aquitaine
- 30
- 9
One ton of Uranium used at a typical 1 GW reactor is equal to how many tons of coal being burned in a 1 GW coal fired plant?
In other terms, 1 GW coal plant requires ~five 100 ton railroad coal cars per hour, every hour. That's typically two 60 car trains a day, every day.vanesch said:So we have:
1 GW electric for a year =
more than 2 million tons of coal...
This is on the low side. And it depends on the quality of the coal and the efficiency of the plant in converting heat into electricity (usually about 30%) The efficiency of a nuclear plant can be higher - as high as 40%.mheslep said:In other terms, 1 GW coal plant requires ~5 100 ton railroad coal cars per hour, every hour. That's typically two 60 car trains a day, every day.
The UK's biggest powerstation is 4GW and uses 36,000tons of coal/day.mheslep said:In other terms, 1 GW coal plant requires ~five 100 ton railroad coal cars per hour, every hour. That's typically two 60 car trains a day, every day.
That is running 100% capacity, which no electric plant does, not even nuclear and nuclear has the highest capacity factor. A well run nuclear plant runs ~93% online in the US, coal much lower, 50-75% if I recall. Its on EIA somewhere. The reason is mostly economic I expect - once the expensive outlay has been made for nuclear, it is practically 'too cheap to meter' for the producer as the operational costs are 2-3 cents/kWh, and thus the operator wants to run it not stop, but no so for coal, for the reasons we've outlined here (two+ train loads a day.) Thus if one has nuclear, run the odd coal plant in the summer to handle the high cooling loads, but idle the ravenous beast in the winter.Andrew Mason said:This is on the low side. And it depends on the quality of the coal and the efficiency of the plant in converting heat into electricity (usually about 30%) The efficiency of a nuclear plant can be higher - as high as 40%.
The energy content of anthracite coal is about 27 GJ/Tonne and of lignite coal is about 15 GJ/Tonne. See the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_of_combustion#Heating_values_of_some_fuels"
A 1 GWe power plant produces 31,536,000,000,000,000 Joules of electrical energy in a year which requires about 105,000,000,000,000,000 Joules of heat (10^8 GJ.). Since the energy from combustion of coal is 15-27 GJ/Tonne, you would need about 4 million tonnes of high grade anthracite or 7 million tonnes of lignite coal...
Enthalpy,Enthalpy said:Nukes run at full capacity because they can't be throttled down easily. So countries with a high proportion of nuclear power plants use other plants to adjust the production .
The French (being anti-capitalist with no word for entrepreneur) just sell it to their neighbours for a profit.However, countries like France which is on the order of 85% nuclear may well have to throttle back the nuclear power plants when the load on the grid drops below 85% of the grid capacity.
mgb_phys,mgb_phys said:The French (being anti-capitalist with no word for entrepreneur) just sell it to their neighbours for a profit.
Which isn't any different from what we do (or in some cases are planning to do) with nuclear waste.CO2 is a huge concern but underground storage could be a solution.
Yes - if they can sell it - they do. However, if the case arises where they have more capacity than
demand - either domestic or foreign - they can throttle back.
With France's nearest neighbors of
Denmark and Germany going "green" with windmills and solar arrays; the opportunities for France
to sell nuclear power to Denmark and Germany abound - when the wind and solar installations don't
live up to expectations
Andrew Mason said:The energy content of anthracite coal is about 27 GJ/Tonne and of lignite coal is about 15 GJ/Tonne. See the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_of_combustion#Heating_values_of_some_fuels"