A climate technology startup aims to suck carbon from the atmosphere using a new type of nuclear power plant that’s never been built in the United States.
https://www.eenews.net/articles/doe-docs-carbon-removal-proposal-bets-on-rare-nuclear-reactors/
3 comments:
I can't help feeling that while this technology is designed to suck CO2 from the air it will for sure suck dollars from my wallet.
We're still awaiting charging stations from the billions in congressional spending.
Obama had Solyndra, we'll see if Biden can one up his predecessor.
The economics of modular reactors involves their mass production, hence the modular and deployable design. The issue is that there is very little demand, perhaps none at all, and the long time to license and build them is combined with the higher cost of capital that now prevails
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nuscale-layoffs-nuclear-power_n_65985ac5e4b075f4cfd24dba
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nuscale-uamps-nuclear_n_654c317ce4b088d9a74d17db
https://hbr.org/2023/03/capital-is-expensive-again-now-what
These articles mention cost overruns as well. At the same time, of course, costs of wind and solar, as well as energy storage are dropping steadily.
As an aside, if this technology efficiently removes CO2 from the air, I wonder why we can't just power it with coal, and pump those emissions into the ground along with the other carbon it removes. Wyoming where this project is located has immense coal reserves that can be produced at low cost, of course, it is the nation's largest coal producing state.
This seems somewhat practical as well, an international project to reduce atmospheric CO2 by refrigerating air in the freezing weather thereby forming CO2 snow: (very little water is contained in air at extremely low temperatuers)
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/52/2/jamc-d-12-0110.1.xml
This would require a few hundred gigawatts of energy to be made available, this could be done by windmills as he suggests, nuclear power plans, or perhaps by beaming the energy from space in the form of microwaves onto special receiver arrays, using orbiting solar arrays - there could perhaps be other options as well of course,
The CO2 would then be placed for long-term storage in insulated landfills, there might be a low rate of overall sublimation due to insulation of course, which would be easy to deal with.
It does require some intrastructure construction in antarctica but the amount needed could be relatively minimal.
It does look especially feasible if undertaken by many countries rather than one, which would make sense anyways due to the treaties in place around antacctica.
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