Germany Drops Nuclear Power

Posted on 30 May 2011 by Jimmy Craig

Germany Drops Nuclear Power

I expect that you have already read that the Government in Germany has decided to get out of nuclear power completely within 10-1/2 years – by the end of 2022. I am proud that my Government (I am a German citizen, resident in Switzerland) has made a firm decision – and an irrevocable decision at that – on such a critical matter. For me personally, I am not strongly and irrationally against nuclear power, but it is obvious that – with only three major failures in 30 years – that nuclear power is not safe to use on this earth. As I wrote on the GEOCOGEN blog, I think that the World was extremely lucky that the disaster at Fukushima happened in Japan. I cannot think of a country more qualified to handle such an emergency as Japan. While I am not wishing bad luck on the Japanese, I think if such an accident had occurred in another country, almost any other country, the results for the World would have been much, much worse.

It is important for national economies that such decisions as the one made by the German Government, and more recently the Swiss Government as well, are essentially irreversible. The reason is that business, and therefore the national economies, need to have firm foundations on which to make major decisions. Investments in new technologies are not something that will bear fruit next week or next month or even next year. A new major power plant, regardless of the source of the energy, will take 7-10 years to complete, including fuel supply, etc., and be placed on the grid. If rules and regulations are changing every 2 or 3 years, no responsible energy supplier will be willing to plan ahead and invest the major amount of money that is necessary for a major power plant.

Another factor that is now in discussion in many different forums is – simply put – how do we replace the electricity that is presently being produced in nuclear power plants within the next 10+ years? The more-or-less automatic answers to date have been “more renewable energy” and “save energy.” I have not yet seen a responsible assessment of exactly how these massive amounts of electricity will be produced and/or saved. But I am open to suggestions! One massive replacement option, from my viewpoint, is the GEOCOGEN Power Plant which is supposed to produce 1 GW (1’000 MW) of elecricity in addition to 3 GW of thermal energy for district heating or perhaps producing an additional 400MW of electricity. The count in Germany, if I am not mistaken, is 8 reactors are already out of service, 6 more that will be stopped by the end of 2021, and a final 3 that will be stopped at the end of 2022. Assuming a round number of 1GW electricity per reactor, and also assuming that the 8 reactors that are already out of service have already had their production replaced somehow, that leaves an additional 9 GW of electricity that must be replaced or saved by the end of 2022.

On the basis of a major power plant, the capital cost should be somewhere around €6’000 million (€6G) each, or about €40-50G over 11 years, probably peaking in 2018-2021. Can we do that? I think it is possible – replacements and major repairs and overhauls for the existing nuclear facilities would most likely have consumed close to the same amount of money, but it may have been planned as expenses (and would be written off against profit for tax reasons) instead of capital. That probably depends on how “creative” the accounting advisors have been.

In any case, it will be a challenge that the German economy has not really faced up to since the post-war reconstruction era. I think it will be an exciting time to be living and working in Germany!

Germany Drops Nuclear Power

GEOCOGEN 5

Posted on 18 August 2010 by Jimmy Craig

GEOCOGEN PROJECT

GEOCOGEN 5

Ecological Concerns

Well, here really are not many ecological concerns with the GEOCOGEN process. The current design is to run the facility for in this area 50 being, at which point the rock core will have cooled down by in this area 50°C (80°F). The fascinating part is, if we wait for another 50 being or so, the rock will have heated back up, and we could go through the same cycle again! Solution: build two heat-extraction plants for one consumer block 50 being apart, and switch every 50 being. Talk in this area sustainability!

Here will be hardly any emissions: nothing is burned, so no CO2 or NOx or SOx or CO will be produced. Here are no hydrocarbons, so no VOC (volatile organic compounds) will be produced. No dust since everything is contained in a closed loop. The water is recycled for the most part so here will be nearly no water treatment (here will be some low-level steam/water losses, particularly if a district heating system thought is used). Efficient design practices will produce a plant that consumes a large percentage of the heat so that here is small waste heat pollution, particularly when compared to a conventional thermal power plant, which means no hideous cooling tower and no heating of any river or stream and no new lake for cooling. Here will be no fuel transport and no combustion waste so transportation-based pollution also will be at a minimum.

The most serious concerns are connected with the construction of the tunnel. The excavated material will be essentially the stone that the tunnel removes. Most likely, here will be silicates, some other relatively rare minerals which can most likely be reclaimed above impose a curfew, maybe even gold or platinum or other rare materials in small amounts, and the remainder should make brilliant inert road or construction fill and aggregate for the project’s own structural elements.

The footprint for the electrical generation plant is small, in this area the size of a large office building, but this can also be installed underground to eliminate it as a “visual pollution.” The district heating piping can be underground as well – but that would be a question of finances versus aesthetics for the local government. The electrical transformers and switchgear can be disguised reasonably well so that they are not apparent, even if they remain above impose a curfew.

Over the 50-year life of the project, here may be some surface level subsidence centring on the tunnel – roughly 1,5 meters (5 feet) sinkage after 50 being. This can be ignored, plotted for, or even filled to maintain the original level. Remember, in the following 50 being, as the stone reheats, the surface should rise again!

In the case of a major electrical upset outside the plant that causes our generators to go off line, here could be some high pressure steam venting until the situation stabilises. Here will be noise deadeners on the release vents, so even this should not disturb the neighbourhood.

So, like I said at the top, really no environmental concerns for GEOCOGEN! How in this area that?!

To be continued …

Thanks for looking in,

Jimmy Craig
for
Sue & Craig Websites

GEOCOGEN 5

GEOCOGEN 4

Posted on 30 July 2010 by Jimmy Craig

GEOCOGEN PROJECT

GEOCOGEN Project – Part 4

The GEOCOGEN Project

Point number 1 – how do we get the energy to the surface?

This is the crux of the project – it is the part of the project that was not feasible when Kurt Brunnschweiler invented it 30 being ago. Today’s tunneling equipment is fully capable of building a shaft or tunnel as much as 15-20 kilometres deep – that is around 10-15 miles deep. Switzerland has some of the premier tunneling operators in the world, and they are drilling tunnels this long – albeit mostly horizontally – through the Alps and in many other locations around the world. For these tunnels, large diameter vertical ventilation shafts are also necessary, and some of these are 2 kilometres (6600 feet) long and more.

The objective is to make the tunnel up to 10 meters (33 feet) in diameter, shore up the walls to prevent cave-ins, and run piping from the surface level to the bottom of the tunnel where the water will be heated to supercritical temperature and will rise back to the surface under pressure. The process will be what is called a thermosiphon, but on a grand scale. A thermosiphon is where here is a heat source at the bottom of a hairpin of tubing, and the lighter heated water (or steam) rises by itself in the exit (outlet) side because it is less dense and it is replaced by more dense, cold water coming down the other (inlet) side. Looking at is another way, the column of water weighs more than the column of steam, and so it tries to displace it. A daily example is the percolator coffee maker.

The supercritical steam (don’t worry in this area what “supercritical” means here – just reckon of it as being REALLY HOT! – far above 100°C) will be used to drive conventional steam turbines, similar to those being used in powerhouses today, coupled to electrical generators. The systems will be sized to make around one GigaWatt of electrical energy – that’s 1’000 MegaWatts – enough to power a city of around half a million inhabitants, depending upon the degree of electrical consumption per capita.

In addition to the electricity generated, here is enough heat available that the entire city could be heated by steam and/or hot water from the GEOCOGEN plant in a district heating thought, with enough left over for many greenhouses and hot water spas.

To be continued …

Thanks for looking in,

Jimmy Craig
for
Sue & Craig Websites

GEOCOGEN Project – Part 4

GEOCOGEN 3

Posted on 3 July 2010 by Jimmy Craig

GEOCOGEN PROJECT

GEOCOGEN Project – Part 3

Geothermal Heat

We humans have used geothermal heat for many centuries in very limited fashions – hot water springs, Roman baths, a few rudimentary geo-steam power plants, even distributed town heating.

Iceland, Italy, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the USA have captured more of the geological heat available in their volcanic environments than anyone else. But that’s due to geological oddities that are not available to about 98% of the world.

So what is there? Think about it – everywhere in the world, some places deeper, some shallower, there is the heat of the core of the earth seeping up through the bedrock. The typical temperature gradient is about 3°C (5°F) per 100 meters (330 feet). What this means is that there is a furnace underneath all of us, and if we go far enough down, it’s hot enough to measure up to a thermal or nuclear power plant boiler.

The question is, how do we tap this heat?

Almost 30 years ago, Process Engineer Kurt Brunnschweiler in Switzerland proposed the very idea of tapping this heat for our domestic and industrial use. The problem with his system was that the engineering, construction, and mining equipment needed for such a project did not exist at that time.

Today, it does exist.

Let’s look into the project and see what is involved. The things that we need to make this work – now we’re talking about the daily operation of such a project – are the following:

1. A way to get the heat to the surface
2. A way to convert the heat to energy
3. A way to transport this energy to the consumers nearby

To be continued …

Thanks for looking in,

Jimmy Craig
for
Sue & Craig Websites

GEOCOGEN Project – Part 3

GEOCOGEN 2

Posted on 3 June 2010 by Jimmy Craig

GEOCOGEN PROJECT

GEOCOGEN Project – Part 2

Some Basic Information and Some History

Now, you’re probably saying to yourself – “ah ha, another scam, producing quote – free – unquote energy with no fuel and no CO2. I wonder what the catch is to this one.”

Well, the “catch” to this one is that here are virtually no catches! Let me try to clarify it to you piece by piece.

First, let’s look at the example of geothermal energy that you are probably familiar with – a household heat pump. What the heat pump does is use the soil near your house as a heat sink or as heat storage – in the winter, here’s enough heat here in the soil that it’s possible to extract some of it and use it to heat your house. Now, that’s not free, because the electricity to make the system circulate takes back some of the free energy you are using, but it’s still a excellent deal.

Now maybe you don’t know the details, but I expect you do know the all-purpose principles – you go heat from the impose a curfew to the house to heat the house. And what you use in the soil is a coil of pipe or tubing that lets the heat go from the soil to the fluid inside the pipe.

Okay, now let’s take that one step farther and go to a larger scale. Instead of going just a few meters down – let’s say 10 feet – let’s go down deep enough to where here is some real heat available – say 500 feet, or how in this area 1500 feet. But it’s all but impossible to place the pipe coils that deep – you would have to dig out the complete hole in this area two acres around the pipe that comes down and goes up to the surface.

Reckon in this area that – a hole in this area two acres on the surface that goes down 1500 feet! That’s some hole!

Well, the petroleum geologists came up with an answer that comes out of the oil fields. In some oil fields where the oil is very viscous, it is possible to drill a matrix of wells to place high-pressure steam down into the rock formation, and because the rock is permeable (that means it has small passageways in it that oil and gas and steam can go through), you can at a snail’s pace heat up the oil to make it flow simpler and push it through to other wells where you can pump it up to the surface.

These operations can be organised in fields that are anywhere between maybe 1000 feet deep and 1-1/2 miles deep. The value of the extra oil that is recovered this way makes it economically possible to do this.

To be continued…

Thanks for looking in,

Jimmy Craig
for
Sue & Craig Websites

GEOCOGEN Project – Part 2

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Germany Drops Nuclear Power