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Re: Global Warming (NUCLEAR)



Regarding Ludwik's comment:

The only way to reduce the CO2 emission significantly is to
make electric industry nuclear, as in France. ....

Of course there are economic and engineering feasibility issues to
consider, but I recall a proposal from a Scientific American article of
about a year ago that described a method for having a coal-based
electrical industry that did not contribute to global warming simply by
not putting the CO2 produced by the process into the atmosphere. Rather
than venting the CO2 to the atmosphere up the stack, the exhaust was to
be first scrubbed of its acidic oxides (of sulfur & nitrogen) and then
after cooling it is compressed and pumped via pipeline to the ocean floor
where it is discharged to the environment. Under the very high pressure
conditions of the sea floor the CO2 would be a liquid, which (due to its
high density and the low rate of water motion down there) would
essentially stay put on the sea floor as a harmless liquid layer. The
waste only had to be actively pressurized to a pressure corresponding to
the level where the CO2 liquified, since below that depth, it would sink
under its own gravity and fall out of the discharge tube on its own. The
proposal was to build a lot of high power coal powered power plants
along the coastal areas so the discharge pipes would not have to be
extremely long. (I guess the idea was that it is better to have long
transmission wires for the electrical grid than to have long discharge
pipelines.)

I suppose though, that the sea water would eventually dissolve some of the
liquid CO2 near the ocean bottom, & maybe some of this would eventually
find its way back up to the surface where the solubility would be low
enough to cause CO2 to be discharged to the atmosphere. But maybe a
sufficiently quiet and stagnant sea floor region could be found where
the water didn't appreciably circulate at such depths and the CO2 would
be kept isolated from the upper ocean even if the deepest water did
become significantly carbonated.

David Bowman
David_Bowman@georgetowncollege.edu