There are many fuel cell products already entering the market, including ceremic fuel cells. Ceremic Fuel Cells is releasing their “Blue Gen” product, which has a 2 kWe output, and will also use the waste heat from the process to generate domestic hot water. This is an Australian product.

In Germany the Baxi Group are developing a mini fuel cell for homes, which also utilises the waste heat from the process to generate domestic hot water. This will be released onto the market in the next year or two.

The fuel cell is most effective when used as a mini-CHP (combined heat and power plant). This allows the plant to operate at an efficiency of around 85% vs about 25-30 % efficiency of your typical central power station.

Itching4it: I was chatting with my (strongly pro-renewable) congressman, and pushed him on nuclear. He had a counter-argument that surprised me. He said that nuclear plants required huge amounts of concrete, and that cement production is so carbon-intensive you are better off, from a global warming viewpoint, burning natural gas. That sounded rather unlikely to me, but I haven’t gotten around to researching it.  (Quote)

Time for your congressman to learn some facts then, as his comments are pure nonsense!

Life cycle assessments of nuclear powerplants show extremly low outputs of carbon dioxide. For instance, Vattenfall, which is the state owned electric company in Sweden did a life cycle assessment of their nuclear power plant in Forsmark (3x BWR and circa 3300MWe). When emissions from concrete, steel, uranium mining, uranium enrichment (80% gas centrifuge) and everything you need to build, operate and decommission the plant is included, the average emissions was concluded to be approx. 3 grams per kWh (7 lb/MWh). Obviously that is nothing compared to the emissions from natural gas, that is for instance less than 1% of the direct emissions from a natural gas power plant.

The Vattenfall LCA also include several other energy production methods like wind, biomass, hydro and solar. Aside from hydro, they did not manage as well. Land based wind offered the lowest emissions among the (non hydro) renewables at around 15 g CO2/kWh (taken from memory, so they may be a few grams off).

What has the largest effect on nuclear LCA is the choice of enrichment method. Gas centrifuge enrichment is far more energy efficient than gas diffusion enrichment. It’s also important to power this enrichment by electricity produced by nuclear, hydro or similar low emission electricity rather than for instance coal.

The LCA study concluded that the energy return on investment was 57:1 (invest 1 kW and you get 57 kW back). With fossil fuels you’re usually happy these days if you get above 10:1.

PS. This site keeps getting slower. Maybe you should hide the comments until people choose to read them.

LRGVProVolt:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor#Fuel_cyclesHappy trails to you ’til we meet again.  

Thanks, and I thought the Candu was just a slight improvement on the LWR!