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78 comments on Clean fuel from dirty coal?

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tom deplume on February 28, 2006 - 1:07pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Last month I was driving down west coast of Michigan on a bright sunny morning. It was a very rare cloudless day with one exception, the plume of vapor from the Palisades Nuclear Powerplant near South Haven. It stood out clearly for 50 miles as the only blemish on a extremely blue sky. It is truly amazing how much energy those cooling towers throw away while its neighbors are burning nat gas and propane on a cold January morning.
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Paula on February 28, 2006 - 1:13pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
It's worth bearing in mind that water vapor is a much more potent greenhouse gas than C02.
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LevinK on February 28, 2006 - 4:39pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
AFAIK water vapor is in a thermodynamical balance in the atmosphere and there is not a lot that we humans can do to affect it.

Oceans are producing million times as much vapor as all human activities combined. It would be interesting though to see how GW plays on this - we can expect with rising temperatures the air humidity to grow producing a positive feedback. On the other hand the water cycle (evaporation -> precipitation) will intensify, taking away some of the energy absorbed by the oceans thus cooling them off. I have to check but probably the total efect would be neutral because it is absent in the climatographic models I've seen.

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SocraticGadfly on March 1, 2006 - 1:31am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Ahh, but a warmer atmosphere cdan hold more H2O vapor.
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LevinK on February 28, 2006 - 4:41pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Unfortunately our urban development pattern was not designed for the central heating that could utilise this energy.

Maybe Kunstler would turn out being right that it is mostly Suburbia to blame for our worries.

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