|
Edited on Wed Feb-17-10 12:14 AM by KittyWampus
Both Uranium and Petroleum involve extracting fuel from the ground, processing it, transporting it, dealing with waste. A lot of energy is expended just transporting stuff great distances.
Both involve highly centralized distributors who make massive amounts of money delivering energy that is necessary for modern life to continue.
Building nuclear plants costs massive amounts of money. It also requires a degree of oversight and regulation that is absent from the United States. But getting back to the money-
The money spent on building nuclear plants would be better spent retrofitting infrastructure and investing in Green Technology.
A main difference between Greener Technologies and Petro/Nuke is that the former involves collecting or harnessing energy on a more local level while the latter involves extracting energy from sources often far from ones home.
There is one method of producing oil locally that involves COLLECTING LOCAL WASTE and turning it into oil- thermal depolymerization. You get more energy out than is put in because energy isn't spent driving the water out before processing. This could be done on a municipal level. You go to the dump with your plastic bottles and fill up with oil made from those bottles at the filling station next door.
I see going nuclear as simply trading one destructive addiction for another. All that changes is the drug dealer.
History
Thermal depolymerization is similar to the geological processes that produced the fossil fuels used today, except that the technological process occurs in a timeframe measured in hours. Until recently, the human-designed processes were not efficient enough to serve as a practical source of fuel—more energy was required than was produced.
Many previous methods which create hydrocarbons through depolymerization used dry materials (or anhydrous pyrolysis), which requires expending a lot of energy to remove water. However, there has been work done on hydrous pyrolysis methods, in which the depolymerization takes place with the materials in water. In U. S. patent 2,177,557, issued in 1939, Bergstrom and Cederquist discuss a method for obtaining oil from wood in which the wood is heated under pressure in water with a significant amount of calcium hydroxide added to the mixture. In the early 1970s Herbert R. Appell and coworkers worked with hydrous pyrolysis methods, as exemplified by U. S. patent 3,733,255 (issued in 1973), which discusses the production of oil from sewer sludge and municipal refuse by heating the material in water, under pressure, and in the presence of carbon monoxide.
An approach that exceeded break-even was developed by Illinois microbiologist Paul Baskis in the 1980s and refined over the next 15 years (see U. S. patent 5,269,947, issued in 1993). The technology was finally developed for commercial use in 1996 by Changing World Technologies (CWT). Brian S. Appel (CEO of CWT) took the technology in 2001 and expanded and changed it into what is now referred to as TCP (Thermal Conversion Process), and has applied for several patents (see, for example, published patent application US 2004/0192980). A Thermal Depolymerization demonstration plant was completed in 1999 in Philadelphia by Thermal Depolymerization, LLC, and the first full-scale commercial plant was constructed in Carthage, Missouri, about 100 yards (100 m) from ConAgra Foods' massive Butterball turkey plant, where it is expected to process about 200 tons of turkey waste into 500 barrels (21,000 US gallons or 80 m³) of oil per day.
|