The Curious Case Of The Alternative Energy Source That Wasn't Allowed To Bark Much In The Night
It's Elementary
By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Energy | Featured Stories — Comments (27) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
President Bush focused much of his State of the Union Address on his plan to use ethanol and biofuels as an alternative energy source. Alas, a heavy reliance on ethanol and biofuels is not the best of ideas and will only serve to increase an already large government subsidy. Furthermore, there is an alternative energy source to which the President gave surprisingly short shrift in his speech.
I give it longer shrift here.
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The Curious Case Of The Alternative Energy Source That Wasn't Allowed To Bark Much In The Night 27 Comments (0 topical, 27 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
The hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) that you probably have in your medicine cabinet is used (in much higher concentrations)as a rocket fuel - remember the Bell jet pack?. H2O2 breaks down into water, oxygen, and heat when it comes in contact with silver, in a catalytic reaction (the silver isn’t consumed or changed). Basically, you spray it through a silver mesh and you get a cloud of hot steam on the other side. The water that comes from the reaction is actually drinkable, the oxygen is breathable.
There’s a recently developed process (still under patent protection) for producing H2O2 in industrial quantities that uses a catalytic conversion. The pilot plant is using hydrogen extracted from natural gas, but assuming there’s enough cheap electricity available, there’s no reason the hydrogen can’t be extracted from water by electrolysis. At that point, you have a plant that takes in water and electricity, and produces hydrogen peroxide. No drilling, no air pollution, no sludge, no waste products. You might actually end up releasing a little surplus oxygen from the electrolysis process.
As a fuel, peroxide is much easier to deal with than gasoline or hydrogen. It’s non-flammable and, in the long-term, non-toxic; high-concentration H2O2 leaked from an underground tank will kill anything in the soil, but it will also break down into water in the process. It won’t poison the aquifer (in fact, it might clean it up a little). In a crash situation, you wouldn’t want to come in contact with it (it’ll take off flesh at those concentrations), but it won’t explode and it won’t burn. You can actually use it to put out fire.
I don’t believe it would be that difficult to produce a piston engine that uses peroxide, but piston engines are inherently inefficient. The better bet would probably be a turbine powering an air compressor, with throttleable pneumatic motors (like in an air wrench) on all four wheels. A reservoir (air tank) would allow the vehicle to handle high-acceleration demands and allow the turbine to run at intervals and only at its optimum speed, rather than being throttled through stop-and-go traffic (which is about the worst-case for turbines). This would also allow you to have a heat scavenging system with an alcohol loop driving a secondary compressor, so you could recover some of the waste heat from the turbine and from the brakes. It might also be possible to have a gas-powered turbine on board, for times and places where there’s no peroxide available. By the way, there’s already a car powered by compressed air on the market, this would be able to use some of the same technology.
Engineering problems are always simpler than political problems.
would prove more reliable. A car with high pressure air tanks and turbines on all four wheels would be a maintenance nightmare. remember, the fdewer moving parts, the more reliable the mechanism. I do like the idea of using nuclear power plants to generate both electricity and hydrogen. In terms of energy cycle efficiency, generating hydrogen with waste heat would be a big plus. Nuclear plants typically only run at about 30 - 35% cycle efficiency. Therefore, ther is a lot of waste heat. Additionally, at nights, especially in the spring and fall, the spot market price of electricity often falls below the cost of production. Generating hydrogen would help solve our energy problems (from a transportation fuel issue), while improving the economics of power plant operation. I'd consider this a win /win, although the liberals /socialists would probably have problems, because those evil electric utilities would make higher profits.
...H2O2 can be explosive in industrial concentrations (30%+). That makes it an attractive terror weapon. (It's not a problem now because you need trackable government permits to get it in those concentrations.) Any bets on whether the nervous Nellies will let us use it for motor fuel?
[Updated:] I looked it up. As you said, 30% H2O2 is not itself an explosive, but mix it with the right easily-available chemicals, and you can have a lot of fun.
It would make Hollywood's depiction of of every gas tank being a bomb waiting to explode accurate.
Veritas magna est et praevalet.
Sorry about the threadjack, but this is the first chance I've gotten to discuss this concept.
I'm not sure you need more than 30% concentration for this sort of application: you want a steam expansion, not heat, so you want the concentration to be low enough that the exhaust is not too much above 100C. Anything more than that just contributes to waste heat.
On the other issue, even if it CAN be made into a bomb, can't the same be said for gasoline?
Even barring the frightening concept of transporting tanker truckloads of high concentration H202 through our cities. There is absolutely no infrastructure to handle what is at best a very sensitive material.
Veritas magna est et praevalet.
called it, and as I recall they managed to literally dissolve quite a few Me-163 pilots in various creative ways.
In Vino Veritas
which is certainly explosive. At least once a year I read a story of a house in some city exploding. Any replacement transportation fuel is going to require investments for replacement of infrastructure. Heck, look at what the gas station spent to replace underground gas tanks. Overcoming any issues with handling H2O2 is a solvable engineering issue. If you want to get off of a petroleum based economy, it's going to be expensive, and probably require at least a 10 - 20 year transition.
I've wanted my jetpack for a long time.
"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle
If we had cheap electricity, we'd have a heck of a lot of portable fuels (oil, natural gas, propane) available for transportation. Those fuels are all getting burned up in massive quantities in stationary applications right now. Applications that could be converted to electricity if it wasn't so expensive. Add plug-in hybrids into the mix and you have a real solution and all it takes is lots of fission.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
Abandon everything we have in place, rebuild the power grid, and buy new automobiles.
Veritas magna est et praevalet.
from the horse to the automobile in two or three decades; from horse draught trolleys to electic in even less time and again from electic traction to diesel buses in a couple of decades; from the steam locomotive to diesel in less than two decades, which would have been even quicker had not WWII intevened.
I agree it would be a big transition, but it isn't like we haven't done it before.
In Vino Veritas
The only thing that is talked about is fuel cost. I bought my car used and have had it 5 years now, the fuel cost is still not up to the purchase price and is only running about equivalent to insurance and maintenance.
If you live in new york proper your fuel cost will probably never exceed your parking fees.
Veritas magna est et praevalet.
those earlier transitions were, so there is more to it than just the economics. In the first quarter of the 20th Century, much later in truly rural areas, giving up your horses for an automobile was a supremely irrational decision in most of the Country because of the poor roads; people just wanted them and endured all sorts of expense and inconvenience to have them. Converting from horse draught to electric or gas/diesel traction had as much to do with esthetics and real estate values as anything else - no horse waste, no fodder production and storage, and no livery stables on valuable urban property. Probably "blackmail" from General Motors had as much as anything to do with some railroads' conversion from steam to diesel, since roads like Norfolk and Western and Union Pacific had endless supplies of cheap coal and highly efficient steam locomotives.
I have a 140 mph "freeway flyer" and my neighbor has a Corvette in a town with 37 miles of "open" road that is covered with snow and ice for half the year - but I like my hot rod! I don't know if I could ever make myself drive the kind of car that is really all that I need; I could do just fine with a Prius or even a pure electric two seater with enough trunk space to hold a couple of grocery bags, and I wouldn't be caught dead in one.
If it weren't for fast cars, and in my case fast boats too, old whiskey, and pretty women, hey, we could all work at the video store. I worked hard to become decadent!
In Vino Veritas
Abandon everything we have in place
People switch fuel sources all the frickin' time. I just put in a propane boiler this summer because fuel oil was just too expensive. If electricity were cheap, I would certainly not hesitate to put in an electric boiler. The same goes for people doing the
rebuild the power grid
We'd have to upgrade it in some places but it would be fine in others. We got plenty of work to do on the grid anyway.
buy new automobiles
There are already fleets that run on propane and natural gas. They are not radically different from conventional automobiles. It is even possible to convert existing automobiles, though it isn't really worth the cost. In any case, we already buy new vehicles on a pretty regular basis. There aren't too many people driving around in Chevettes any more.
And of course fuel oil is just diesel fuel by another name... hardly cutting edge stuff that we need to rethink the design of automobiles to make use of.
Incidentally, people need to buy new automobiles to use ethanol anyway. If you fill up with E85 and do not have a flex fuel vehicle, you are going to be pretty sad.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
Its not trivial no matter how you slice it. What was your expected time to payback on your heater. Right now I have an electric tank water heater, I could replace it with an electric flash heater and achieve a savings. The problem is I don't think I will be keeping my current home long enough to achieve any return.
Veritas magna est et praevalet.
Its not trivial no matter how you slice it.
Of course, but real solutions often aren't. Simply giving out corporate welfare checks to agribusiness (in the case of biofuels) is always going to be easy, though. Everybody loves giving free money to farmers.
What was your expected time to payback on your heater.
Payback is about 3 years, depending on what fuel prices do. Either way I have a lot more flexibility since I kept the oil tank and oil fired boiler and can switch back if it becomes advantageous for me to do so. Well worth it. If I could achieve the same savings with electricity I would put in an electric boiler tomorrow. Right now, electricity is the most expensive option so I am not interested.
Right now I have an electric tank water heater, I could replace it with an electric flash heater and achieve a savings.
I had an electric tank heater and replaced it with tankless propane water heater. Payback on that should be about the same as the boiler, since the unit only cost 600 bucks and maybe a hundred or so worth of parts to install it, minus the $300 federal tax credit on tankless heaters.
I'm not so sure about an electric tankless, since all you save there is standby losses... you still pay the same price per BTU. That would certainly draw out the payback period. Installation is also more of a problem since instant heating of water requires a whole lot of power.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
I’m personally a big fan of nuclear power, but the nuclear industry in the 70's brought a lot of its problems down on itself; I know nuke engineers who say that TMI was inevitable.
To my knowledge, no two civilian power plants in the US are identical. From an engineering standpoint, this is a nightmare; every plant certification needs to be defined and reviewed from the ground up, the inspectors have to be trained in on each design, the training and safety procedures have to be rewritten for every plant.
The worst part of this is that because the procedures are unique to each plant, the training has to be done in place, on a live, operating reactor. It's no coincidence that Chernobyl and TMI both happened in the middle of a safety exercise, I understand that there have been a lot of other close calls that have occurred either during training drills or while testing/updating safety procedures.
What I think we to define a national standard reactor design. We’d be able to have a single training center and a standard set of operating, inspection, and safety procedures, and we’d have a much better understanding of the operation of the reactor if there is a problem.
My preference would be for a small, portable reactor based on the Navy's design. Not that I think we should be transporting operating nuclear plants around the country, but a system designed to be portable is going to be more rugged than a stationary design, and it won’t need to be modified to suit the local climate or geography. The Navy design has a relatively small power output, but I think we’d be better off setting up “plantations” of small, reliable reactors than to have one big, uncontrollable beast.
Unfortunately, the Navy design requires a LOT of available cooling water, but on the other hand, they've never had a major reactor problem.
"no two civilian power plants in the US are identical."
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Correct. However all US light water reactor fall into the BWR or PWR category. In the BWR category, only GE designed US BWR's. There are slightly different designs in operation, but all of the controls and safety features work in basically the same fashion. In the PWR category, there were three manufacturers, Combustion Engineering, Westinghouse and Babcock and Wilcox. The last B&W is different becauce the steam generator is different and causes the plant to respond to transients differently. The designs under consideration for future plants are all designed to be passively safe and much simpler in terms of the numbers of safety related components that have to be maintained.
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"The worst part of this is that because the procedures are unique to each plant, the training has to be done in place, on a live, operating reactor. It's no coincidence that Chernobyl and TMI both happened in the middle of a safety exercise,"
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None of the above statements are true. reactor operators train on simulators, not in the actual control room. Chernobyl happened during turbine testing, not a safety exercise, and TMI happened during normal plant operations as a result of a stuck open pressurizer relief valve and human error.
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"What I think we to define a national standard reactor design. We’d be able to have a single training center and a standard set of operating, inspection, and safety procedures, and we’d have a much better understanding of the operation of the reactor if there is a problem. "
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Given my experience with the NRC and department of Energy, the last thing I want is a standard design developed by a government committee. Our current plant designs despite their other faults are extremely safe. Just look at the TMI accident. All of the plant systems functioned exactly as they were designed and the plant was stable. Even after an operator, in error shut off a cooling pump, and melted most of the core, the radiation was contained and no one was injured or killed. They trashed a multi-billion dollar power plant, but the public was safe. The current level of training for nuclear control room operators is extremely high and their understanding of how the plants respond to transients is encyclopedic. I've been in the control room when a plant experienced a loss of a single offsite power source as a result of a lightning strike. The operators' performance was amazing. There was no panic. They took manual control of the plant, just as they had practiced, and in minutes had everything stable without the plant automatically shutting down. This is quite a feat, since relatively minor system perterbations will cause a shutdown. The training these guys get is light years different than in the 70's.
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"My preference would be for a small, portable reactor based on the Navy's design."
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Do you have any idea that the navy reactors run on highly enriched fuel (essentially bomb grade) and are unlicensable for civilian use.
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"The Navy design has a relatively small power output, but I think we’d be better off setting up “plantations” of small, reliable reactors than to have one big, uncontrollable beast."
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The nuclear industry has looked at smaller modular designs, but economies of scale keep driving us back to larger reactors. Also there is nothing uncontrollable about large reactors.
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"Unfortunately, the Navy design requires a LOT of available cooling water, but on the other hand, they've never had a major reactor problem."
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All reactors require lots of cooling water. Also, ever hear of the SL-1 accident?
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Next time, stick to posting on things you know something about.
We need to bring an end to the legal nonsense and get the national waste repository operational.
Look folks, it’s in the middle of the feakin’ DESSERT. As in “deserted”. In the worst case scenario of all human technology breaks down in the next 5,000 years and the world turns into the Lord of the Flies, there isn’t going to be anyone living around the place because there’s no water and no food for hundreds of miles. If they have enough technology to be there long enough to dig that deep, they have enough technology to notice that the people doing the digging are getting sick. Problem solved.
I also think we need to glassify some of the hottest waste and launch it into the sun. Yes, I realize that sometimes launch vehicles fail, but not with enough energy to vaporize a glassified payload. Worst case is you end up with a single chunk of highly radioactive glass at the bottom of the ocean, so you send out a recovery vessel equipped with lead underwear and a very long set of tongs, and you try launching it again.
There is no shortage of space to store radwaste. There would be even less if we reprocessed fuel. Ther are no big engineering challenges to either fuel reprocessing or even high level waste storage. The French and Japanese both reprocess fuel. All of our high level waste problems are political. The last thing we want to do is start strapping high level waste containers on rockets. Talk about a political nightmare. There is nothing wrong with burying the stuff and waiting for it to decay.
I agree they should start loading waste into the repository at Yucca Mountain. But how do you get around the Not-In-My-BackYard problem? Most evidence suggests that the Nevada site would be very well-suited to the job, and they should start loading in the radioactive waste. But would I still feel that way if I lived in the area?
How do you get people to chill out about it? One time cash payments to folks in the area (You-don't -like it-you-can-move-payments). I think there aren't many folks that live nearby, so this would be a minor expense. What would it take for you to be willing to have nuclear waste in your backyard?
What would it take for you to be willing to have the nuclear repository be 25 miles from your home? As much as I can say rationally that it is safe, and that it is a good thing for the country and for energy security, I don't think I'd be willing to expose my son to the (admittedly small) risk. Because until you can answer that question, no politician is going to have the guts to make the final decision and start sending in the waste in large quantities.
But its not a direct replacement for transportation fuels.
Veritas magna est et praevalet.