Silicon Valley hypegasm for miracle shoebox powerplants

Thorium Reactors Are the Solution

Thorium can be bred into fissionable Uranium, which would ensure the world's energy supplies for the next 5000 years, based on current demand. No CO2 involveld, except for obtaining the Thorium.

If it were not for the Soviet cockup, we would probably be running more than one Throium Breeder here in Germany. This was not a demo machine, but yielded 300MW of power, about 1/4 of the largest current nuclear reactors.

I am waiting for the Russians to turn off Gas in the winter, which will finally silence the Greentards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thtr

Also, there is a huge amount of U238 available, which could be bred into a fissionable Uranium nucleus. More than 99% of natural Uranium is U238. We currently only burn U235. The americans use U238 as ammo for tank-busters; it is so abundant....

Mabye time for Freedom Reactors ? (France is making 70% of their leccy by nuclear. And these are only U235-based).

Greentards, can you hear me ?

THTR

The German page is much better:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_THTR-300

Even if yiu can't read German, the fuel conversion can be understood by anyone.

Get that nadger . . .

bolted to the back end of a cow - free methane fuel.

We are also deeply addicted to milk/cheese etc, so cows will be around for a long time (maybe longer than the gas pipelines). Those that don't produce milk we can always eat, and using the methane reduces greenhouse gases.

Trebles all round.

(N.B. a "nadger" is northern UK dialect for a clever and ingenious device/implement, of any kind)

Bah

You don't see enough bashing of the BBC's "tech journalists" and I often wonder why.

Landfill gas in perspective.

The landfill driven gas turbines I have heard of are int he MW class. Big by individual consumers but about 1/500 or less the size of the typical GW power station. They are *expected* to last about 30 years on a site and it's true the UK has *lots* of landfill. However it's not clear how many of these sites have the right construction (IE impermeable lining to trap it and an impermeable cap to lead the gas to the turbine.

OTOH it would be (more or less) carbon neutral.

However were more farmers and meat processors to take up anerobic digestion (as reported in El Reg a while back) this *could* cut gas requirement by 50% (Likely an *absolutely* best case but 25% off the UK gas bill would be a good idea) and of course it would make HMG less vulnerable to Russian err politicians.

Personally the best thing you could do would be to power your a central heating circulation pump and the controller from the gas supplied to the boiler. Otherwise you need *both* services just to make one work.

It's one of those ideas that looks *very* good, promotes independence, less reliance on central resources etc. Tickss all the right marketing boxes. But actually not very good at all, except for businesses.

Thanks

Thanks for the first rational reporting on the box I've seen. I looked a while yesterday, and everyone was repeating nonsense like saying the box could use solar and wind energy as fuel to generate electricity (?!?!?). Bottom line is at best it's an efficiency improvement on converting hydrocarbons to electricity, which can be a significant advance, but nothing revolutionary, and certainly not zero emissions. Clever implementation, including waste heat utilization for secondary generation or direct use would help a bit, but we're still talking an incremental efficienty improvement, not revolution.

And it amazes me that this stuff continues to get grafted along, and supported/reported by "technology" groups. When exactly it the "technology" area exclude basic science?

Journalists, what do they know?

The Guardian reports magic properties for the Bloom Box:

"But its real potential lies in its claimed ability to use any fuel source – gas, plants, wind, solar, etc"

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/22/bloom-box-fuel-cell-launch]

Probably not going to be best for

individual houses, but it could be very handy at a neighbourhood level. Rather than having a substation that draws all of it's power from the grid it could largely or totally cut the need for grid power, cutting transmission losses and increasing efficiency (large gas turbine power plants run at less than 60% efficiency - less again when you include transmission losses -, the Bloom is supposed to be in the 80%+ range). There should also be a reduction in other emission products.

The big target though would be in electric cars. There's already a network of LPG filling stations with which to fuel them. Combine a Bloom fuel cell with a super capacitor storage unit (to even out peak power demands) and you'd have a clean, low carbon solution with fast refuelling times and long range. CO2 should be less than 1/2 of that produced by current cars, there'd be no NOX, hydrocarbons or particulates emitted (the components of smog) and it sounds like the technology is going to be more affordable than Lithium Ion battery packs.

Norway

It's certainly true that a lot of gas is being imported into Europe as a whole is from Russia, however, I think you'll find that a significant proportion of imports into the UK come from Norway.

Good job!

The Reg gets props for getting this story exactly right. and seeing right through the BS First report I've seen ANYWHERE that does. Congrats guys.

Back to the Future

When he invented the (coal-fired) electric generator, Edison originally envisioned it as a device to be sold to individuals and companies for their own electric consumption. This is not how things turned out, of course. Westinghouse envisioned large centralized electric generation companies that sell kilowatt-hours instead of machinery, and the company developed the A/C-powered electric grid required for that vision. The rest is history.

The electric grid won out because there are economies of scale with the heat engines used to generate our electricity --- and those economies of scale are large enough to justify the expense and inefficiencies of the electric grid. Or to put it the other way, small-scale heat engines (such as Diesel generators) are an expensive way to generate electricity.

There is nothing sacrosanct about the electric grid, it is a necessary evil. Energy production and consumption must be exactly matched at every point in time, and there is NO practical way to store electricity, not even for a little while. In comparison, the gas grid is much more efficient and easier to manage.

If we now have a technology that allows for high-efficiency local-scale electric generation, then it really could radically alter the way we produce and consume electricity, just as cell phones have radically altered the way we yak on the phone. If these boxes are ultimately more (economically) efficient than a generator+grid, then we might (over time) see the electric grid go the way of the land line.

Hopelessly addicted to/using too much gas

Somebody correct me please if I'm wrong, but isn't it more efficient on the whole to burn gas for heat at the point of consumption than it is to generate electricity from that gas and then convert the electricity to heat?

I know the whole gas/leccy power usage thing is one of our Lewis' favourite tubthump topics, and I'm with him when he uses it to argue against idiot proclamations of "total" household power consumption that don't take into account the huge amount of energy we get from gas, but if my assumption above is right then Lewis' allusions to our "nasty gas habit" in this article seem more than a little disingenuous.

Finance

" It is on the one hand the general public which is, at least in this parts of the world, not very much in favour of new nuclear power plants. On the other hand it's finance: it is rather difficult to find investors for such plants simply because of the costs involved. Each part of the life cycle of a nuclear plant, ie planning, building, operating and decommissioning (incl. storage), is a costly high risk venture on its own."

I do not have the slightest doubt that behemoths like RWE or BP or Exxon can finance those 5 billion Euro it costs to build a nuclear station, if they could get the permission to build. It costs about 8 cent/kWh to generate leccy with a nuclear power station of the 1GW class. There are lots of proven designs around and you can pretty easily calculate costs and the revenue you are going to make.

IF you have the permission to build AND the confidence the greentards won't close it down in three years, a nuclear power station is a foolproof money machine.

London, New York and Frankfurt finance will be happy to find the billions. New Equity or special Bonds can easily do it. My guess is that RWE or EDF could fund it out of their deep pockets w/o going to the bankers.

Currently there are lots of nuclear stations in construction, so the finance argument is not valid.

According to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Future_of_the_industry

"However, China plans to build more than 100 plants,[45]"

Dubai, Finland and the US announced also. Only the Euro greentards rather like to buy the Gas from the Tshekists of Russia.

@Lewis Page: Starvation?

I think you have been reading too many tabloid newspapers Mr Page.

90% of corn production is for use in animal feed, and ethanol production doesn't even remove this product from the market place.

Ethanol is produced using only the corn kernel's starch, and what you have left with is 'distiller grain'. This, in turn, is a highly concentrated protein/nutrient rich food that animals are happy to chomp on.

EUREKA!!!

now they just need to design a natural gas capturer attach to my toilet to proudly announce that my all house energy needs are provided by my own turds.

it this box can do all that is reported by the guardian, this addendum should be a easy task for those inventive genius.

Hypegasm

Made me laugh anyway

Life? Shoebox sized? Sand is cheap? CO2 sequestration?

Life is normally the problem with this type of fuel cell. They are used for power backup instead of batteries in a number of remote sites (Think cell phone base station for example). The problem is that the units tend to only have a life of about 2000 hours.

I like the idea of something shoebox sized that can power my house. At the moment I have a box bigger than that where the power comes into my house, and it doesn't even generate it. This could save me some space!

Also it says that it is make from cheap materials like sand. Well solar cells and microprocessors are made from sand too, but cheap it ain't!

I understand how CO2 sequestration works at a major power plant, but how does it work for shoeboxes in houses? Will we need to build another pipe network to take away the CO2 that was produced from the gas piped in?

Where is the "100% marketing hype" icon?

"a nuclear power station is a foolproof money machine."

nuclear: "you can pretty easily calculate costs and the revenue you are going to make."

Don't be so silly.

No one knows what Olkiluoto in Finland will cost or when it will open.

No one knows how much it will cost to finance any particular nuclear reactor (finance costs, interest, etc, being a major part of the economics of a nuclear station).

If the costs and profitability of nukes were predictable, Obama wouldn't just have needed to announce $8billion in loan guarantees. Without the $8bn subsidy (that's what it is), "the markets" won't touch nuclear with a bargepole.

No one knows how much revenue a given nuke will make over its predicted lifetime because no one knows how much electricity will sell for in the future.

And therefore no one knows whether a given nuke will be profitable or not in any given year or over its lifetime. Therefore "the markets" have avoided them like the plague, and that's before we get into the PR issues such as safety, waste management, etc.

"a nuclear power station is a foolproof money machine."

Anyone who believes that probably also believed the claim when Calder Hall opened that nuclear electricity would be so cheap that there'd be no need to meter it.

Not a joke

Anyone have any idea how many cow burps it takes to light a light bulb?

Seriously?

Technology

...is not killing people.

"U238 is bred into Pu239 in a reactor. Fortunately for all of us, so far FBRs have been stupidly expensive, stupidly inefficient and stupidly unreliable so almost all countries have given up on the splendidly pyrotechnic mix of superheated plutonium, molten sodium and hot water."

The worst weapon of World War 2 was definitely not the nuclear one. It probably was a simple toxic substance named "Zyklon B". Second probably was plain-old HEX like TNT. Maybe #2 was just the phosphor that burned down japanese and german cities. Recently a million people were killed by Machetes in Rwanda. Outlaw Machetes ??

The technologically easiest route to the bomb clearly is U235, and that is the consensus in the scientific community. The Plutonium argument is a greenie's BS argument modern nuclear technology.

No residential natural gas use in the US????

Methinks Lewis is a bit off on American residenttial natural gas usage. If gas is available, houses almost invariably use it for water heaters, furnaces and pool heaters. Gas clothes dryers and stoves are common. Other uses are for gas fireplaces (actually illegal to burn wood in a few localities), outdoor gas lights and grills.

One offs...

For those who aren't connected to the grid & are in need of something to support their windpower or solar power needs, the odd turn to the Bloom Box may be just the ticket. As a long haul, green pass I concur with the author.

Benefit of the SOFC

is that running *pretty* hot ( historically they *did* run 700-1000c, but newer ones are targeted in the 500-650c range, making the sealing tech a *lot* easier) they can crack more complex HC containing materials (Methane and Propane being obvious, but also Methanol and Ethanol) down to Hydrogen, which is ultimately what *all* these designs use.

So you *potentially* a multi-fuel cell with *potentially* useful amounts of heat you can use to run a domestic hot water, clothes drying or cooling system.

All the electricity for an average sized merkin's home in a shoebox. I'll believe it when I see it. The devil in this is the construction and the catalyst at the price point you need.

BTW The thing I saw in Popular Science (A *long* time ago) was a ceramic honeycomb with IIRC alternating channels for fuel, air and cooling.

Were they to get big wins off US dairy farmers (who generate *lots* of slurry ready for digesting) this might be quite a good idea. But *zero* emissions is BS *unless* you're one of those nutters who doesn't think CO2 is a pollutant

Oh wait, neither did shrub.

F$%k me. 10 tonnes to generate 100Kw

A capstone mini gas turbine package is about the size of a portable toilet cubicle. It will do about 200Kw. I'd estimate it's transportable by pickup truck in a pinch.

As everyone in the fuel cell business knows

You do better in cost, efficiency and reliability with an internal combustion engine and a generator. Plus, SOFC's have the nasty problem that they can only be cycled from room temperature up to their operating temperature a very limited number of times as the stresses due to the various materials having large but different coefficients of thermal contraction causes microcracks ion the charge separation membrane which for SOFC's, is almost always made of YSZ (Yttria-stabilized zirconia). Those microcracks cause gas shorts, which cause the SOFC to consume its fuel in a manner that prevents electricity generation.

Anyway, there are many many SOFC companies out there, all very limited in their markets by the simple fact that an internal combustion engine and a generator beat fuel cells in every metric that matters except noise.

Cost Of Nuclear

"No one knows what Olkiluoto in Finland will cost or when it will open.

No one knows how much it will cost to finance any particular nuclear reactor (finance costs, interest, etc, being a major part of the economics of a nuclear station)."

That probably is because the companies involved haven't build a nuclear power station for the last 20 years (Tchernobyl etc). The Koreans are much better, because they have more recent experience.

Look at this nice little calculation:

Wholesale price = 8cent/kWH

Power: 1500 MW

Cost: 5 Billion Euros

Useful Operating Time: 30 years

Cost of Capital: 8 %

That results in

Revenue: 1.051.200.000 Euros / year

Interest Costs: 400000000 Euros (first year !)

Repayment: 166.666.666,67 Euros/year

That leaves you with the tidy sum of 484.533.333,33 Euros/year out of which you must pay

* employees

* fuel

* repairs

* inspection

* downtime

I am not working in the Energy sector, so I cannot say how expensive fuel is, but it looks like a money machine to me. It is also getting better at the rate of 13 million/year as you pay back on the initial price each year.

The consumption and price of leccy is only going up, so the numbers are probably getting even better !

AC@14:10

"Some of the SOFCs do have problems with cycling up and down, and just before I left, there were plans for one of their customers to use a couple of 250kW generators in conjunction with a large sodium/sulphur based battery to shave the peaks off the demand."

the Sulphur battery bit sounds very like the Rolls Royce Marine solution they were offering.

On a side note a *lot* is made of the chief developers NASA links to their in-situ propellant programme. AFAIK this involve electrolysis of Carbon Dioxide (from the Martian atmosphere) to Carbon Monoxide and Oxygen. This background implies a controlled pyrolysis of the fuel to a CO (and H2) rich gas before the catalytic cell. In principle a neat sidestepping of the whole strip-the-hydrogen-out-of-the-hydrocarbon-first business.

But I don't think it was very efficient, merely that it could avoid a failure prone mechanical pump.

CANDU Reactors

..can sustain a Thorium Fuel Cycle without high temperature operation, requiring neither Helium nor Sodium as a coolant:

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/21641041/THORIUM-SELF-SUFFICIENT-FUEL-CYCLE-OF-CANDU-POWER-REACTOR

CANDU is an acronmy for Canada Deuterium Uranium. Thorium is that abundant stuff that can power the world for that 5000 year period until we get fusion power realized.

@jlocke

"..can sustain a Thorium Fuel Cycle without high temperature operation, requiring neither Helium nor Sodium as a coolant:"

Unfortunately the high temperature is quite a nice feature oft these designs for efficiency reasons.

I rather like the CANDU design. Its neat sidestepping of the whole enrichment problem in particular. Easier to build (in principle), easier to reprocess the fuel.

It's 2 biggest problems are it seems to be quite proliferation resistant (making it unpopular with anyone who would at least like the *idea* that they could become a nuclear power) and it's Canadian. I cannot help but feel that it has suffered when people like GE, Westinghouse and General Atomics promoted their designs heavily.

Sodium sulphur batteries?

Don't sodium sulphur batteries have their own problems with temperature cycling?

Lucas Chloride Electric Vehicles developed an apparently technically and economically practical sodium sulphur powered vehicle in the late 1970s (a Transit-class van based on the Bedford CF, aimed at the same kind of market that the lithium-powered LDV Electric Maxus was targeting till Lord "Two Resignations" Mandelson of Ill Repute signed their death warrant a few months ago).

Sodium sulphur batteries. They're hot.

Electric grid losses versus UK water mains

Electric grids 75

UK Water main 50%

Despite the UK water supply network loosing as much water per day per household as it supplies to the *same* household this (to water companies) is considered acceptable.

Fixing leaks is overhead.

Replacing pipe is overhead.

Thames Water (the top of the leaking league table) is owned by the German Eon, and made several hundred million pounds profit last year, like they do every other year.

But building a new reservoir (to make up the losses) is an asset. They can get bank loans, tax write offs and (probably) government grants for the work.

And there is *no* consumer choice. You cannot change supplier. There is *no* national grid for water or even an independent infrastructure supplier.

On that basis I'd say 7% losses (and their effects on electricity prices) are anywhere *near* the level needed to justify on site generation.

In the UK it would be better to roll out the legislation to allow local addition of Methane made by anaerobic digestion of meat and fruit waste into the gas supply. Something a *lot* of people would like.