Coal power

[oil pan 4]

Hey who's okay with that?
I think it sucks. About half the base load is covered by coal and half by nuclear. Why not nuclear for almost all the base load?
We would all be better off is there was a small coal base load buffer because combustion boilers modulate better than nuclear. Nuclear can be modulated but it takes much more enriched uranium to run reliability.

Originally Posted by freebeard

Nuclear con-fusion?

Is the down-side of having a high-speed rail system connecting quarantined cities offtopic?

Bad you. Report to fauci virus gulag.

[freebeard]

01-25-2020, 02:29 PM seems like a long time ago. IIRC I was just recovering from a novel inflammation.

[oil pan 4]

I thought that deserves to be here too.

Originally Posted by Hersbird

I'm sure in the town that was built there to mine the coal and run the powerplant. Otherwise population in the aera would have been about 5. They have .3% of the area covered in surface water and although not technically a desert, they only get 15 inches a year precipitation spread out pretty evenly throughout the year. I'm sure the worst runoff is when the ground is frozen and the snow is melting, but then the ground is frozen so there is little erosion of the contamination. I don't know if you could pick a less environmentally impactful place for industry. Certainly looks better than any of the lithium mines you see pictures of.

Here is the 4 power plants, the town, and the mine stretching off about 10 miles into the distance.


Each one of those plants can 100% power the city of Tacoma at the highest peak usage they have ever had.

[oil pan 4]

Battery materials and other rare earths from coal ash. Starts at 4:30

gas light setting: melt retina

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

Battery materials and other rare earths from coal ash.

And in the end, with a much lesser environmental impact than conventional mining for battery materials. But it's easier to simply display carbon dioxide as evil and charge more for anything supposedly "greener".

[freebeard]

Isn't elephant in the room Thorium?

Originally Posted by DDG

Thorium Vs. Coal: And the Hands-Down Winner Is ...
https://bearroombrawl.wordpress.com/...own-winner-is/
There is a syntax problem here. Evidently the thorium in a ton of coal produces 13 times the energy generated from burning the coal. That seems to be more or less in line with the Oak Ridge figures which show that the thorium is far more energy productive than the coal.
....
Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste ...
large.stanford.edu/publications/coal/references/hvistendahl/
At issue is coal's content of uranium and thorium, both radioactive elements. They occur in such trace amounts in natural, or "whole," coal that they aren't a problem. But when coal is burned into fly ash, uranium and thorium are concentrated at up to 10

[oil pan 4]

Thorium can be mined from coal ash.
All you could ever want. Till we are a type 1 civilization and thorium reactors are a hobby, "for educational purposes only", backup generators, ect.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Can't it also serve for medical purposes such as radiotherapy for cancer treatment?

[oil pan 4]

If you mean the bismuth 218 phenomenon then yes.
Bismuth 218 can only be made from thorium decay and has the peculiar property of being highly radioactive, but it only pops off an alpha particle which decays it into stabile but toxic thallium 214.
So in theory bi218 can be given to someone ate up with fast growing cancer, be given a bismuth 218 concoction the cancer will eat up the bismuth be irradiated then poisoned then give the person a chelation therapy and the person pees put the thallium.
But no one's ever made enough bismuth 218 to try it.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

If you mean the bismuth 218 phenomenon then yes.

I was not that specific, just lurking about the viability of another use for coal ash that seems to have been mostly neglected by the tree-huggers.