Megawatt electrical power

The uses of nuclear fuels to generate electrical power, to make isotopes for peaceful purposes, and to make explosives are well known. The estimated world-wide capacity of the 429 nuclear power reactors in operation in January 1990 amounted to about 311,000 megawatts. 

The wodd s total capacity of grid-coimected electric power derived from wave energy is less than half a megawatt, distributed among several demonstration plants. The largest unit, the 350-kWe Tapered Channel plant in Norway, uses the hydropower approach. The plant was developed by Norwave AS and has operated continuously since 1986. Based on this durabiUty, two commercial orders were placed from other parts of the wodd. 

When the power is a large number, as in the case of an electric power plant, it is convenient to express the power in megawatts (MW) where one megawatt equals one million watts. An electric power of 1,000,000,000 watts would be expressed as 1,000 MW. A large coal-burning or nuclear power plant produces about 1,000 MW of electric power. The sum total of the electric power produced by all electric power plants is expressed m units of gigawatts (GW). One gigawatt equals one billion watts. An electric power of 1,000,000,000,000 watts would be expressed as 1,000 GW. 

Fuel cells have attracted considerable interest because of their potential for efficient conversion of the energy (AG) from a chemical reaction to electrical energy (AE). This efficiency is achieved by directly converting chemical energy to electricity. Conventional systems burn fuel in an engine and convert the resulting mechanical output to electrical power. Potential applications include stationary multi-megawatt power plants, battery replacements for personal electronics, and even fuel-cell-powered unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs). 

It is estimated that this would cost about 8,000 per capita in the United States for 300,000 megawatts of generating capacity to replace the coal consumed in the U.S. for electrical power generation. Post combustion scrubbing is a well known but largely unapplied technology. 

In the U.S. about 20% of the electric power is produced by 104 nuclear power reactors with an average output of almost 900 megawatts per reactor or 93-GWe (gigawatts) total. If this were increased by 250-GWe, nuclear power could fill all current U.S. electricity requirements. 

In the world s largest fuel cell application at a chemical manufacturing site, Dow s by-product hydrogen created as a part of Dow s manufacturing processes, will be converted to electricity by a GM fuel cell. The electricity that is generated will power up the plant. Dow could eventually use up to 35 megawatts of power generated by 500 fuel cell units. 

Fossil fuel electrical power plants can be more hazardous to humans than nuclear power plants because of the pollutants. A 1,000 megawatt (MW) coal-fired power plant releases about 100 times as much radioactivity into the environment as a comparable nuclear plant. A 1,000-MW power plant will use 2,000 railroad cars of coal or 10 supertankers of oil but only 12 cubic meters of natural uranium every year. Fossil fuel... 

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has started the billion- dollar, FutureGen project to demonstrate a 275-megawatt prototype plant that cogenerates electric power and hydrogen and sequesters 90% of the C02. 

The most recent system is a 220 kilowatt fuel cell/gas turbine power plant operating at the University of California s National Fuel Cell Research Center located in Irvine, California. The first-of-a-kind hybrid power plant consists of a 200 kilowatt fuel cell generator pressurized at about 3.5 atmospheres in combination with a 20 kilowatt two-shaft gas turbine. The system was first run at the Pittsburgh facility and started operating at Irvine in June, 2000. Total run time until July, 2000 was 264 hours. Electric energy delivered was 42 megawatt-hours. Electric efficiency was 51% (LHV). An electric power feed-through mounted on the pressure vessel devel-... 

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