Archive for February, 2010
Portable Nuclear Power & Desalination Plants
The crises in Haiti has an interesting desalination story. The aircraft carrier U.S.S. Carl Vinson is currently offshore of Haiti sending supplies ashore and picking up the wounded. Its onboard nuclear powered desalination plant makes some 400,000 gallons of its own fresh water every day, and much of it will soon be going ashore.
The nuclear-powered vessel, which had been heading to its new home port in San Diego when it was diverted to Haiti hours after the quake, has massive desalination capacity - purifying the same ocean saltwater it traverses - and the Vinson has a daily excess of 200,000 gallons “that we can give away,” says Cmdr. William McKinley, who oversees the desalination process.
Nuclear powered aircraft carriers have been desalinating their own water for 30 years and submarines have been nuclear powered for 50 years without incident.
The reason I mention this is that two inventions in the last several years or so will make it readily possible–later this decade to assemble a portable nuclear powered desalination plants in fairly short order. The first is the portable desalination plant. The second is the portable nuclear power plant. As part of disaster relief it might become a part of FEMA’s tools to have portable nuclear power plants and portable desalination plants in storage ready to be rolled out on short notice.
There are a number of portable desalination systems developed in the last couple years that might scale.
UCLA has developed a portable desalination system that can desalinate any kind of salty feed water.
The M3 demonstrated its effectiveness in a recent field study in California’s San Joaquin Valley in which it desalted agricultural drainage water that was nearly saturated with calcium sulfate salts, accomplishing the desalination with just one reverse osmosis stage.
M3 could also be deployed to produce fresh water in emergency situations for up to 6,000 to 12,000 people daily.
There is another portable desalination plant developed at San Dia National Labs
When the research plant opened in August of 2007, Zero Discharge Desalination, a high-tech portable laboratory designed by Dr. Tom Davis with Dow Water Solutions and Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, was brought in for dignitaries to tour during the opening celebration.
ZDD is a state-of-the-art technology for removing the salt solids dissolved in brackish water and managing the concentrated wastes.
Already emergency tested is the portable desalination unit from the Tularosa Basin National Desalination Research Facility.
When Gulf Coast residents were left without a drinking water source in the aftermath of Katrina, Tularosa Basin National Desalination Research Facility sent its portable reverse osmosis (RO) membrane purification system to Biloxi, Miss., to provide drinking water to 40,000 local inhabitants. The unit can produce over 100,000 gallons per day of drinkable water from contaminated river water or from seawater.
In fact, for anyone wishing to do further research on the latest portable desalination units available today a visit to the Tularosa Basin National Desalination Research Facility is order. They have set up a test site for anyone interested in testing out their new desalination designs.
What about portable nuclear power plants?
The World Nuclear Association has an international list of small nuclear power plant designs. The list is small. However, there may be as many as 90 portable nuclear power designs worldwide. Given that scale and variety of design innovation–its likely that portable nuclear power plants will be one of the great technology stories of this decade
Two early American entries in the field are still 3-8 years away.
The first, Hyperion Power Generation has thus far hogged the mini nuclear reactor spotlight, but NuScale Power claims that it can cut nuclear plant construction costs and increase safety with its Lego-like 45 megawatt modular reactors. For disaster relief Hyperion might be best because their model is designed for off grid use. Besides, NuScale Plants would need refueling every two years.
There are many other American companies that will come on stream in the next couple years. I’ll mention two. TerraPower “runs primarily on natural or depleted uranium, rather than enriched uranium. With un-enriched fuel, the reactors could be loaded up with fuel and sealed for 30 to 60 years. ” Their product is further away from being completed. A fourth company “Babcock & Wilcox, a large energy management company, is getting into the market for small nuclear reactors.”
While TerraPower and Hyperion are staffed and run by experienced nuclear executives, Babcock & Wilson can brag about something else. Namely, that they’ve been in the nuclear reactor construction business for 50 years. That, and they have lots of money.
Since Babcock & Wilson have been providing small nuclear power plants for the navy for decades — you would think they would be first to market for portable nuclear power plants for the civilian field– but maybe not.
Therefor Hyperion may well be the first to market:
Hyperion Power Generation’s Power Module is a modular, hot tub-sized nuclear reactor that delivers 70 megawatts of thermal power or 25 megawatts of electric power for seven to 10 years. Hyperion expects to sell 4,000 of the $30 million reactors when they go on sale in 2013. The company has already received 70 pre-orders, proving that there is a market for small nuclear devices.
Mark Campagna, representing Hyperion, explained that the firm’s 25 MW “nuclear battery” (slides) is a spin-off from Los Alamos National Laboratory. The firm continues to rely on expertise from the federal science facility with a cooperative R&D agreement.
Unlike B&W and NuScale, both of which emphasized hooking up their reactors to existing electrical grids, Campagna said the competitive advantage of Hyperion’s design is that it is focused on providing local, or “distributed power,” where there is no grid. Key export markets will include remote oil and gas fields, mining, and military installations. A target use for developing nations will be to power potable water treatment facilities.
Hyperion’s focus on off grid power generation might make them best for FEMA type disaster relief operations.
But– and here’s the kicker. If you can drop a power plant with this much free standing power anywhere–more interesting things become possible. One of the uses for an off grid power plant mentioned above is to cook oil from oil shale (at +600 degrees) in places like Colorado and Wyoming. But as I mentioned in a blog a while back –this same technique might be used to cook water out of gypsum at 212 degrees.
Now here is where it gets fun.
Portable nuclear power plants collapse the complexity of providing energy for pumps to pump rivers of water in pipes 1000’s of miles. All you need is pipes, pumps and off grid portable nuclear power generators to push water 1000’s of miles inland from any coast.
So?
The main point of this blog is that the 21st century will kick off in earnest when the cost desalination and bulk water transport collapses. Thereby making it cost effective to pump fresh water from the American coast inland 1000 miles to various places out west where crops can be grown. Deserts would be turned green, the habitable size of the US would be enlarged by 1/3. Just as the Hoover dam created the model for water policy around the world– the US model could be replicated world wide –thereby doubling the size of the habitable earth.
If their costs come down sufficiently –portable nuclear power plants may just make this possible.But even in the near term …in the next ten years portable nuclear power plants just collapse the complexity of pumping bulk water long distances. So while the cost of shipping water might be high–it still can be accomplished without too much difficulty.
There is one other thing that portable nuclear power plants make possible.
It becomes technically easy to do bulk water transfers on the fly.
What does that mean?
With a portable nuclear power plant it would be technically easy to build a pipeline, line it with pumps powered by portable nuclear power plants and pump vast volumes of water 1000 miles for 2 months of the year. And then the rest of the year, either move the portable nuclear power plants, shut them down or send their electricity elsewhere.
Hmm what 2 months of the year are we talking about?
Well currently everyone hates bulk water transfers–that is the people in the great lakes and Canada. but what if you could pull rivers of water out of the Mississippi for two months of the year while the river was at flood stage–thereby lowering water flows below that of flood stage. There’s a lot of people along the Mississippi would think this a good idea. So instead of paying the army corps of engineers a billion annually for Mississippi flood control and FEMA another billion for flood managment– you spend the money on pumping a river of water over the South Pass in Wyoming and then letting it run down into the Colorado basin (& maybe use the downslope over the great divide to power generators for electrical production) –or pump flood water to the sinks of eastern Colorado to refill the Ogallala aquifer. or further south, send the water to west Texas.
Nobody dams the Mississippi. But if you pumped a lot of water away from the Missippi at just the right time–there would be no more need for vast expensive flood control projects.
Just a thought.