95 (at least) Killed for Gasoline in Nigeria

Gasoline fumes and explosions kill millions of innocent children! Gasoline is a narcotic and needs to be regulated immediately. This gasoline drug trade must be stopped. We cannot let the drug of gasoline harm our children and promote crime and poverty in America.

Nuclear power killed less than 95? This is quite a surprise for me. How many where killed in Chernobyl? And please, do not associate thorium with today nuclear power. That just seems not very fair.

Nuclear power killed less than 95? This is quite a surprise for me. How many were killed in Chernobyl?

This is perhaps a more valid point than the author believed. If we apply the heuristic that nuclear opponents are twice as dishonest as the former Soviet Union, we can use the opposition between them. That entity wanted to downplay the consequences of Chernobyl, they want to up-play it. Its lies and theirs must therefore bracket the truth! So if, as I seem to recall, the Soviet Union said 30 people died — ten to power 1.477 — and nuclear power opponents say 8000 did, ten to power 3.903, we need only find a number twice as near to 1.477 as it is to 3.903. That number is ~2.286. Ten to power 2.286 is ~193, so we expect about 200 people to have died. About as bad as Piper Alpha, except not all at once. Later on, I found some corroboration: http://www.rri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/NSRG/reports/kr79/kr79pdf/Imanaka.pdf –

… Imanaka [41, 42] suggested a possibility that a substantial fraction of evacuees from the most contaminated villages could receive effective dose more than 1 Sv, which is a criteria for acute radiation sickness, using the dose rate map on May 1, 1986 presented at CIS/EC Minsk conference in 1996 [43] and temporal changes of dose rate until the evacuation. After these works Imanaka happened to find another map representing the radiation situation around Chernobyl on June 1, 1986 compiled by USSR scientists in 1991 (Fig. 1) [44]. As seen in Fig. 1, the dose rate in Usov village on June 1 was around 200 mR/h. Our previous calculations [41, 42] indicate that the dose rate on May 1 was about 10 times higher than June 1, which means that a dose rate about 2 R/h can be supposed in Usov village on May 1, 1986, from where inhabitants were evacuated on May 3…

Now, how do we know the USSR was wholehearted in its wish to downplay? Well, the USSR was its government; there was no distinction. This means it was not in the conflict of interest Western governments are. If it chose to spend tens of dollars on fossil fuels rather than a single dollar on equivalent uranium, this was purely wasteful. But Western governments are in the position of either taking a significant share of the larger fossil fuel price — in the form of royalties and excise tax — or a somewhat smaller share of the much smaller uranium price. What’s wasteful overall is lucrative for them. (It is, of course, also lucrative for oil and gas vendors, and to some extent coal vendors, but their fossil fuel revenues are out in plain sight, and unlike governments, they aren’t empowered to regulate their competition and preach against it. Recall the former head of the NRC recommending people 50 miles from Fukushima-Daiichi to run, and — if I recall correctly — German government spokesthings recommending Tokyo be evacuated.)

Most prohibition be it prohibition of guns, drugs or nuclear power starts with a distortion of the risks and impacts, then an emotive demonisation rounded off with a complete indifference to the harm and losses caused by the actual prohibition that is sought.

I think (bio)methanol is much better than NH3. First, it is liquid at standard conditions and can be used in very efficiency IC engines, particurally for its high octane rating and high flame speed (on the other hand ammonia is a very slow burning fuel and thus a very inefficient IC fuel). Second, it can be produced from any lignocellulosic biomass with a modest input of heat, electricity and biomass itself (if loiw medium temp 150-200 °C electrolisys is used). Lastly, it's already compatible with current infrastructure (both fuel stations and engines, including DME as cleaner and very efficient diesel fuel substitute) and it' s still much cleaner even than natural gas, avoiding NOx production

Alex, I agree that, all other things being equal, methanol is preferable to ammonia. However, I don’t think things are equal (particularly in scenarios where most energy is required to come from non-fossil sources): - Jet aviation places a very high premium on energy density, therefore jets will always (probably until the end of time) need a carbon-based fuel. Therefore all estimates of future biofuel production capacity for land transportation should consider only the spare capacity after aviation has been accommodated. - All biofuel places pressure on the food supply. Any land that is productive for fuel could also be productive for food or important for wildlife (all crop land was once wild). - After decades of neglect, ammonia engine research is ramping up. Like methanol, ammonia can also fuel engines which are more efficient than those that use gasoline and produce less pollution. - Ammonia is more efficient for fuel cells than methanol (nearly as good as H2, but only in specific types). - Nuclear ammonia can come from large plants (which produces economy of scale) which are located near population centers. Biofuel plants must be small and near the biomass source to reduce transport costs, but the plants won’t achieve good economies of scale. - Agriculture uses a lot of fresh water, much more than power production (I don’t know the gallons of water per gallon of gasoline-equivalent number, but I’m sure it’s 2 orders of magnitude higher than with dry-cooled nuclear ammonia). No nation will pour expensive desalinated water on crops; desalination is only a solution for high-value municipal water. - The head-start that methanol has over ammonia (feasibility of flex-fuel vehicles and pumps) can eventually be overcome if ammonia is at least 15% cheaper, and I think it will be. Links: Past ammonia conferences, including technical presentation archive: http://nh3fuelassociation.org/events-conferences/ Conference kickoff talk by Iowa Energy Centers’ Norm Olson: http://www.ucs.iastate.edu/mnet/_repository/2011//nh3/pdf/Olson.pdf Shawn Grannell has done really impressive work on ammonia engines with flame crackers: http://nh3fuel.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/shawngrannellammoniaconfpres2010.pdf

Obviously, I agree with you about the need of high energy density in aviation fuels (and not only in aviation field, actually). In this case, I think that DME, that is quite easy to produce from MeOH, is almost as good as kerosene, while I don' t see any benefit of ammonia over methanol/DME

Alex, synthetic fuels are energy carriers, so being "energy intensive" is good, not bad. All syn fuels, by definition, have an energy content of 34 KWH per gallon of gasoline equivalent. So the relevant questions are really how does the process efficiency compare, and what is cost of the primary energy source. From what I’ve read, the efficiency of converting from heat to hydrogen (water splitting) is about the same as heat to electricity (i.e. temperature dependent, about 40% at 400C and 60% at 900C). Combining the H2 with N2 to make NH3 is about 93% efficient if the liberated heat is recycled. Combining H2 with CO and CO2 to make methanol is a more complicated reaction and surely less than 93% efficient (it still liberates waste heat since the reaction is exothermic, and it’s a lower-temp reaction, so heat recycling won’t work as well). Regarding the cost of the energy source: remember that to use all of the carbon from the biomass requires adding extra nuclear hydrogen, in an amount that supplies about double the energy of the original biomass. So for MeOH or NH3, most of the energy comes from nuclear power (and it’s cheaper in the NH3 case since the plant is larger and more economical, and likely has a higher capacity factor due to seasonal biomass availability). Do you have a source that claims the cost of the energy in the biomass is cheaper than nuclear power? It’s definitely not cheaper than coal (hence the popularity of coal). Also, note that in ammonia engines (at least in the Grannell paper), the flame speed and ignition problems would be resolved by cracking part of the ammonia into hydrogen and nitrogen prior to sending it into the cylinders (50% of the NH3 is cracked at idle, about 10% at full throttle). The test engine ran fine on such a mixture, and was more efficient than a gasoline engine. I have not seen data comparing the efficiency of ammonia and methanol engines; but I suspect that it is too early to say. But again, my big concern with bio-methanol is the huge amount of land required. The hybrid biomass-nuclear approach may reduce the land 3x, but 33% of huge is still huge. Remember that green plants are only about 2% efficient at converting sunlight to energy, hence they use 10x more land than a solar plant. A solar plant that could supply the entire US with electricity would take up the entire state of Arizona, and the transportation fuel requirement would be similar.

Nathan,I think it's better to continue this intersting debate elsewhere in the forum, if you want to follow it http://www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=3736 anyway this is my comment. I'm usually very open mind to other/new ideas, but as prof. Mackay used to say "we need numbers, not attributes !". Your chemistry and figures contains many mistakes. First of all, yes, any syn-fuel is "energy intensive" (I didn' say the opposite, actually) and need a lot of external hydrogen (idem supra), but this is a point where bio-methanol from biomass gasification is far superior than ammonia : for the reaction CO + 2 H2 = CH3OH it takes only one mole (the other one coming for biomass gaisifcation itself giving a ratio of CO/H2 ~ 1) of hydrogen to produce one mole of MeOH, or 2 kg of H2 for 32 kg of MeOH, while it takes for example 6 kg of H2 to gain 34 kg of ammonia (LHV of NH3 ~ MeOH). You also forgot the energy to separate nitrogen from air that is per se a TREMENDOUSLY energy intensive process and the need to have high temp to allow the reaction (N2 + H2) takes place, while the methanol reaction is simply low temo with no need of external heat/energy (indeed, a lot of that heat can be resued as low temp district heating like in Sweden http://www.varmlandsmetanol.se/dokument/History%20March%2012.pdf I do note I'm not suggesting this kind of process) You mentioned the high need of land : I'm not a big fan of using biomass as feedstock but using 2* 10 ^9 tonn/year to gain a good of 40 milion bpd equivalent of oil (a boost of +33% vs gasoline engines, I think a quite feasible figure) is still quite pratical, together with about 1000 GWe of electric capacity, that is a huge but still pratical (at least for the replacement of 40 milion of barrel per day of oil). On the other how much electric capacity do you envisage to need to replace the equivalent of 40 mil bpd of oil as ammonia ? I think this is the crucial question you need to answer Finally, unlike ammonia, methanol is a well know transportation fuel in high performance races like Indianapolis or monster tracks for both its high performance and safety features so there is very few new work to implement here, the possobility to have high efficiency IC engines optimized for methanol is already proved IC engines is not a matter of discussion (while as far I know I'm still very skeptical about efficency claims of ammonia in *pratical* engines)

Ammonia is also very dangerous in the context of this article we are looking for ways LFTR would alleviate that, aren't we?

"... ammonia vapors are very unpleasant smelling, even when the concentration is low enough to be harmless.È The extreme unpleasantness is due to extreme lethality (due to pulmonary edema) at much higher levels. Ammonia doesn't have to burn, explosively or otherwise, to kill. I have long advocated boron as a fuel that nuclear plants could make from B2O3, and motorists will want.

This sentence shows the uphill media battle that nuclear power has to deal with: "a tragic reminder of how little of the country’s oil wealth has trickled down to the poor." In stead of saying that fossil fuel once again killed a large number of people, the article talks about wealth and the poor. With nuclear power, everything's different. Fukushima didn't kill anyone, might kill one or two people from cancer eventually, but most journalists were trumpeting how dangerous nuclear power was. Sadly, lethal gasoline and other fossil fuel accidents occur so often that we don't even pay attention to them as a danger. Whereas nuclear accidents rarely occur, so are exciting and the concomittant media attention makes the technology look dangerous. It's such a major PR battle for anything nuclear.