Fossil fuels can be a bit fussy to access, and geopolitics tends to make prices volatile. Burning them also takes carbon out of the ground and puts it into the atmosphere, with undesirable climate implications. The hunt for a solution has been on for quite some time.
Various synthetic fuels have been proposed as a solution, wherein carbon dioxide is captured from the air and chemically processed into useful fuel. Done properly, this could solve the climate issue where any fuel burned has its carbon later captured to make more fuel. The problem, though, is that this process is very energy intensive. Given the demands, it’s no surprise that some are looking towards nuclear reactors for the answer.
Hot To Go
Burning fossil fuels is bad for the environment, but the problem is that they’re so very useful. Take transport, for example. Fossil fuels are perfect for this application because they pack a huge amount of energy into very little space while weighing relatively little to boot. At the same time, more than a third of global carbon emissions in 2021 came from transportation, according to the International Energy Agency. While electric vehicles are rapidly gaining market share in some areas, the complete phase out of internal combustion engines is by no means a sure thing. Meanwhile, sectors like aviation are proving especially difficult to fully electrify. We want to get off fossil fuels, but circumstances demand we continue to use them.
Enter synthetic fuels. They’re essentially drop-in replacements for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel that are produced from CO2, water and clean energy rather than being refined from petroleum. When made using captured CO2 and cleanly-produced hydrogen, they have the potential to significantly reduce transport emissions when taking the whole system into account. All this, without requiring an entirely new fueling infrastructure or any changes for the end user.
By capturing carbon and then chemically processing it into a useful combustible fuel, we could keep using existing technologies that we already find practical, like combustion-engined vehicles. Their emissions would still be undesirable, but they’d be offset by the capture process used to make new fuel. The idea is to create a closed loop for carbon emissions. The problem is finding a synfuel production process that’s efficient—both in terms of carbon capture and chemical processing—and to find the energy to run it.
Indeed, synthesizing hydrocarbons is an energy-intensive process. The process is well-understood at this point. Capturing CO2 from the air, generating hydrogen via electrolysis, and catalytically combining them into fuels at high temperatures and pressures all require a lot of energy input. For synfuels to deliver real climate benefits, this energy must come from clean, non-fossil sources.
What do we do when we need a lot of power with minimum emissions? We look at nuclear! Several U.S. Department of Energy labs are actively researching nuclear-powered synfuel production, and the DOE is funding a $20 million demonstration project in Utah. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, the Nuclear Industry Association has been urging the country to seize a leadership position in this emerging field as well.
On a very basic level, a conventional nuclear power plant could provide electricity for various processes involved in synthetic fuel production. However, that’s not the only way to go. For some processes, the heat from a nuclear reactor could be directly used to power the synfuel production process. That is, rather than using heat from a nuclear reaction to create steam to turn a turbine, a purpose-built synfuel reactor could just deliver heat directly to a chemical process that needs it. Nuclear heat could be useful for desalinating seawater for hydrogen electrolysis, or for carbon capture, too.
The question is whether all the effort will be worthwhile. Competing with regular old fossil fuels on price will be a must, even if some degree of subsidy is used to lean the scales in the favor of synfuels. There are hopes that nuclear-produced synfuels could reach prices of $3 a gallon with the right feedstocks and input costs, but that’s words on a page at this stage. There is plenty of engineering to be done before you’ll be filling your car with 20 gallons of nuke gas at your local station.
Efficiency also comes into it, and this could play a big role in how synfuels pan out. Take cars, for example. Automakers have figured out how to make supremely efficient electric vehicles in the past decade. Electrical engineers have become experts at squirting power efficiently all over the country, and there are more EV charging stations than ever. Does it make sense to spin up bespoke nuclear synfuel plants to keep internal combustion alive, when the technology to replace it already exists? Arguments could be made for more demanding applications like trucking or aviation, but then the market for synfuels grows smaller.
In any case, nuclear synfuel holds great promise. Whether it can overcome the general resistance towards all nuclear technologies remains to be seen. Still, the tides may be changing on that front, and the future is anyone’s guess. If you’re a fan of fossil fuels and the like, be happy—there is hope yet that the flammable fluid market will roll on.
Make nuclear synfuels and bring muscle cars back. I believe in a less shitty and annoying future, I am ready for it
So we will all be driving nuclear cars just like they said in the 50’s, just with one intermediary step.
Basically the same as hydrogen fuel cell stuff except the tank can be small and unpressurized and all the engine tech is already extremely mature
AMEN!
Also, another point being that heavy machines will not be electric, unless somehow a miracle battery comes along, that does not require limited amount materials and has the charge capacity near fuel. And seriously, i see no army having an electric tanks etc for a long long time.
I know there’s those heavy heavy earth moving machines, that are electric, but they do not move outside the given path, like a tram.
I know, i know, there’s some electric tank prototype, but how are you going to charge that in the middle of a field? Generators with fossil fuel or mobile nucular truck.
The best way imho is to get the E-fuel infra built as fast as possible, so that current and future ICE engines can be run, until the electric utopia becomes a reality.
Synfuels yes for the applications that really can’t migrate but I don’t think it will be cost effective for passenger cars. Say it costs $20/gallon, the US military won’t care and heavy industry might not either but drivers will and might switch to EVs instead of paying thousands a month in fuel.
No cartels… Don’t have to build pipelines or oil derricks out in the middle of the deep ocean, no tanker ships, the reservoir is above all our heads instead of hidden under deep rock in limited quantities, the energy is cheap…
When properly scaled, it ought to be a lot cheaper. Of course getting this scaled to that point is a ways off
The graphic in the article above from Argonne National Labs is claiming a potential conversion rate of ~73 kWh for 1 gallon of synfuel. Even at dirt cheap wholesale energy prices (cheapest business rate in the USA is around $.07/kWh), the cost of energy alone is more than $5 USD per gallon. And that’s before you even get any of the material inputs (let’s say you get those for free), pay for any of the extraction and refining equipment, or ship the finished product anywhere.
Porsche AG is heavily invested in synfuel projects (I think they call it e-fuel). Currently the stuff coming out of their proof of concept plant costs ~$20 USD/gallon, but their most optimistic estimate for a large-scaled process is around $8 USD/gallon. And that’s the cost at the refinery, not the pump. Which, yeah, I’m sure some muscle car enthusiasts would gladly pay that to keep their passion projects alive. But let’s not be under any illusion that this will ever cost less than the price ceiling that would trigger a nationwide riot over fuel prices.
Barring the discovery of some loophole in thermodynamics, a BEV will always travel farther on the same energy that could be used to make synfuel. The niches where it could have an impact and compete with the oil cartels are aviation fuel and some long-haul applications. But for ground transportation it will always be the exotic single-malt whiskey of fuels.
That is why the production facilities need to be built massively. As someone here said, besides nucular power, this would be a very good way to keep the “renewable” power generation fully utilized during when it would not otherwise be.
The military dont give a shit about emissions to begin with, you can bet your tush that the military will be the last ones using fossil fuels.
Them and the third world
“how do you charge a tank in the middle of a field”
I just imagined all the soldiers furiously cranking handles to charge the tank like those hand-crank lights you can get for camping.
Put caterpillar treads and weapons platforms on a diesel-electric locomotive and you’d have something.
I believe diesel-electric traction has already been demonstrated on some modern battle tanks…
“I just imagined all the soldiers furiously cranking handles to charge the tank ”
FYI (some) WWII fighter aircraft had a large clockspring to start the aircraft if electricity was not available, some other fighters used cartridge starting. I’m not sure if some had both the clockspring and cartridge start.
Usually not a spring but an intertia starter–basically you have a very high gearing so that turning the crank gets a flywheel spinning very fast, and then you have a clutch to suddenly dump that flywheel’s momentum into the crankshaft. Main advantage: it sounds really awesome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YN_PWX7uDSw
I had a friend who put a cartridge starter on his truck. It got interesting when he got pulled over and had to explain why the rear half of a break-open shotgun was attached to his dashboard.
Futurama already had that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tNJeS6O6ds
You can argue many armies have already run electric tanks – in many the drive has been electric even if the power source happens to be a ICE generator that is still onboard. And for an Army in a well funded nation it doesn’t much matter if the resources required are a bit limited – depleted uranium armour isn’t a commonly available resource either, but worth it.
So with modern electric motors combined with battery or fuel cell technologies it becomes quite plausible that an ‘all’ electric tank makes real working practical sense. A tank even the lighter more scout tanks have ranges that amount to bugger all – say 300 miles when driving on roads! So they are already heavily reliant on the logistics train to keep moving in any sort of manoeuvrer warfare, so as long as the electric version can be similarly practical…
Electric would come with other potential gains – battery and fuel cells are more efficient than any ICE generator, so the waste heat generated in the machine to keep it running is reduced. And that probably makes it easier to conceal or disguise its thermal footprint to IR camera, reduces the AC requirement to keep the crew comfortable and the computers working…
Not saying synthetic fuels are a bad idea right now, just saying don’t prejudge the current/near future potential of more directly electronic systems – only really been seeing serious development effort in the last decade or two, and look how far they have already come. Or for a recent and similarly novel example compare it to landing a rocket on its tail, that seemed ‘impossible’ too even though it was clearly plausible, with many folks who aught to know the state of the technology still claiming it couldn’t be done reliably even after the first successes.
I just don’t see any sudden fix for the EV problem. Miracle batteries have been promised for decades and we are still here. That’s why i would heavily invest in synthetic fuels to keep the world turning.
Hardely need an improvement as it stands – current battery and fuel cells are very capable. Plus just like in the case of portable electronics once they actually created a tiny bit of demand for serious power from virtually nowhere Lithium battery became a thing and got ever better – lots of things have been promised for decades, but it won’t actually get any real research effort until after the need is already there to make that research hopefully very profitable. Sometimes you might get lucky researching something else and make a breakthrough, but it isn’t going to just happen if nobody puts in the effort.
Flying cars for instance absolutely could be made, and could have been for at least 30 years without much fuss – just not actually a good idea that will get through regulation etc, so its not worth investing to make it happen.
same for nuclear waste
(For the EV problem: catenary for bus/tram and long distance combined with batteries for last mile has been done for a long time last century in many places. We could get that back, if we really wanted a working solution.)
Except the price of batteries should come down by a factor of 10x so electric cars wouldn’t cost $10k more to their comparable gasoline counterparts.
Highly unlikely that a main battle tank would be viable as an electric. The energy density isnt there. Besides, wouldnt want to sit in any tank taking a hit, but a tank with 1/3 of the internal space filled with lithium based rechargeables, what could possibly go wrong when they get pierced by shrapnel ?
Wouldn’t want to sit in a tank taking a hit anyway, and a penetration even less… For the folks inside a tank taking a penetration it is going to be much the same as what would happen anyway even if the fuel, hydralic etc lines do not get severed and the ammo doesn’t detonate on a modern tank – the shrapnel ricocheting around inside a steel box is never good for the crew… And if it is an ‘oh bugger the tank is on fire’ moment the battery is probably easier to deal with as you get out of the tank than the liquid fuel that will flow everywhere.
Battery do have lower energy density, but the payoff of vastly better efficiency than the ICE especially to run all the computers and communications gear while stationary can make that up at least somewhat. Electric drivetrain are able to be really darn tiny and light in comparison to the combustion engine and gearboxes required to move a tank – which gives you more volume and mass budget for armour and batteries. I’m not going to say it definitely works for everyone. But it is certain in the ballpark of plausible and its also going to depend a great deal on how you’re expecting to use your ‘tanks’ – there is afterall a reason the French still go a bundle on wheeled armour as they are faster etc on good ground…
Funfact: some of that heavy machinary has been running 100% electric forever now. Specifically semi-stationary mining and earth-moving equipment (think huge excavators) have been running power tethers because it is the most effective method of powering them.
Electric Dump Trucks have been using elevation and load differentials to transport ore to processing plants without fuel input. In some cases the power accumulation from engine braking with a full load exceeds the return trip demand by so much that they need to “dump power” at the processing plant to avoid over charging on their next trip.
https://hackaday.com/2019/08/22/electric-dump-truck-produces-more-energy-than-it-uses/
Electric Dump Trucks have been using elevation and load differentials to transport ore to processing plants without fuel input. In some cases the power accumulation from engine braking with a full load exceeds the return trip demand by so much that they need to “dump power” at the processing plant to avoid over charging on their next trip.
https://hackaday.com/2019/08/22/electric-dump-truck-produces-more-energy-than-it-uses/
Hate to break it to you but EV’s are the muscle cars now – nothing can or likely ever will get off the line faster than something that can dump a megawatt of power from zero RPM with no need to shift gears and can do it almost perfectly every time.
There’s already a big hacking/modding scene and the beauty of that is that EV’s are fairly simple and there’s no emissions for the regulators / neighbours to point to as an excuse to ban you from playing with them.
Hate to break it to you but going fast is not actually the main purpose of a muscle car, being loud and ostentatious is.
Specifically for the purpose of spooking the squares, yes
I think you said the quiet part out loud. It’s not about performance so much as it is performative.
If Toyota is right, and I’m not saying they are, then next year will be the end of electric cars. They are about to introduce the new type of green vehicle that’s ammonia powered. They expected to release at the end of this year but rumors are they will be on the road in Q1 2025. That means you can have cars that drive like a normal car, have tons of power, fill up like a gasoline car, act like it in every way, except it uses ammonia to hydrogen as a fuel source. No more hydrogen storage problems, no more pollution. And the more you drive, the greener the environment will become.The exhaust of ammonia cars are what plants actually crave. My employer ordered several ships with ammonia engines. It’s the new green thing with only upsides.
Ammonia to hydrogen in the car sounds like a perfect solution to the limitations of hydrogen cars, if there are no showstopper caveats, and assuming that ammonia can be create in a cost-effective green way. But like any engineering solution, there has to be tradeoffs. What are they?
Haber-Bosch reaction. Nitrogen fertilizers are made from ammonia, which is made as the first step in the process. Unfortunately, the same process also makes nitrogen things that go kaboom and military loves those over fertilizers for the obvious reasons.
Point being, there is ammonia produced aplenty worldwide, just not being used much more (than it should have been).
Bring them back? When did they leave? Modern muscle cars may lack classic styling but they slaughter older muscle cars in power.
But why even use FT process in the first place? With our current reactor technology it’s already possible to transmutate other elements into diesel, gasoline and propane. It’s not rocket science, all it takes is right people with the will to do things (like Musk) instead of current gerontocracy hell bent on taking bribes and being corrupt just for the heck of it.
Why do that when it’s cheaper to cut down all the trees and turn them into syngas? That’s the future we’re gonna get.
Because gassification has really shitty fuel economy. Turns out, when you break the Carbon bonds in solid carbonaecous material (like wood, but also coal etc), you lose most of the chemical energy. Gassification is usually used to incinerate waste, and get at least a little useful work out of it.
Go look up any gassification setup you can find the real numbers for, and find out how efficient it isn’t.
It’s like the bad old days of steam power, before accountants started asking questions about fuel efficiency that led to the development of thermodynamics, only there’s nothing you can do to make gassification get better economy.
No it’s not, unless you want very radioactive diesel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_transmutation
When you just produce CO2 (+other gasses) by burning (syn) fuels and there’s far less “capacity” for removing those gasses from the atmosphere you got a long term problem…
Found the Musk fanboi.
Found the person that hates people that are successful.
Oh, another one.
Successful at what?
… being a gargantuan ass🕳
Just like “efficient” require context, success is also meaningless without it :P
Nothing about nuclear energy generation is cheap.
If you want to synthesize hydrocarbon fuels, use surplus solar energy during peak production times which IS cheap energy.
Opposite day
Except the energy, in unit prices.
You can sell nuclear electricity profitably at 4 cents per kWh before transmission.
If the efficiency was 100% one gallon of synthetic fuel would only cost about $1.30. If you want the price below $3 per gallon, you need a process efficiency above 43% which isn’t unrealistic at all.
not unrealistic? I don’t know man, you need hydrogen and a carbon source, clean supply of either will put a sizeable dent into that target efficiency…
Well, that’s the challenge. However, synthetic fuel production with CO2 taken out of the air has been demonstrated and proven to work with at least 40% efficiency on a pilot plant scale and 60% efficiency with concentrated CO2 from a smoke stack. I remember reading about the research by Fraunhofer institute in Germany about 15 years ago.
How do you figure that? In the example of the US’s newest reactors, just the construction cost divided by their output for the duration of the operating license comes out higher than that. The workers would have to pay the owner for permission to come to work for that price to be profitable.
Unless you mean the company that owns the plant can profit at that price after being handed free reactors from the taxpayers?
Because that’s the going rate at which newly constructed reactors nearby are selling their power to the grid. Your mileage may vary.
A 1500 MWe reactor makes about 1.2e10 kWh of electricity per year, availability factor 0.9.
The reactor costs, let’s say $10 billion, and has an operating license for 60 years.
10e9 / 60 / 1.2e10 = 0.0139 or 1.4 cents per kWh. Add another $10 billion for wages and upkeep, and taxes (nuclear power is taxed more than it is subsidized) etc. over 60 years and you’d sill be under 3 cents total. Then there’s the extended license, where you can operate the plant for up to 85 years, making it even cheaper in the end.
It’s not difficult to make profit at 4 cents out of nuclear unless you’re doing stupid things, like having to pay 20 years of lost profits and business overhead while the government scratches their head over whether you’re even allowed to build the damn thing.
So yes, the company that owns the reactors can profit at that price after being handed a free, or at least half-free, reactor at taxpayer expense (and taking the 20-year license extension for granted).
The current construction cost for new reactors is running about $15-20 billion per GWe, and not just in the US. You can reasonably argue that much of that cost happens for stupid reasons and shouldn’t exist, but it exists nevertheless. Planning for how you feel the economy should work instead of how it does work is not a winning strategy, and political stupidity isn’t going away.
That’s just not the case. Nuclear power just isn’t subsidized like that.
That isn’t true either. For example, Areva built two EPR reactors in China for $10.5 billion. The one in Finland ended up at around €9 billion with massive budget overruns and delays, and €13.2 billion in Flamanville. These are 1.6 GWe plants. That comes down to about $9 billion per GWe.
These projects were grossly mismanaged and still they didn’t end up costing that much.
Ideally, if permitting and construction goes to plan, one should be able to build a modern EPR style reactor for under $5 billion per GWe.
It is pretty much granted. It’s in everybody’s interest – the limit is there simply so the operators wouldn’t neglect maintenance in the knowledge that they can run for 85 years by default. They have to pass re-certification to get the extension.
And how much for the cleanup afterwards? Or is the taxpayer going to pay for that after the operating company conveniently folds once the operating license comes to an end?
That’s not how power pools work.
Generators bid their incremental cost, clear the hourly marginal bid (the most expensive unit generating that period).
That’s how power pools work. Very, very basically.
Some operational details omitted…Peakers will bid average cost, maybe.
The profit isn’t in the hours where they’re marginal.
If the nukes are marginal something is very wrong.
Many nukes also have long term deals that are off the pool, mostly predate it.
they bid the ability to deliver a certain amount of power on demand (I don’t know if they bid the “hot” stand-by cost and get the energy price when the reserve is used on top, or if they bid and get stand-by cost plus average demand, wether the reserve is called or not)
to be fair, the biggest cost of a new reactor is probibly the synthetic cost of red tape that could be gotten rid of with a wave of basic common sense across congress. so yea never going to happen.
Forget about 3 dolares per gallon. Most of europe pays close to 2 dollars per litre, so you can expect about a threefold price increase per gallon in the future.
With European gas prices, you can pretty much bottle your own farts and boil it down with a tea candle, and it’ll still be cheaper than what you pay at the pump.
The problem in the EU is mostly the mad taxes and surcharges levied on electricity to be able to pay €200+ billion a year wealth redistribution to the renewable power industry. If you have to pay that tax for the electricity you buy for making synfuels, then of course it won’t work.
Not in my country, our last nuclear power plant required a government subsidy to guarantee prices at 0.128£/kWh to get built.
It’s a combination of societal, regulatory, imaginary and real issues that makes nuclear expensive, but as things currently stand, it is expensive.
No it’s not. It’s just paid by someone else, through taxes and subsidies.
What, and the petrochemical industry isn’t supported by taxes, tarrifs and subsidies?
Not to the extent, and the further question is, does it return more tax than it costs in subsidies to keep it running?
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/fossil-fuels/renewable-energy-still-dominates-energy-subsidies-in-fy-2022/
“Traditional fuels (coal, natural gas, oil and nuclear) received just 15 percent of all subsidies between FY 2016 and FY 2022, ”
Renewables produced 21% of the energy share and fossil fuels did the other 79% in that period, so renewable power got 21.3 times more subsidies per energy produced than fossil fuels.
That isn’t a fair comparison at all though Dude – the Fossil fuels have been subsidised for 100+ years to develop all the infrastructure that any modern fossil fuel subsidy gets to keep using, probably while making a massive profit still on the tax payers investment from decades ago (that they probably still wont’ have come close to paying back in taxes as those initial investments in setting up the industry once you factor in relative currency value are bonkers).
If you want to compare subsidies you have to actually compare with the history in mind to be at all fair.
“ Nothing about nuclear energy generation is cheap.”
Well. Building a nuclear power plant in rich countries IS very, very expensive, and yet the first nuclear plants were much cheaper and got just as hot.
That’s because a nuclear reactor is not intrinsically expensive; making it super safe is expensive.
You can imagine the climate crisis panning out in ways where poorer countries find that they can build big, cheap reactors, using domestic fuel in some cases. And they might also find it lucrative to export synfuels and desalinated water. So we might indeed end up with cheap nuclear power, by siting the actual reactors in Africa and maybe not making them quite as safe.
Just cheap for whom is the question.
Here the risk is socialised and the profit privatised.
Nuclear power plants can be made much cheaper. Design can be standardized and modularized. A huge part of the cost come about from regulatory processes and the long construction timelines.
Compatiblity with existing engines makes this a really attractive idea. It has the advantage of working like a hydrogen economy (nuclear energy is used to pwoer an endothermic production of a chemical fuel which is then burned when and where needed), but with liquid fuels that we are already good at storing and transporting. And its is compatible with existing vehicles, saving us any bother of trying to mass manufacture new ones to an arbitrary deadline. This is a much more sensible idea than the push for battery powered vehicles, there is a reason, energy density, that chemical fuels have always been favoured for transport applications. Quite apart from anything else, fossil fuels will run out some day, we should be getting this ready well before then, and indeed if we stopped burdening nuclear energy with excessive bureaucracy (new plants have had to submit hundred thousand page environemtnal impact reports on the effects they’d have on surrounding countryside) we could probably get this cheaper than actual fossil fuels (at the prices they were at several decades back) someday.
“carbon capture” is a buzzword…neither CO2 sequestering from the atmosphere or capturing it at the source is sustainable, as both require a shitload of energy, which has to come from somewhere…
“Carbon Capture” is something invented by oil companies to make everyone believe it’s possible to keep burning fossils and running away from the consequences with “clever tech.” Like the “carbon footprint” and “individual responsibility.”
geoengineering is clever tech and would solve the problem…we “just” have to figure out the practical bit
Carbon capture can be really easy and cheap. It is called plants that remove CO2 from the atmosphere. They can be processed into fuels and used for construction materials like wood. Plant and trees are easily buried to capture the carbon. Exactly the process that put oil there in the first place. If you used nuclear power to process plants to fuels, you would have a nearly closed carbon cycle.
Like nuclear?
Yeah. Uranium.
Or planting trees. What are you talking about? CO2 sequestering is a natural process and has been for eons
What? Someone has already been planting trees for centuries on a massive scale and felling adult ones just to put them back into coal mines and oil “holes”? Why have I never heard of this? /S²
“for eons” – that’s the problem, plants and algae are orders of magnitude slower at capturing CO2 then we are releasing it
Yeah, that is certainly true… I wonder if we sought out the plant that is best at sucking up carbon and turning it into biomass the fastest, then carefully bred it to maximize this trait, what’s the practical ceiling for rate of capture?
I wonder what it would be. Bamboo? Some kind of squash? Beats me
Maybe kelp:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/05/kelp-running-tide-carbon-removal/638421/
But it’s hard to imagine enough kelp to run the entire fossil fuel industry in reverse.
Carbon capture will help, but it’s not a solution on its own. We still need to stop putting so much CO2 into the air.
I think some university was doing research into slime (alge), as it grows exceptionally fast and quite tolerant of unfavorable variations in conditions.
If we wanted to be a bit radical we could require large shipping vessels to be powered by nuclear reactors. If there are concerns about security then you could have the reactor run and secured by military personnel on board.
Would be a bit touchy for international relations since then any shipping basically becomes a military-run nuclear aircraft carrier floating around inside your harbors.. But I think this would essentially be the way. We’d just have to tell everyone tough shit, we can’t have the eight largest boats in the world creating as much emissions as every single land vehicle in existence
I dimly remember years ago an article in Scientific American (Popular Science, Jugs, can’t remember) an article about running large cargo ships on nuclear waste. I think it was some kind of giant expansion engine or something. If anyone knows what I’m talking about I’d love a reference to it.
And the cost of shipping would be what, 10x compared to a regular freighter? There’s lots of things that can be done, few that can be done economically
It all boils down to cheap energy, no matter the source. Nuclear fission reactors are plants with the highest TCO per supplied MWh by far. Only if you assume that the waste handling, demolition, and sanitization cost ends up in the taxpayers’ hands, fission reactors are commercially viable at all.
That way we’re going to be solving one problem by creating another one about the same size.
Is everyone forgetting that combustion is polluting? Were not capturing the NOx or any of the myriad other combustion byproducts. It’s not some clean closed loop.
If we want to use liquid fuels that’s fine, but burning them is incredibly inefficient, on top of the incredibly inefficient production. We already know how to access them more efficiently with fuel cells, and if we’re generating them anyways we can create the best ones for that use.
This could work for the military, but for general use? No way.
Seems like the perfect use for renewables? Make synthetic fuel when there is excess electricity because the sun shines and the wind blows, then use some of it like a battery when there’s a shortage. Sell the rest to the military or airlines or shipping companies for use cases that can’t easily be electrified.
I don’t see why you’d need nuclear because just like desalination it is a perfect use case for intermittent power sources.
Burning synthetic fuel wastes a large fraction of the stored energy as heat. Cars are 30-40% efficient, and Formula 1 is up to about 50%. Turbines generators get 60-65%.
Meanwhile, pumping water uphill and then pouring it through a water turbine gets you about 75% efficiency. It’s a little weird how good pumped hyro is for energy storage.
yes, thats the solution to everything. Lemme just go build a mountain with a lakebed on top in my flat AF kansas backyard. LMAO
Kansas, the World’s Greatest Exporter of Flat!
A large part is the argument of a blanket application of energy production. Use what works in your area. Hydro in Kansas is a no-go. Solar in PA – – Not likely.
I think it’s hilarious that people are against nuclear due to safety concerns. I know in my area, as in a good part of the country, nuclear waste has been “temporarily” stored in the reactor’s “parking lot” for decades without incident.
If we every get a working government together (not the next 4 years, for sure), we can get back to solving issues. Try Yucca Mtn., or fill up a valley somewhere. How many areas in the US are there, where you can drive for hours, and there is nothing around.
We all know what the problem is: Government. Nuclear waste is not a nuclear bomb. Handling it responsibly a minor problem. The problem is trusting Government and the oversight of sub-contractors. But, half the US population appears to believe we have too much oversight.
So good luck with all that…
Cmon, in a country with close to 4,000,000 sq miles you can’t find an area of let’s say 1 sq mile, with a 50 mile or so exclusion radius? And are unable to transport casks safely to that area?
…FAIL …
That’s what the mentioned “Yucca mountain” referred to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository
The difficulty is that the government keeps getting side tracked from actually doing anything about it.
The Yucca mountain site was selected all the way back in 1987.
Another problem is that people don’t want the waste materials transported through their city or state on the way to Yucca mountain.
Re. below: Joseph Eoff says:
December 3, 2024 at 7:41 am
“…Another problem is that people don’t want the waste materials transported through their city or state on the way to Yucca mountain.”
Silly Humans. No problem putting compromised, rogue rulers in power with access to The Button, but afraid of a sealed cask going down the road at 10 mph.
CTs do not get 60-65% efficiency
Combined cycle generators get that.
Once the heat recovery units attached the CTs exhaust are up to temperature.
They are much more expensive than CTs.
The average efficiency of thermal generators on the grid is not 60%.
Marginal unit is rarely 65% efficient.
Those are run as baseload, like a nuke.
And this is what it’s about.
Why would you even consider a “base load” generator for producing a product that has no timescale (it’s shipped out in barrels or pipes). Intermittent power sources shine (no pun intended) when it comes to producing a ‘no timescale’ energy storage product.
One reason is the availability factor.
You have to size your production plant according to peak availability, but your output will be according to the average availability. The excess energy happens often, but for relatively short periods of time, so your plant will only be running at 1-10% capacity overall. This means you have a huge overhead to pay for the investment on top of the price of input energy. It’s not economically efficient.
If you were running it with a steady input, you would invest 10-100 times less money in the facility itself for not having to oversize it, and the output product would be much closer in price to your input energy prices.
Availability for ‘making’ synthetic petrochemicals and availability for generating electricity for consumers can be tied together to give benefit to both.
Oversize your solar/wind generator so that consumers mostly get their desired availability, use the extra energy when consumers don’t want it to make your hydrocarbons, and then supplement the primary generators ‘down time’ (night, no wind) by operating a steam turbine driven by some of the hydrocarbons you made during the day. Sell the remaining.
For sure, such a system would be more expensive than a “pure” solar or wind farm, but cheaper and lower operating costs than nuclear.
Existing ‘base load’ generators (nuclear/coal/gas) also have to compensate for load variations throughout 24 hours – just at a slower pace. A hydrocarbon synthesizer would need to ramp up/down to make most efficient (ie: cost effective, and it ALL comes back to cost) use of the available energy – and that will be regardless of what you connect it to.
You only have to oversize the heat input if you can store some heat to smooth out the availability, rather than oversize the whole plant. Until it’s too hard to get a big enough grid hookup, since the resistive heat is very low capital the storage is going to be the questionable part of the idea. It seems like the answer is that if the energy price was ever so spiky that you couldn’t otherwise operate enough of the day, then storing heat would pay for itself very easily by increasing your utilization, and if it didn’t pay for itself it’d be because your utilization was already high enough without it.
What about using agricultural byproducts? Like gassifcation for plant material and rendering to extract oil from meatpacking byproducts. Or use gassifcation on plastic waste.
gassification is WWII tech
Supercritical water oxidation is where its at today.
SCWO can turn cellulosic waste into simple sugars for fermentation systems and can break down plastic waste into methane, ethane, propane, and butane.
gassification is WWII tech
Supercritical water oxidation is where its at today.
SCWO can turn cellulosic waste into simple sugars for fermentation systems and can break down plastic waste into methane, ethane, propane, and butane.
So long as you don’t look into the details, it’s a perfect solution. Look into the details and it’s yet another pipe dream.
Everything, even the most nobrainer obvious solution to a problem is a pipe dream if nobody bothers to invest the effort required to make it happen. Though like most ‘magical solve alls’ this one could work as a standalone solution in theory but would definitively look better as just part of a more complete overhaul.
The problem with nuclear power plants has always been that they can’t be turned off and on easily. Hence they can only handle the base load, that is the minimum electric power consumption. The fluctuating levels have to be supplied by things like hydro, coal, and natural gas. But, if there was something productive to do with the excess electricity during low consumption periods then a much larger amount of nuclear power generation capacity could productively be used. This is not only at night, when nobody is watching TV or pinging the data center, but also during the day when there is significant solar production.
So, build the synfuels plant alongside the nuclear generating station. When there’s excess electrical power it breaks water into hydrogen and oxygen, and pulls carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, then turns it into liquid fuel.
https://www.powermag.com/flexible-operation-of-nuclear-power-plants-ramps-up/
But yes, all wasted power generation potential of all generation types could be directed to making synthetic fuels.
The amount of up-down cycles is limited.
The Steel gets more chapped with every cycle.
Right, but when the excess power can be directed to other target, much easily, you don’t even need those up-down cycles.
Yet the design criteria for modern nuclear power plants is that they have to be able to follow load. They can’t shut down completely, but they can get down to 30-50% without issues. Fortunately, the typical demand variation is also between 50-100% so it’s usually a very good match. Hydro, gas, and the others are needed for some amount because the ramping rate is limited.
You can throttle them up and down. It’s just less economical to do so.
Lets be honest, if this was that easy and profitable it would already be a thing.
Sounds cool but why would one do it? Nuclear generated electricity is the most expensive way to produce electricity. Fuel generation is inefficient and then we use a highly inefficient ICE to move things around? Why not use the electricity directly much more efficiently? This might be an option for planes, maybe big ships, maybe industry applications but most certainly not for cars when you can use the electricity much more efficiently directly. Charging for 30 minutes every 400km is also not a problem and charging times are going down all the time. The occasional break is needed anyways. EVs have many other benefits. For the money wasted on all the conversions, lots of charging stations and grid extensions can be built.
Also there are regions where much more cheaply produced. Solar energy could be used to make such fuels. So if synthetic fuels become a thing, why not use the cheapest electricity for it?
I don’t see this as an option at all.
RE: “nuclear is the most expensive…”
How is that?
No it’s not.
The damage caused by fossils far outweighs any other means…
For reference, the US uses ~380 million gallons gasoline and 125 million gallons diesel fuel a day. So according to that graphic you would need about 1500 of the big nuclear reactors.
Also ~60 million gallons jet fuel, so that is an other 200 reactors.
And if every power plant has an MTBF of 20000 years, you get an accident every 11,1 years.
Sounds really cheap, isn’t it?
I assume you’re being sarcastic, but you are correct.
Add up all the damage caused by fossil fuels. Oil spills ring a bell (tanker vessels and platforms)? Ground water pollution all over the place from leaky gas station tanks is also a large problem. Health problems due to particulates affecting tens of millions of citizens, acid rain, global warming, …
So sad to see so many posts nit-picking the the monetary cost, totally ignoring all the other costs. Yet, not surprised.
So yes, a local incident every ten years is a bargain.
There is not enough economically mineable uranium on this planet.
And the uranium in the oceans will certainly not be economically mineable.
It certainly is true even if you assume 100% conversion rate of suitable mineral on the planet in to fuel nuclear reactors (at least of the sort that we can actually practically make energy positive right now) are a definitively finite resource, but folks said oil would run out many many many times as demand grew and existing wells ran dry – that just make the tech step forward to make it profitable to extract and possible to survey and then extract from more challenging areas.
So I’d never make your statement so certainly – actually sorting out the political and technical challenges is not likely any time soon. However as both are definitely possible problems to solve that doesn’t mean it will never happen.
The nuclear industry has been promising us a glorious future for decades.
But it just won’t come. So why now of all times?
Because, some heads are being extracted, that are finally realizing Nuclear is the way…
nah it’s not, with breeder reactors we can power something like 2% growth in total energy consumption for about 1,000 years from known reserves. “Economically mineable” is a silly limitation anyways, it just means “I want to limit it to this price that suites my argument”
Sure, with a source of energy that isn’t producing a bunch of CO2 you might want to convert some source of carbon into fuels that are easier to transport or store than electricity.
“…Capturing CO2 from the air,… ”
Awww, hell no. Not this again!
Even if CO2 in our atmosphere rises to the point of cataclysm it’s still mostly made of other gasses. It takes too much energy to separate out the CO2 for use. A much better option is to take stuff that would have become carbon in the atmosphere such as smokestack output or trash that would have decomposed into methane and convert that directly into fuel. Grab it before it gets released into the atmosphere.
Then, even if it does just end up getting released out the tailpipe of a car.. at least it got one more use first. One more use that could have been more oil pumped from the ground.
Easier storage of electricity would be better though. How about kicking these GD Backwards Magats out of power and getting in some decent leaders who will pump some money into the Salton Sea project instead!
Oh hey, I’ll just leave this here, just for some perspective:
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-overview
“Electricity and Heat Production (34% of 2019 global greenhouse gas emissions): The burning of coal, natural gas, and oil for ELECTRICITY AND HEAT is the largest single source of global greenhouse gas emissions”.
I’m generally skeptical of synfuel efforts, here’s my reasoning.
physics stuff:
the number that probably matters most, is the number of megajoules you need to make each gallon of the stuff. A finished gallon of gasoline has 121 MJ in it. Maybe there is some magic that would let us do it for only 10% more energy as input, so say 133 MJ. This is a total SWAG; it might be 250 MJ; I don’t know.
feeding the installed base of cars, means you are feeding piston motors that can only take about 30% of the energy in the fuel and make torque from it – the rest goes to waste heat. They won’t shift into a nice mode where the 133 MJ of energy put in at the factory turns into 133MJ of torque. You get the same 36MJ or so of net torque as you would with the classic stuff.
economic stuff:
– people won’t buy it if it costs more. IMO if you need 133MJ of reactor energy to make each gallon, it will be expensive.
people won’t buy it if it’s not for sale in their area.
it can’t displace classic gasoline unless it wins on both of those comparisons: price and volume production. Price is probably the bigger one; no sales means no volume growth means dead end.
EV comparison stuff:
put only 100MJ into an EV (about 28 kWh) and it will drive 110mi+. There aren’t any 110 MPG gas cars around.
If you have enough energy to cook up synfuel and feed all the gas cars, you probably have 4X the energy you would need to just power an all-EV fleet.
If you want to tackle the emissions problem, the pistons have to go – the 70% waste heat at the motor is the killer. If you don’t, then you have no need for expensive/rare synfuel.