US, India, China Plan 850 New Coal-Fired Power Plants By 2012

[hatrack]

"The official treaty to curb greenhouse-gas emissions hasn't gone into effect yet and already three countries are planning to build nearly 850 new coal-fired plants, which would pump up to five times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the Kyoto Protocol aims to reduce. The magnitude of that imbalance is staggering. Environmentalists have long called the treaty a symbolic rather than practical victory in the fight against global warming. But even many of them do not appear aware of the coming tidal wave of greenhouse-gas emissions by nations not under Kyoto restrictions.

By 2012, the plants in three key countries - China, India, and the United States - are expected to emit as much as an extra 2.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide, according to a Monitor analysis of power-plant construction data. In contrast, Kyoto countries by that year are supposed to have cut their CO2 emissions by some 483 million tons.

The findings suggest that critics of the treaty, including the Bush administration, may be correct when they claim the treaty is hopelessly flawed because it doesn't limit emissions from the developing world. But they also suggest that the world is on the cusp of creating a huge new infrastructure that will pump out enormous amounts of CO2 for the next six decades. Without strong US leadership, it's unlikely that technology to cut CO2 emissions will be ready in time for the power-plant construction boom, many say.

"If all those power plants are online by 2012, then obviously it completely cancels out any gains from Kyoto," says Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler with the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration."

EDIT

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1223/p01s04-sten.html

[NNadir]

1. Time for my monotonic note.

The capacity of these plants, according to the article, will be 327,000 MWe, equal to the output of about 327 large nuclear plants. The planned coal plants will put out an additional 2.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year (ignoring, of course, as we traditionally do, the question of disposing of all that coal ash.)

A typical nuclear plant running at 1000 MWe (using steam turbines rather than more efficient systems) consumes about 3 kg of fissionable material per day, or roughly 1200 kg per year, a little over 1 metric ton. This means that one would need to fission completely about 400 metric tons of fissionable material per year to eliminate this 2.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide.

On a mass balance basis, this means that one would have to physically manage - again ignoring completely the coal ash - 0.0000001th the amount of matter if one chose to replace this coal capacity with nuclear energy.

This should be a no-brainer, but mysteriously enough, it isn't. Why do I feel like I'm living in a very bad episode of the Twilight Zone?

[Muzzle Tough]

2. I agree.

Why are most so-called "environmentalists" against nuclear power?

Why are Greenpeace and the Sierra Club against nuclear power?

Who knows?

It sure does seem like the Twilight zone!

[AZCat]

3. Some comparisons for reference

I took this information from the Energy Information Administration web site.

The International Electricity Information page has lots of good info, and I used information in the Excel file linked in the International Electricity Installed Capacity Data section.

Electricity Installed Capacity as of January 1, 2002
(Million Kilowatts)

U.S.
Conventional
-Thermal 634.9
-Hydroelectric 98.6
-Nuclear 98.2
Geothermal, Solar, Wind,and Wood and Waste 16.6
Total 848.3

China
Conventional
-Thermal 253.1
-Hydroelectric 83.0
-Nuclear 2.2
Geothermal, Solar, Wind,and Wood and Waste 0.0
Total 338.3

India
Conventional
-Thermal 90.2
-Hydroelectric 25.8
-Nuclear 2.9
Geothermal, Solar, Wind,and Wood and Waste 1.5
Total 120.3

World
Conventional
-Thermal 2325.6
-Hydroelectric 723.6
-Nuclear 361.1
Geothermal, Solar, Wind,and Wood and Waste 54.6
Total 3464.9


The article says that the 850 new plants will produce 327,000 Megawatts, or 327 Million Kilowatts. This would increase the total electricity generating capacity for the U.S., China, and India from 1306.9 Million Kilowatts to 1633.9 Million Kilowatts (a 25% increase).

That's a lot of extra power, and this doesn't include the 340 coal-fired power plants in various stages of development in 58 other countries (from the article).



By the way - does anyone know how to format a table? I am having a hard time, and the HTML lookup table doesn't have anything on tables.

[NNadir]

4. Thanx for this data.

From this data we can do some "back of the envelope calculations" of volume, mass and toxicity of "wastes" from various sources.

I will attempt to find time to do some of these after the holiday, to discuss, for instance how much so called "nuclear waste" actually exists, and how much carbon we are dumping in the atmosphere to produce electricity.

[AZCat]

5. We did some of that in my Power Systems Analysis class

I'll see if I can did up the notes I took on byproducts of power production. The class was a couple of years ago (spring 2002) but the info should still be meaningful.

[NNadir]

6. Here is some data I will use. It will be fun to see how your class's

analysis's compares with mine (if you can find it) and how we handle the data, and the type of simplifying assumptions we make. (Since I have never taken such a class - it will be especially interesting for me.)

The file below has some relevant and interesting data, specifically the energy value, sulfur content and ash content of coals and wood. For some reason, the metric values (ignoring the even more unworkable English units) give the energy in kilocalories/kg for these sources. As I'm sure you know, a kilocalorie is converted to a kilojoule by multiplying by 4.184. One simplifying assumption I will need to make is a sort of "universal energy value" of coal.

http://www.epa.gov/ttn/chief/ap42/appendix/appa.pdf

For accumulations of nuclear materials, years ago I derived the (simplified) relationship A = P(1-exp(-kt)) for how fission products accumulate. Here A is the accumulated mass (in most of my spreadsheets, given in metric tons), P is the maximal amount of a fission product that can accumulate before the fission product is decaying at exactly the rate it is created at a particular output for nuclear generated power, k is the decay constant for the nuclide decay constant, which is simply the natural logarithm of 2 divided by the half life, and t is the time at which a given power output has been generated by nuclear means. For convenience, I always use time units of seconds in values involving time.

As I usually do, I will not treat any Uranium, Plutonium, or minor actinides as "waste" since I find such a conception most unfortunate. (I regard these materials as resources.) I am aware however that public policy in the United States - though not elsewhere - my objection notwithstanding has managed to define these materials as "wastes."

Some simplifying assumptions went into this derivation. The differential equations that nuclear engineers call the "fuel depletion" equations can be quite complex and are often solved numerically using sophisticated fuel depletion programs like ORIGEN (to which I have no access). These programs account for issues like neutron fluxes and capture cross sections, sometimes - as I understand it - using "multigroup" analyses - in which neutron energy distributions, of which the cross sections are functions, are considered.

I have fudged all this by simply using the "accumulated fission yield" available for each nuclide in the Table of Nuclides. http://atom.kaeri.re.kr/ Fission yields actually vary with the particular nuclide being fissioned. The "big four nuclides" under modern conditions can be considered to be Uranium-235 (by far now the biggest), Plutonium-239 (the next most important), Uranium-233 (which one hopes, for non-proliferation reasons, will become more important) and Plutonium-241, which becomes important when fuel is recycled. Because as a practical matter, most nuclear energy is still generated using U-235 enriched natural Uranium, and the vast majority of reactors in the world are thermal, I have used the values given for fission in U-235 under thermal conditions (0.253 MeV neutrons) in the tables. Note that the (internet) tables do not even give the values for Uranium-233 or Plutonium-241. This is trivial though: Most heavy nuclides have fission product distributions that look like camel humps and fissioning heavier nuclides move the hump reflecting the higher mass nuclides slightly to the right, towards heavier fission products. (The effect on the most important element in the heavy part of the fission product hump, Cesium, is slight.)

In general values are better when we consider so called "nuclear wastes" that have been removed from the reactor as spent fuel, although I don't think this makes all that much difference in most of the important cases. In any case, these are the most important values for people who are considering what to do with fission products, whether or not one regards them as "wastes" or as useful materials. The "constant" P I have used above, is obtained from from the fission yields, the power output and conversion factors (the electron charge, Avogadro's number, the energy yield per fission - generally taken to be 190 MeV per fission.)

Now I'll go back, consolidate some of the hundreds of spreadsheets I've generated jerking around with this data over the years, and get back when I have a chance.

[NNadir]

7. I will post calculations with respect to coal in this thread (post #81):

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=5609&mesg_id=5609

only because I frequently refer to that thread and would like to keep this work in a central place.

I hope no one objects.