Ah Peter, you have hit the coal nail on the coal head.

The bearded gnomes are the screwed up face of mental constipation. Wouldn't you love to invited to one of their parties?

I'm afraid Dr Chris knows bugger all about coal sequestration but I admire her for having the guts to come out and say she doesn't want the bloody thing near her house!

I'm going gung ho for tidal waves, bushfires and nuclear reactors - anything to stop us from living in the medieval world these enviro-nutters want to create.

Me thinks that alot of the CO2 from power stations, will very
possibly be used to grow algae on a large scale, with a win-win
outcome all round.

I read somewhere that it would take around 50 square km of
farmed algae, to supply all of Australia's liquid energy
needs. So some serious work is going on in the field.

Algae are such simple life forms, highly efficient at
harvesting energy and multiplying themselves rapidly,
some with 50% oil content.

But they need large amounts of CO2 to grow. The very
best source is a coal fired power station.

The Americans did alot of research on this stuff in
the 90s, but gave it away when the price of oil sank
back to 10$ at the time. Its all being cranked up
again, including in Australia.

Not only that, but when the oil is extracted, the residues
make great stock feed.

Chris,
Lots of assumptions and selected naivety in this piece, as with the whole CO2 sequestration technology.
In short a very uninformative piece of prose. It adds nothing to an important debate only gives a platform for more of the same. Trivial and pointless. I hope your lectures have more substance.

SM

I am on a quest to read more about the Chinese idea of nuclear power i.e. no meltdown pebble nuke technology. on the surface it seems like an option worth more consideration.
( on "addicted to money" show last night)
Any comments and or sources?

Examinator,

To put what I say in perspective, I need to define the difference between inherently safe and intrinsically safe.

A crude comparison would be if you had a ball on top of a hill, and put measures in place to ensure it never rolled down, this would be inherently safe, in that the event of rolling down the hill would be extremely unlikely.

If the ball were at the bottom of the hill it would not tend to roll away, and even if all restraints were removed, it would stay put. It would then be intrinsically safe.

The reactors of today are inherently safe in that multiple redundant systems are in place to ensure that an incident does not occur, but in the unlikely event of all the safeties failing, an event can occur.

There are several designs for smaller systems that can be built which are intrinsically safe (less than 100MW), i.e. a terrorist could bomb the place, and knock out every safety system, and shortly afterwards you could sit down for lunch next to the reactor with no harm.

The added advantage is that for a factory that burns gas for heat, the waste heat from generation can be used instead of sending it into the sky via cooling towers. This saves not only the coal but the gas for heating too.

Also for small towns mini power plants (1-10MW) could be built in a truckable package, buried, supply power for about 40 years, and then exhumed, loaded back on a truck and returned for reprocessing.

The major flaw in this scenario, is that public perception of these small units is the same as if one built a 3 GW giant, and the effort and money required to get approval one of these mini units is nearly the same as one of the giants.

I have been fan of these intrinsically safe mini nuke systems for many years, but I don't see it happenning until nuclear power is common place in a couple of decades.

I would like to add another perspective. We are running out of oil. That also means we are running out of the means to manufacture industrial chemicals, and that of course includes plastics. Coal is also a source of chemicals and was so when I was young. We also forget that coal is used in making steel.

Personally I think we could have a much stronger effort in energy demand reduction and that, coupled with large scale solar thermal (and yes storage does work [operational in Spain] in case we get the usual opposite view) we would be working towards a solution. It needs investment certainty.

Coal could then be transitioned to industrial chemicals.

As for carbon dioxide as a means of growing algae, its not so easy but a project was started in the La Trobe Valley at the Hazelwood plant about 10 years ago.

Everyone seems to be focussing on Australia only, when there is an abundance of coal, supporting many economies, in countries around the world. Surely an investment in CCS is worthwhile to attack the global problem?

Why has everyone got such NIMBY (Not in my backyard) syndrome? I can't understand why people don't support development of a technology that could change the world, rather than just their own patch?