Coal.

[NNadir]

From the New York Times website http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/books/chapters/0625-1st-good.html some excerpts of a first chapter in a reviewed book:

One of the triumphs of modern life is our ability to distance ourselves from the simple facts of our own existence. We love our hamburgers, but we've never seen the inside of a slaughterhouse...

...It's easy to forget what a luxury this is-until you visit a place like China...

...In rural areas, running water is a surprise, hot water a thrill. When you flip the switch on the wall and the light goes on, you know exactly what it costs-all you have to do is take a deep breath and feel the burn of coal smoke in your lungs...

...The cost of the rough journey China is undertaking is obvious. More than six thousand workers a year are killed in China's coal mines. The World Health Organization estimates that in East Asia, a region made up predominantly of China and South Korea, 355,000 people a year die from the effects of urban outdoor air pollution...

...All this would be much easier to condemn if the West had not done exactly the same thing during its headlong rush to become rich and prosperous. In fact, we're still doing it...

...But we've been hooked on coal for almost 150 years now, and like a Bowery junkie, we keep telling ourselves it's time to come clean, without ever actually doing it...

...The 2000 presidential election was another turning point. Democratic candidate Al Gore was one of the first American politicians to take global warming seriously, and anyone who takes global warming seriously is not a friend of Big Coal. Coal industry executives knew that if Gore was elected, regulations to limit or tax carbon dioxide emissions wouldn't be far behind. So Big Coal threw its money and muscle behind George W. Bush, helping him gain a decisive edge in key industrial states, including West Virginia, a Democratic stronghold that had not voted for a Republican presidential candidate in seventy-five years. After the disputed Florida recount, West Virginia's five electoral votes provided the margin that Bush needed to take his seat in the Oval Office...

Here's an interesting statistic from the review that does not appear in this excerpt:

More than 104,000 Americans died digging out coal between 1900 and 2005; twice as many may have died from black lung. The fatality rate in coal mining is almost 60 percent higher than it is in oil and gas extraction.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/books/review/25powell.html?ex=1151380800&en=e63f331288309dac&ei=5087%0A

For the benefit of the "only Chernobyl counts" theory of energy risk analysis, that's the figure for the United States. It's unimpressive for the Chinese, who can do that many dead bodies in a decade or two with coal.

[Dead_Parrot]

1. Amazon ed. reviews

- for the registrationophobic - here.
Sounds like a laugh riot... :evilfrown:

[Dogmudgeon]

2. Coal: The New Black Death

It would be a nice slogan if it had a chance of enlightening people. But sloganeering hasn't exactly been a success in public education.

Coal killed my great-grandfather, an Irish-American collier in upstate Pennsylvania in the early 1900s. Of course, I'm not critical of coal just because my great-grandpa died of black lung disease. I think you'd find many people just in the USA who've lost family members a couple generations back to King Coal. And of course, the Chinese are suffering from the wrath of their energy tyrant now.

Most people are entirely unaware of how dirty coal is. I myself was stunned to find out how much radioactive matter is in coal -- and gets into the air. And I've also heard that some of the chemicals generated by burning coal are pretty brutal as well.

As to coal gasification, I suppose that would eliminate many of the dangers of coal itself, but with the emphasis on investing cheap and charging dear, I wouldn't expect too much progress without the iron hand of Big Gummint.

--p!

[Dead_Parrot]

3. Coal-mining and coal-burning are different issues

My paternal ancesters chased sheep around the hills (insert joke here) for a living: my maternal ancesters mined coal in the Welsh valleys, and none of them lived long and happy lives.

However, the death-toll of miners is pissing in the ocean compared to the death toll of "innocent" air-breathers the world over. And that's not including the millions who will be unholmed from climate change....

"Clean coal" is the dirtiest fuel we have access to, and the more people who realise that the better.

[NNadir]

4. I think coal gasification will do very little to reduce the danger of coal

Everything that is now in the coal will still need to be dumped somewhere.

It will simply make it easier to deny coals effects, make it seem cleaner than it really is.

It can never be clean.

[eppur_se_muova]

5. ...is still a four-letter word.

If the "clean coal" movement were named honestly, it would be the "not quite as appalingly dirty as before coal" movement.

It is quite sad that under an administration run by oilmen and their cronies the emphasis has shifted from regarding coal -- abundant in this country -- as being a cushion against oil and gas imports to being a resource to exploit relentlessly, damn the consequences. So-called "clean coal" may produce less acid rain, but the #1 problem with coal, oil, and gas is that they are not carbon-neutral, i.e. CO2-neutral -- a concept much of the public does not seem to grasp, and only the better-educated are even aware of. "Clean coal" is a dangerous meme, crafted by those who stand to profit from unrestrained exploitation of coal.

[Dead_Parrot]

6. Fossil government. nt

[conning]

7. A pound of coal, when processed,

produced 3.75 KWH, whereas a pound of uranium ore, when processed, produces 62000 KWH. Is this information correct?

[Dead_Parrot]

8. And the rest...

The coal side sounds a little high to me, but close enough: With reprocessing, 1KG of Uranium is closer to 10 million kWh.

[NNadir]

9. All the energy conversion factors you will ever need.

www.evworld.com/library/energy_numbers.pdf

Some of the statistical figures are outdated. Current US energy consumption is more than 105 exajoules yr^-1. Current world energy consumption is 440 exajoules yr^-1.

I have heard some people say that world energy consumption will reach 1000 exajoules yr^-1 by 2050. I personally don't believe it. I believe human population will fall dramatically before then.

[conning]

10. thanks for the energy conversion chart

I'm trying to become literate (or numerate) in these matters. So far I can translate various energy sources into the btu format. Now I need to understand the joule and exajoule. One quadrillion btu (10 to the 15th power of btu's) is equivalent to one exajoule (10 to the 18th power of joules).

I'll be printing out the conversion chart to better play with it.

My goal is to become comfortable enough with this information (as well as the CO2 emissions associated with various forms of energy) that I will be able to weave it into ordinary conversation.

[Dead_Parrot]

11. Personally, I cheat...

http://www.onlineconversion.com/energy.htm

:D

10 Calories (in food) = 261,319,393,303,100,750,000,000 eV. Vital stuff to know. :silly:

[NNadir]

12. Your goal is a worthy one.

Thank you for having it.

The world needs as many energy literate people as it can possibly have, especially those who can weave it into casual conversation. The matter is becoming extremely critical.

[NMDemDist2]

13. welcome to DU conning!

:hi:

[conning]

14. According to my calculations from the energy conversion chart,

a pound of coal yields 4.4 kwh, and a pound of uranium yields 10,777,777.8 kwh. Quite a difference, and quite a bit more of a difference from the numbers I had been using.

[NNadir]

15. OK, but be careful.

You are speaking of the fissionable isotope, U-235.

In order to get this energy from U-238, which dominates natural uranium, it must first be converted to Pu-239. I personally think this is a good idea, to convert U-238 to Pu-239, but it is non-trivial and the idea causes quite a bit of controversy.

The energy value of coal is in the ballpark, but be aware that coal's energy content varies. Brown coal and hard anthracite are different things. All forms of coal are unacceptably dangerous in my view, but again, this idea doesn't meet with universal acclaim.

[conning]

16. I understand that the energy value of coal varies.

Is there an average amount of isotope 235 in a pound of uranium (e.g., 20 grams)?

[NNadir]

17. Yes. The standardized value is 0.70%, but varies with source.

Famously uranium in Gabon and a few other places has less of this isotope because of the operation of naturally occurring nucler reactors several billion years ago. At that time, the concentration of U-235 was about 3%. All uranium also contains very small amounts of U-234, which is formed in equilibrium with U-238 owing to its natural decay.

For most nuclear reactors, uranium is "enriched," so that the concentration of uranium is increased to about that of the Gabon reactors plus or minus a few percent. Some reactors use highly enriched uranium (HEU), more than 90% U-235. HEU is generally used in small reactors, like those found at research institutions or on submarines. A few reactor types allow for the use of natural uranium. The best reactor of this type is the CANDU. The worst is the RBMK, which was the type of reactor at Chernobyl. The United States operated one nuclear reactor that was like the RBMK, at Hanford, Washington. Although this reactor provided power to the grid, its main purpose was to make plutonium for nuclear weapons. It has now been shut down.

All nuclear reactors transmute some U-238 into Pu-239, and the consumption of Pu-239 can account for nearly half the energy output of a nuclear reactor. In some countries, notably France, plutonium made in this way is put back into the reactors, and the energy recovered. I think this is a good idea.

Reactors that convert more U-238 into Pu-239 than the U-235 they consume are called "breeder reactors." Only a few types of this reactor have been built, mostly because uranium is extraordinarily cheap. In principal, and probably as a practical matter if humanity survives global climate change, all of the energy in uranium can be recovered by converting all of it to plutonium. Thus it really is possible to recover about 10 million kilowatt-hours per pound, although it literally takes hundreds of years to accomplish this with a particular sample of mined uranium. However the commercial interest in doing this has been less than overwhelming. It is cheaper to use virgin uranium obtained from mines, at least for the short run. This will undoubtedly change in the next century, should the century finish.

Thorium is also usable in nuclear reactors, much as U-238 is. To be useful, it must first be converted to uranium-233, which does not occur naturally on earth.

[conning]

18. Oh so many variables.

Even if nuclear reactors were only using u-235 (which they are not) a pound of uranium would yield about 72000 kwh.

I am reading and re-reading the information in your post. My education continues. With the appropriate reprocessing it would take hundreds of years to derive the maximum kwh use of a pound of coal. What perspective that gives to concerns about "running out of uranium."

[NNadir]

19. If you are interested in energy calculations...

...I'll toot my own horn and tell you that I do lots of them here.

Since you are new to DU - and welcome by the way - you can find a sample of those threads in my journal.

All DUers have the ability to create journals in which they can place representative posts. I have updated mine to include my recent post listing the energy constants.

In this forum I mostly write about nuclear energy.

I don't think the world is going to run out of uranium, although I am concerned that the earth will run out of atmosphere.

[conning]

20. NNadir, you have educated yourself about nuclear energy,

but most people remain quite ignorant about it. Much of the fear of it comes from that ignorance. It's easy to understand about coal, as it is much like the wood that people have been burning for eons. With nuclear energy, you have to make an effort to understand its transformative properties.

I am so glad you are making the effort to educate people about nuclear (or "nookular") energy.