(no subject)

[fivemack]

A Greenpeace article

http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/climate/greenpeace-shuts-down-coal-fired-power-station-20071008

includes the line 'And it will only be 45 per cent efficient, in an age when power stations can reach 95 per cent efficiency'.

This is a coal-fired power station, so 45% efficiency in converting thermal to electrical energy is I think extremely good.

95% thermal efficiency implies, by the Carnot equation, that the heater is twenty times hotter in Kelvin than the heatsink and that there are no other thermal losses in the system. With a heatsink laid on an infinite icefield at zero centigrade, the heater has only to be hot enough to boil tungsten. I was unaware that gas-cored fission reactors were either in production, or this enthusiastically endorsed by Greenpeace.

Comments

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

There is an interesting advertising exercise in promoting the pineapples from a potential giant greenhouse built at Hunterston to use the heat from the waste water of Hunterston B

Did you choose that station purely at random from among the nukes or did you deliberately pick one whose two reactors tripped (http://www.bmreports.com/servlet/com.logica.neta.bwp_PanBmData) on Wednesday (this is public data; search for BM units T_HUNB-7 and T_HUNB-8 for settlement days 2007-10-04 to 2007-10-08, period *) and have not yet returned to generation? (Also... (http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article2091904.ece))

I also note RWE's planned coal-fired station at Blyth (http://www.rwe.com/generator.aspx/presse/language=en/id=76864?pmid=4001632), with coal coming into the Tyne and up a disused-but-repairable railway track. I don't think that quite makes Northumberland the equivalent of Siberia, but it's still fun to compare. Some people reckon that EU emissions allowances need to be floating around the €30-40 mark before serious investment into clean coal becomes profitable, and Phase 2 has been more or less rangebound (to within +/- 5% or so) over the last month, as previously discussed. At least one major European financial player has suggested there's a lot of upside potential on the contract, though.