will yield, maybe they use a different process or have improved the efficiency. Nonetheless, pretty interesting.
I seem to me I read an article which stated 50% of the power plants produces would be used to pump CO2 to their storage areas. The coal or natural gas electric plant would pay storage a storage fee. Oh, did I mention the storage areas are old oil wells and the oil company are hoping, by pumping the wells full of CO2, to recover more oil.
FatBigot says:
June 27, 2010 at 10:04 pm :
I’m no fan of radical environmentalists but as a chemistry geek I can tell you that CO2 can be toxic as it’s % by volume concentration in the atmosphere increases. Around 7.5% by volume will kill you.
BTW that would be 70,000 ppm to reach 7%. We would have to increase the concentration 200 fold to surpass this and I don’t see that happening.