Three DOE National Labs (ORNL, ANL, INL) Report on the Conversion of Coal Plants to Nuclear Plants.

[NNadir]

The full report is here: Investigating Benefits and Challenges of Converting Retiring Coal Plants into Nuclear Plants. (ORNL, INL, ANL).

The trend in modern nuclear engineering is to treat the nuclear island separate from the islands devoted to producing consumer energy, in all most every case, electrical energy up to now. There is no intrinsic reason for doing so, steam Rankine engines either from the coal plants on which the antinuke rhetoric supports, or current dedicated nuclear plants are low thermodynamic efficiency, around 33%. While one can applaud the basic idea considered in reusing the steam turbines and heat sinks from coal plants for the conversion of nuclear heat to electricity, given that coal plants have a reliability second only to nuclear plants (and ignoring that coal plants kill people during normal operations and nuclear plants, um, don't), we do need to consider that because of climate change, the heat sink systems need adjustment. The ideal solution is to capture waste heat as liquid fuels, raise efficiency by raising reactor temperatures, and reject unused heat directly to the atmosphere rather than water, except in the case where electricity is a side product of desalination.

I discussed a thought experiment about the latter case here:

The Energy Required to Supply California's Water with Zero Discharge Supercritical Desalination.

Nevertheless, the consideration of this case, apparently under discussion in coal heavy Poland using either the Kairos or NuScale technology (cf pp 28-32 in the report) does seem of value. Coal steam turbines are designed to operate continuously, meaning that the materials in those turbines, as well as the attached generators should be considered for further use.

The DOE News Item: DOE Report Finds Hundreds of Retiring Coal Plant Sites Could Convert to Nuclear

An excerpt:

WASHINGTON, D.C.— The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today released a report showing that hundreds of U.S. coal power plant sites could convert to nuclear power plant sites, adding new jobs, increasing economic benefit, and significantly improving environmental conditions. This coal-to-nuclear transition could add a substantial amount of clean electricity to the grid, helping the U.S. reach its net-zero emissions goals by 2050.

The study investigated the benefits and challenges of converting retiring coal plant sites into nuclear plant sites. After screening recently retired and active coal plant sites, the study team identified 157 retired coal plant sites and 237 operating coal plant sites as potential candidates for a coal-to-nuclear transition. Of these sites, the team found that 80% are good candidates to host advanced reactors smaller than the gigawatt scale.

A coal to nuclear transition could significantly improve air quality in communities around the country. The case study found that greenhouse gas emissions in a region could fall by 86% when nuclear power plants replace large coal plants, which is equivalent to taking more than 500,000 gasoline-powered passenger vehicles off the roads.

It could also increase employment and economic activity within those communities. When a large coal plant is replaced by a nuclear power plant of equivalent size, the study found that jobs in the region could increase by more than 650 permanent positions. Based the case study in the report, long-term job impacts could lead to additional annual economic activity of $275 million, implying an increase of 92% tax revenue for the local county when compared to the operating coal power...

I added the bold; my reason for supporting nuclear energy is not about saving a few bucks for the short term and screwing all future generations. My reason is ethical; it's about saving lives and leaving gifts for future generations, rather than liabilities.

The WNN news item:

US study assesses potential for coal-to-nuclear conversion

An excerpt:

Hundreds of coal power plant sites across the USA could be converted to nuclear plant sites, providing huge decarbonisation gains as well as bringing tangible economic, employment and environmental benefits to the communities where those plants are located, a new US Department of Energy (DOE) study has found.

A coal-to-nuclear (C2N) transition - siting a nuclear reactor at the site of a recently retired coal power plant - could help increase US nuclear capacity to more than 350 GWe, Investigating Benefits and Challenges of Converting Retiring Coal Plants into Nuclear Plants found. The USA's current nuclear fleet has a combined capacity of 95 GWe.

The report is underpinned by a study carried out by the Argonne, Idaho and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, sponsored by the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy. It is guided by three overarching questions: where in the USA are retired coal facilities located and what factors make a site feasible for transition; what factors of technology, cost, and project timeline drive investor economics over such a decision; and how will C2N impact local communities?

The team screened recently retired and active coal plant sites to identify 157 retired and 237 operating coal plants sites as potential candidates for a C2N transition, which it further evaluated on parameters including population density, distance from seismic fault lines, flooding potential, and nearby wetlands, to determine if they could safely host a nuclear power plant. It found that 80% of the potential sites are suitable for hosting advanced nuclear power plants of varying size and type, depending on the size of the site being converted.

The team then evaluated a case study of detailed impacts and potential outcomes from a C2N transition at a hypothetical site, considering various nuclear technology types for a range of scenarios including large light-water reactors, small modular reactors, sodium-cooled fast reactors and very high temperature reactors.

Of course, there are trends in some places to replace nuclear energy with coal.

Recently I engaged a rather stupid antinuke in an online conversation for the purpose of letting him, her or they display exactly how stupid he, she, or they is/are. It succeeded. The anti-nuke in question whined about so called "nuclear waste," but refused with childish evasions to answer the question I asked: "How many people in the 70 years of commercial nuclear power operations have been killed by the storage of used nuclear fuel?"

My favorite part in this exposure - the anti-nuke claimed not to be an anti-nuke as they typically do these days, now that they helped to destroy the planet - was showing data reflecting that the officially anti-nuke country Germany has shut its nuclear plants to burn coal. (Our President is clearly wiser than their Chancellors.)

Anti-nukes aren't very bright, so I made sure to use graphic representations; apparently they have low reading comprehension:

Germany's electrical generation sources for the last 5 years:






Germany's electrical generation sources for the last 30 days:






Source: Electricity Map, Germany (Accessed 9/16/22)

For comparison purposes here's France for the last 5 years:





I noted that the type of coal the Germans are burning, their primary domestic coal supply, is lignite.

I then pointed to a rather well cited study in Lancet - one I've referred to a number of times - suggesting the mortality rates associated with primary energy types

Here's table 2:

Anil Markandya, Paul Wilkinson, Electricity generation and health, The Lancet, Volume 370, Issue 9591, 2007, Pages 979-990.

When presented with the question, after lots of dumb excuses for not answering it, the anti-nuke rather reminded me of this fun interchange with former Senator Al Franken when he asked a straight up question (in another context) that his rhetorical opponent refused to answer, because the rhetorical opponent was lying:

While Franken's exchange was amusing; I'm actually not amused by anti-nukes. The planet is burning. Rivers have disappeared. Crops and people have been killed by extreme heat. Glaciers on which billions of people depend for their water supply are melting permanently. Vast oceanic ecosystems are being wiped off the face of the planet.

It's not funny, nor is it amusing.

Ignorance kills.

Have a nice weekend.

[hunter]

1. We ought to start this now, before the inevitable "Perl Harbor" global warming crisis...

... in the U.S.A., whatever that turns out to be.

I wouldn't single out the coal plants either. Many gas plants are good candidates for nuclear conversion, better than some coal plants.

The sooner we quit fossil fuels the better.

[NNadir]

2. In the report they've identified 157 retired coal plants that could be converted to nuclear plants.

The report gives the criteria by which they selected them. Traditionally, before the invention of the combined cycle gas plant, the first process intensification type power plants, coal plants ran as base load power.

I think once the process is demonstrated on low hanging fruit, plants with suitable equipment, up to and including steam generators, it may be useful to move as quickly as is possible to newer operating coal plants as opposed to suitable retired plants. In all cases, coal has go first, and since coal's reliability is second only to nuclear, this will have an immediate effect on the release of carbon dioxide, PAHs, mercury, lead, cadmium, etc..

Combined cycle gas plants run at high efficiency only when they run continuously. When their shut down because some assholes trashed wilderness for wind industrial parks and the wind is blowing, their thermodynamic efficiency falls, rising back only with sufficient run times. These, I think should be next in line. The gas turbine would need to driven by superheated air, rather than by combustion gas; this process will offer the opportunity to remove greenhouse gases and certain very serious pollutants; neither aerosol microplastics, methane, and indeed some HFC's would not survive this process, thus the process would clean the air as opposed to dirtying it. (A caveat is that nitrogen chemistry would need to be monitored carefully, but some fission products in used nuclear fuel might be useful in minimizing this issue.) I have also been studying this process for direct air capture in Brayton/Rankine hybrids, which is what a combined cycle plant is, although I'm still in favor of seawater based carbon capture for a number reasons.

Any Rankine Steam gas plant should be converted to nuclear, because it's essentially equivalent to a coal plant, but slightly less dirty.

I would leave standalone gas turbines in place. Reaching thermal efficiencies (in which exergy is included) of 70-80% using nuclear heat, and thus reducing the heat rejected to the atmosphere, vastly lowering or eliminating the need for cooling water, since our "renewables will save us" rhetoric has destroyed the world's rivers, will necessarily involve the synthesis of fluid fuels, the best one being DME with a carbon source of captured CO2, or CO2 obtained from the pyrolysis of waste biomass, municipal waste and perhaps the clean up of ground water destroyed by fracking.

Here is the demand profile for the CAISO system on September 6, 2022, during the episode of extreme heat the state experienced during which record demand on that grid was recorded.



CAISO Demand (Click on Date in upper left)

The peak power, which may have been a record for Demand in the State, with restrictions in place, was 51,145 MW at 7:05 PM in the afternoon.

Here is how California was generating energy that day:





(The so called "renewable" energy shows the power generation numerically in a pop up at 7:05 PM)

The output of dangerous natural gas based power generation, for which the waste CO2 was dumped directly into the atmosphere, remained above 25,000 MW from 4:30 in the afternoon until 10:00 in the evening. The wind, which was producing next to nothing for most of the daylight hours, kicked up a little, but the wind was still a trivial component of demand throughout the entire emergency.

In the morning hours, until noon, the grid was destroying the exergy available in dangerous natural gas to charge batteries - knowing a crisis was coming - at a thermodynamic penalty for which future generations will have to pay.

How might this awful case have been addressed carbon free, without wondering if the wind will blow or if they'll be cloud cover, or (as happened here) extreme heat persists after sundown?

Now consider a case where to capture exergy by converting what would have been waste heat in a nuclear plant to DME. I think that nuclear plants should run flat out, producing more electricity (more or less as a waste product) than the grid demands, utilizing the electricity for industrial processes such as metal refining, desalination, the reduction of carbon dioxide to carbon for materials use, etc., delivering the excess to the grid only during grid emergencies, shutting the industrial plants down temporarily and selling the electricity at a price where doing so is profitable. At this point people might fire up gas turbines with carbon neutral DME (as it will have been made from atmospheric or oceanic carbon dioxide or carbonate).

Given that climate change has made a situation in which a lack of air conditioning can lead to mass fatalities, it might be well advised to lead some cheap peaker plants in place. DME is a drop in fuel for dangerous methane, and as it would be manufactured as a closed cycle, is easily liquified for storage, more easily than propane or LPG, it would represent a stable reserve of fuel.

Thanks for your comment.

[hunter]

8. Presumably, if nuclear power plants were running full power, 24/7...

... producing transportation fuels from atmospheric or oceanic carbon dioxide, desalinating water, and producing electricity, the greater problem wouldn't be peak electrical demands, it would be what to do with the excess electricity when demand is low.

In the drought-stricken Southwestern U.S.A. this electricity might be used to pump desalinated water to higher elevations than would otherwise be practicable, for example to Lake Mead (elevation 375 meters when full) or Shasta Lake (325 meters).

If we ban fossil fuels, as we must, the primary purpose of many nuclear power plants won't be the production of electricity, it will be the production of transportation fuels such as DME and synthetic fuel oils. In other places the primary purpose of these plants will be desalinization. In either case electricity becomes an abundant side product of these other industries.

In the long term I look forward to a time when we can restore lands and rivers damaged by other forms of energy development to something resembling a natural state; not just the coal strip mines, but the removal of dams and large scale solar and wind projects as well.

[Finishline42]

9. Except...

A lot of dams have locks associated with them that facilitate barges moving cargo more economically than even trains. There are a lot of rivers that wouldn't be navigable without dams to maintain a pool height.

Windmills provide income to farmers/ranchers and property tax to those localities. They don't make a significant negative impact on the local environment. Visually you might not like them but to a land owner in a wind blown part of the country, it's a welcomed addition.

I think you are missing what should be a major application of solar in desert areas. Solar panels provide much needed shade in areas where desertification is an issue. They could also be set up to collect dew to irrigate crops to combat one of the major problems in arid areas.

[NNadir]

11. Electricity is a thermodynamically degraded form of energy with an important exception.

The exception is when it is generated from waste heat, in other words, when it is utilized to recover exergy that would otherwise be rejected to the atmosphere.

My preferred solution would be to use the "solution" that Henry Kaiser utilized in Kaiser aluminum plants years ago. That is he made an arrangement to run his aluminum plants when electricity was exceedingly cheap (from hydroelectric plants).

Now there is a thermodynamic and O&M cost to starting and stopping electrochemical systems, but it's less onerous if one can predict with fair certainty when those costs would be at a premium.

During the months after the summer solstice, California, for better or worse - mostly for worse - as things stand can produce up to 14,000 MW of electrical power for brief periods. At these points, electricity may be close to worthless. (This feature, as operative now, of course drives up the cost of reliable energy because they can not recover revenue continuously although they are designed to operate continuously.) Therefore it would make economic sense to keep electricity off the grid and utilize it for industrial processes. Since it's recovered exergy and not energy consumed for the purpose of simply making electricity, the environmental impact will be minimized.

It is no longer the case that aluminum is the only metal that can be prepared by electrochemical means. The wonderful FFC process has changed all that. There is also electrochemical refining, and laser printing (additive manufacture) that can be driven by electricity without much penalty. I would advise for California, continuous electrical power generation on the order of 50,000 MW, with the sale of that power to the grid based on the economics of the grid.

One thing that California should do since solar power isn't sustainable or clean, and because it is basically available to wealthy people and not the poor, is to not subsidize it by giving fixed price returns. It should reflect the actually busbar cost of electricity; if the busbar cost is zero because the power is not needed and is generated anyway, the price should be zero.

The costs of disposal should also be addressed.

Nuclear plants could do things of value with waste electricity - electricity generated as a side product of other operations - pump water, refine metals recovered from municipal waste, run FFC plants, even run membrane based desalination plants.

The grid will always be variable, particularly because of climate change. The idea should be maximize exergy, that is efficiency.

Thanks for your comment.

[Finishline42]

3. I might have missed it, but I didn't see how long and at what cost would be involved to

convert a coal plant to nuclear?

RE: turbines

I know that the turbines are designed for the projected duty cycle. And as you said, coal plants are designed to run constantly (they have a long cool down and warm up cycle) which forces them to keep them turning with little or no load during the lull in demand from evening of the current day to the start up the next day. A lot of coal is burned in the process. Any time that wind and solar are available, it's at a cheaper cost than anything that uses fuel that has to be bought to create electricity. Without a doubt, wind and solar drives up the cost of coal, gas and nuclear.

The cost and time to convert coal to nuclear is relevant because of how wind and solar are being developed. What I have noticed is that there are companies that specialize in the process of building a wind and/or solar farm. they understand the permitting process, what it takes to secure the properties for the project and then getting the equipment installed and brought online. But once the revenue steam is established, the asset gets sold. The selling company recovers capital to direct to the next projects and the buyers have an asset and all they are concerned with is generating revenue (they don't have large labor or fuel costs).

There are a lot of companies that are capable of building a wind or solar farm. How many companies are able to convert a coal plant to nuclear?

BTW, Is there a case history of this being done?

[NNadir]

4. Cost to whom?

A nuclear plant is a gift to future generations. Wind and solar junk are liabilities, because they'll all be landfill in about 25 years.

Among the more important liabilities of course, is climate change, since the solar and wind industry entrench the use of dangerous fossil fuels.

I fully realize that the goal of antinukes is to find every single specious grounds to attack the only form of low carbon, reliable energy and oppose anything that kicks the wind out of their sails, but basically the goal of the current crop of nuclear engineers is not to satisfy bourgeois bean counters but rather to save the world for future generations.

This proposal, should it pan out, will achieve very high mass efficiency, as well as land efficiency, something that is particularly abysmal for the fossil fuel dependent solar and wind scam.

Have a wonderful week.

[Finishline42]

5. At this time

wind and solar do require fossil fueled power plants to fill in when they aren't available. But they also cut into the use of those power plants which drives up their cost to operate. I'm sure you can see the net result - the more wind and solar deployed, the more expensive coal and gas become to generate electricity, all the while wind and solar get better and cheaper which...

By the way I read and reread your response and noticed you completely avoided answering two simple questions...

How much would it cost to convert a coal powered power plant to nuclear

And how long would it take.

[NNadir]

6. Well, rather than read and reread my responses, people could find things out for themselves.

I do.

As for the claim that solar and wind cut into the use of fossil fuels, one would think that after trillions of dollars squandered on them the rate of accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is going down, but the opposite is true. The accumulation is accelerating.

I derived a crude quadratic equation reflecting this rate here:

A Commentary on Failure, Delusion and Faith: Danish Data on Big Wind Turbines and Their Lifetimes.

As of this writing, I have been a member of DU for 19 years and 240 days, which works out in decimal years to 19.658 years. This means the second derivative, the rate of change of the rate of change is 0.04 ppm/yr^2 for my tenure here. (A disturbing fact is that the second derivative for seven years of similar data running from April of 1993 to April of 2000 showed a second derivative of 0.03 ppm/yr^2; the third derivative is also positive, but I'll ignore that for now.) If these trends continue, this suggests that “by 2050,” 28 years from now, using the language that bourgeois assholes in organizations like Greenpeace use to suggest the outbreak of a “renewable energy” nirvana, the rate of change, the first derivative, will be on the order of 3.6 ppm/year. Using very simple calculus, integrating the observed second derivative twice, using the boundary conditions – the current data - to determine the integration constants, one obtains a quadratic equation (0.04)t^2+(2.45)t+ 419.71 = c where t is the number of years after 2022 and c is the concentration at the year in question.

Anyone who wants me to be impressed will show me data that gives different boundary conditions. However they don't because they can't.

Of course, fossil fuels were never the focus of the wind and solar scam. The goal was to attack nuclear energy, which has been successful in Europe, in particular in Germany with the result that energy poverty is arising because the Germans can't get Putin to take more of their money to use to kill Ukrainians.

I note that, in contrast to the Germans, most of the former USSR's former client states are embracing nuclear power. (The report linked cites Polish literature.)

One would think that if solar and wind were so damned quick to build, half a century of cheering for them and throwing huge sums of money at them would have led to them producing more than the roughly 11 exajoules they produce each year, and something like the roughly 30 exajoules nuclear, even with its infrastructure being defunded, has been producing each year for decades in an atmosphere of vituperation and selective attention.

As for my responsibility to answer questions, including deliberately loaded questions, I read for myself, find out things for myself, and it's not my job to teach the anti-nuke community how to face reality. Experience teaches that they won't do it anyway.

I'm an autodidact. Anyone can be one if they spend the time.

Rather than badger me, I wonder if anti-nukes can look in the mirror and see if they're wearing any clothes.

Anti-nukes don't answer the question "If used nuclear fuel is so 'dangerous' how many people have been killed by the storage of used nuclear fuel in the 70 year history of commercial nuclear operations?" even though they report so called "nuclear waste" to be a big, big, big, big "problem." When they act this way, I wonder if they're insane.

Why is it my job to answer them about anything?

They also can't explain why after all this "wind and solar are cheap" poor people can't afford electricity in Europe, why Germany's industries are shutting down and people are being laid off.

Crippling’ Energy Bills Force Europe’s Factories to Go Dark

Manufacturers are furloughing workers and shutting down lines because they can’t pay the gas and electric charges.

(Ref: NY Times, 9/19/22)

The planet is on fire. People have died all over the world from extreme heat. Rivers have disappeared. Glaciers that are the source of fresh water for billions of people are melting and disappearing Crops are failing from heat and a lack of water. Huge ecosystems are collapsing.

And I'm being asked to count beans on coal to nuclear conversions?

Should I include the payback for people not being killed because coal isn't burned because coal was replaced by nuclear?

The cost of rivers flowing because nuclear power produces reliable and constant power without driving climate change by relying on fossil fuel plants to start up?

How about the cost of forests not burning, also because nuclear plants don't need to fire up coal plants like the Germans do when the wind isn't blowing?

How about the cost of having water to irrigate crops also because nuclear plants don't drive climate change?

How about the cost of treating people disabled by air pollution, because nuclear plants can contain their by products on site indefinitely?

I linked a report. Anyone can read it. It's not my job to inform people whose main concern is the cost of the "clean up" of Three Mile Island and isolate it from the cost of the FACT that solar and wind are unreliable and inordinately expensive.

All the nickel and diming in on this issue frankly disgusts me.

A nuclear plant, no matter how much it costs, is a gift to future generations. This was true in my lifetime. My father's generation built the Oyster Creek Nuclear Plant, which came on line in 1969 and was generating electricity for me at a low price until 2018. It operated for 49 years without killing anyone. It could have gone longer, but bean counters determined that burning dangerous natural gas and dumping the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere was cheaper.

Again, for whom?

My son is on the front lines of nuclear engineering. It seems quite likely he may interact with some of the people who wrote this report, since the nuclear research community in the national labs is relatively small and his advisor holds a joint appointment to one of those labs. I'm not going to bother him with, "An anti-nuke wants to know..."

Anyone who wants to find out about external costs, the costs to the environment and to living things, including but not limited to human beings can do so. I did. Anyone who wants to talk about construction costs and construction costs only, using selective attention and ignoring the costs of the redundant systems on which the short lived solar and wind junk depend is entirely missing my point, and there's no real value in discussing anything with them. They don't hear what they don't want to hear. They may as well be on a different planet. I, by contrast, am living on the planet that's regrettably burning because of irrational fear and deliberate ignorance.

Am I being clear?

No?

I couldn't care less.

[Finishline42]

7. What?

And I'm being asked to count beans on coal to nuclear conversions?

Of course it doesn't matter if you count the beans - the people that count the beans do matter and it's why this isn't getting more attention. Nuclear is the most expensive electricity on the grid and it's not getting any cheaper.

I wonder as well if there's a lot more involved that just building a containment building for a reactor in the conversion. As I said earlier there are a lot of different types/styles of turbines, sure wish someone with expertise in this area would add some input.

[NNadir]

10. I apologize for not getting back to you quickly on this post.

I certainly didn't want my response to your "What?" to be my 30,000th post.

As for the "What?" without advising anyone to read or reread any of my posts, I would certainly point out that the only relevant section of the post, which inspired the "What?" were one to do so, would be the last three sentences.

For convenience here they are:

Am I being clear?

No?

I couldn't care less.

I'll let you know when I'm looking for anti-nukes to give advice on nuclear engineering. However, this said, I would advise not waiting up late for me to do so.