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Originally Posted by theunchosen
You pump exhaust across it and just make sure the algae gets sun and it takes care of everything else for you. drain the tanks filter them separate the aqueous layer off, refine slightly , done.
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The problem, though, is the way you've got it set up makes it look like a "magic wand" to eliminate CO2 emissions from power plants, which it isn't at all. Say you've got a 100 MWatt coal-fired plant located at latitude 45, with 50% thermal efficiency. Then even if your algae did their photosynthesis with 100% efficiency, you need to devote about 800,000 square meters of land to them in order to capture enough sunlight to reconvert 100% of the CO2. Real photosynthesis is much less efficient
Photosynthetic efficiency - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia so you'd need about 12-15 times the area, say 10 km^2 per 100 MWatts of generation.
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And what if we manage to kill all the bacteria first by dumping radioactive waste on them?
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Not an easy thing to do, for example see here:
Deinococcus radiodurans - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Not to mention the minor :-) lapse of logic in thinking you'd need to remove CO2 from nuclear power plant waste...)