I read a report today about the plants in the country that have the greatest emissions of carbon dioxide. Unsurpisingly, they were coal plants. To my disappointment, many of them were in the South.

I’ve often been caught at a railroad crossing as I watch the coal trains pass by–car after car–and I think how little thorium it would take to replace all that coal. A piece of thorium about the size of a sugar cube.

Later on…

Thanks to the beauty of Google Earth and TerraServer, and a rudimentary ability to search on the Web, it’s not to hard to find these “dirty kilowatts”. I thought I’d start with the biggest CO2 emitters of them all. After all, if we’re going to make a dent in CO2 emissions, as Al Gore wants us to, the most straightforward approach would seem to be to knock off the biggest offenders, right?

Here’s a list of the biggest power plant emitters of CO2 in the United States in 2004, along with how much CO2 they emitted:

1. Scherer, outside of Macon, Georgia, 25.6 million tons
2. Bowen, outside of Cartersville, Georgia, 21.0 million tons
3. Gibson, Gibson, Indiana, 20.8 million tons
4. Miller, outside of Birmingham, Alabama, 20.7 million tons
5. Parrish, outside of Houston, Texas, 20.6 million tons
6. Navaho, near Glen Canyon Dam, Arizona, 20.2 million tons
7. Martin Lake, Tatum, Texas, 20.0 million tons
8. Cumberland, northern Kentucky, 20.0 million tons
9. Gavin, southern Ohio, 19.1 million tons
10. Sherburne County, central Minnesota, 18.1 million tons

When you tally up all the CO2 emissions from these top 10 plants, you get 206 million tons of CO2. Is that a lot? Yes, but it’s only 3.4% of the 5973 million tons of CO2 that the US emitted in 2004.

To make a real difference in the amount of CO2 that the US emits, there’s probably no better place to start than coal. But I seriously doubt that conventional, solid-core uranium reactors are going to have low-enough capital costs to convince utilities to shut down their coal plants. As has been pointed out by others on this site, we need capital costs probably an order-of-magnitude lower to displace coal. And I think that a thorium-fueled, liquid-fluoride reactor with a compact, high-power density helium gas turbine system is such a power source.