Oil via Nuke power plant in Canada's Alberta Tar Sands- maybe w/ hydrogen!

Seems some experimental work showed the "highest-known production rate of hydrogen by high-temperature electrolysis" - and recovering usable fuel from the Athabasca Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada - the largest oil deposits in the world - and making gasoline requires only copious amounts of steam and hydrogen, both products of a reactor with good hydrogren generation. Alberta Hydrogren used in automotive fuel cells might replace 400,000 gallons of gasoline per day, but with no infrastructure for car use, the immediate use is recovering usable fuel from the Athabasca Tar Sands.

SO SHOULD THE NYT PRETEND THIS IS ALL ABOUT A HYDROGEN ECONOMY?

:-)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/politics/28hydrogen.html?oref=login

"The developers also said the hydrogen could be used by oil companies to stretch oil supplies even without solving the fuel cell and transportation problems."

"But the plan requires the building of a new kind of nuclear reactor, at a time when the United States is not even building conventional reactors. And the cost estimates are uncertain."

"The new method involves running electricity through water that has a very high temperature. As the water molecule breaks up, a ceramic sieve separates the oxygen from the hydrogen. The resulting hydrogen has about half the energy value of the energy put into the process, the developers say. Such losses may be acceptable, or even desirable, because hydrogen for a nuclear reactor can be substituted for oil, which is imported and expensive, and because the basic fuel, uranium, is plentiful.

The idea is to build a reactor that would heat the cooling medium in the nuclear core, in this case helium gas, to about 1,000 degrees Celsius, or more than 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. The existing generation of reactors, used exclusively for electric generation, use water for cooling and heat it to only about 300 degrees Celsius."

<snip>

'recovering usable fuel from the Athabasca Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada - the largest oil deposits in the world'
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Bush has this way of inching his evil self into any Nation with a healthy stash of energy supply.

His sudden recognition and gratitude to Canada for 9-11 help just HAD to have an alterior reason. Does Bush do anything good just for the sake of goodness? There just had to be something BIG in it for him.
Crooked is as crooked does.

Have the Saudi/Bush plans for world oil domination reached to our blessed Canadian neighbors?

Beware Canada, when George Bush smiles at you, calls you his friends, BEWARE!
While you're thinking "he's not such a bad guy..see how nice he can be"...a hundred bucks says he's already sized you up and has your wallet in his back pocket.

Shifty, lying & crooked. He's a thief, a con artist. Practiced, seasoned and paid well for his silver-tongued talents.

Trust us when we say that if Bush and pals want your oil reserves they WIL have them.
THis visit comes with a very high price.
Buyer Beware.

Please let the worlds greatest con artist know that the heist their planning with Canadas Oil Reserves is to be met with caution and mistrust of Bush and his gang of filthy greedy thugs.

Send him away..send the message loud and clear..and remind your leader what Bush is really after.
No doubt Bush will make Canada a tempting offer.
But that's what they did to the leader of Iraq years ago.
BEWARE, THIS BUSH VISIT.

Thanks
Blaze

the tar sand has been discussed previously, and apparently rejected. The last I heard of it was about a year ago.

The Canadians were considering building a standard "Candu" nuclear power plant that would provide the steam needed to get the heavy tar-like bitumen to drip into spots where it could then be recovered. The electricity could be used in standard of electrolysis of water to provide hydrogen, or could be sent south to the U.S. grid.

Currently, natural gas is used both to make steam and as a source of hydrogen by the steam reforming process. Burning it, of course, results in some GHG emissions, and decreases the among of natural gas available for such uses as space heating, for which natural gas is particularly well-suited. For that use, it is extremely efficient and emits fewer greenhouse gases and other pollutants than heating oil and electrical resistance heating.

I am not a great fan of nukes, but I am not totally opposed to them either considering the draw-backs of burning fossil fuels. I much prefer renewables, but I have very serious doubts as to whether renewables alone can provide sufficient uninterrupted electricity for an adequate, although much more modest, standard of living.

Although I strongly support nuclear power, using nuclear energy to obtain oil not something for which I'd like to see nuclear resources used. I believe that we must move away from all fossil fuels, including these tar sands. Everything I've read about these sands suggests that developing them will have an enormously high negative environmental impact.

Now some comments on the nuclear/hydrogen part:

Irrespective of what the article says, the HTGCR (High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor) is not really "new." This basic design has been around for a long time, although many improvements have been made in the reactor design and the newer designs are supposed to over come some of the drawbacks. One commercial HTGCR operated commercially in the United States, at Ft. St. Vrain in Colorado. This reactor, built by General Atomics was a commercial failure. Pilot plants at Peach Bottom GA operated successfully at 85% capacity from 1967 until 1973. Although modern nuclear plants typically run at much better than 90% of design capacity - even better than 100% in rare cases because of improvements in fuel management practices in the last several decades, 85% capacity was pretty good in those days.

A similar reactor also operated in Germany and was shut down not because of its operating characteristics but because of Chernobyl, which actually had nothing to do with this reactor. Germany has committed itself to abandoning nuclear power, even though German nuclear power operations have the lowest external (environmental-health cost) of any energy producing effort in all of Europe. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=5609&mesg_id=5609 I mention this only to point up that while we often think of stupidity as being the exclusive providence of the United States, it exists elsewhere as well. A German pilot HTGCR operated very successfully from 1966 to 1988.

The British Magnox reactor - now obsolete - was also a gas cooled reactor. Over twenty of these reactors operated, and eight are still on line. Carbon dioxide was the moderator/coolant. Because the reactor used Magnesium alloy fuel elements, it had limited temperature ranges, and probably was not suited for hydrogen or fuel manufacture. The Magnesium fuel elements also decayed rather easily when stored under water, not a good thing. These reactors - like the RBMK (Chernobyl) type reactors - were also suitable for weapons diversion. Most British nuclear weapons had their Plutonium manufactured in Magnox reactors. Good riddance to these reactors.


Modern High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactors will probably nonetheless become very important in the next twenty or thirty years. Many, many of them may be built. Both Japan and China have operating research HTGC reactors and China is building the world's first commercial HTGCR designed exclusively to produce hydrogen. The hydrogen will probably be reacted with coal to give motor fuels. (Too bad about the coal part.) Coupled to thermochemical reactors of various types, and generating electricity as a by product in the cooling of hot gases and supercritical fluids, these reactors will operate at very high thermodynamic efficiency.

There are other high temperature reactors. There is a lot of talk about the cheap modular pebble bed reactor which is a South African design. This is a high temperature reactor with a gas coolant, and could easily be modified to produce hydrogen or other high temperature products. This type of reactor will probably become very important, rivaling the HTGCR type for high temperature applications. I don't like these reactors because the fuel pellets are so stable that they are difficult to recycle. This is not a good thing, since it is wasteful of actinide and fission product resources. (The fuel pebbles are designed to simply be thrown away.)

Some of the liquid metal reactor types can also be modified for high temperature applications. I'm not fond of liquid metal reactors, in general, but I have no doubt that types based on the now abandoned IFR - developed in the US - will someday be commercial.

A better reactor for high temperature applications is probably the Molten Salt Reactor. This is, in my view, a superior design since one can modify the fuel characteristics for all sorts of interesting purposes. Apparently the Gen IV reactor program is not pursuing this design however, choosing the HTGCR for high temperature applications. This is, in my view, a serious mistake, but one that will certainly be rectified after I am dead in the late 21st century. This design just has too many advantages to be forever buried. I predict that if the human race survives - a somewhat dubious prospect especially given our rather myopic proclivity for oil - molten salt reactors will be the work horse of future energy supplies. Actually though the MSR is not really just one type of reactor: It can be regarded almost as an infinite set of reactors with common elements. These reactors can be employed to make weapons designers look for other lines of work, to achieve extremely high fuel utilization, do on line fuel recycling, burn undesirable nuclides via transmutation, generate hydrogen, destroy hazardous chemical waste, recover hydrogen and carbon from waste materials, the list goes on and on. Some day humanity - if, again, it survives - will look back on Alvin Weinberg and wonder how it is we valued him so little in his own time.


As for the high temperature electrolytic cell with molecular sieves reported in the NY Times article, it may give better performance than traditional electrolysis, which isn't saying much, because traditional electrolysis is extremely wasteful of energy. I have a hard time believing that this method of water splitting will prove superior to thermochemical methods like the Sulfur Iodine cycle, but I don't know enough about the system to effectively judge it.