i think this guy is so cool. How dare anybody give him a thumbs down. These are really, really educational. if i was a kid watching these i'd wanna be a nuclear engineer. This guy is cool. Leave him alone.
@@daanski82 He's teaching kids how things work, not endorsing it. He's also done a video on Thorium. And mentioned Uranium briefly in this vid to compare with coal.
Getting a thumbs down for the horrible explanation. This shouldn’t even be allowed on RU-vid because his terms, process knowledge and explanations are beyond wrong
Thank you for producing these videos. Thousands of people will gain knowledge and learn important information about how our energy is made thanks to your hard work. Keep up the great work.
You are a fantastic teacher. This knowledge should be widely disseminated and known so that people will understand the incredible accomplishments that have been achieved to create this modern world we live in.
@Bill delete this has been studied multiple times. You might want to look one of them up. Even in coal-heavy areas of the United States, traveling a thousand miles in an electric car results in less pollution. And the grid is getting cleaner all the time.
While working at a coal fired power plant in Mississippi during the summer of 2012, I had the chance to look inside one of the furnaces that was still active while the other was undergoing maintenance and upgrades. The coal is ground into a powder by milling machines at the end of conveyor belts and blown into the furnace where it burns. The walls of the furnace glowed red, and the burning coal was a tornado of orange and yellow flames, like a scene out of Dante's Inferno, and the heat was so great the sweat on my clothes evaporated. Each furnace was about 60 or 70 feet high, and the walls were steel tubes full of water and steam. This plant would get a 100 car train every other day which offloaded it on one side of an ellipse the whole train would occupy as unloading proceeded. The plant itself was a 1,000 megawatt power plant, and fed power throughout southeastern Mississippi and southwestern Alabama
Been watching your videos about nuclear and love the postive and informational videos of our power plants weather it be nuclear or fossil powered. I’m a millwright that works for Siemens generation services and get to work on some of the largest steam and gas powered turbine generators in the world. A lot of people don’t understand how important nuclear and fossil fuels are to produce power for our grid. Yes clean renewable energy should be pushed forward everyday but the people who think we need to shut all of the fossil and nuclear power plants down and should be only using hydro,wind and or solar power is sadly mistaken on what could happen to our grid without our big fossil and nuclear plants.
I have watched many of these videos and worked at nukes, coal plants , natural gas plants , co-gens, and oil refineries. This guy truly loves what he does.
woah I didn't realize they produce natural gas that way, I thought they just burned it and heated water. That jet engine part is pretty cool and efficient.
Robert M. Most of your new power plants in the last 15 years are gas turbines/combined cycle units with steam turbines. They have aero derivative units (cf6-80, for example) and frame units which are very much like a steam turbine. The plant I operate we have simple cycle units that are 46 percent efficient (LMS100).
Look up a channel called AgentJayZ If you want to know more about gas turbines and how they work. That guy goes into some interesting details on the subject.
I've been watching a lot of your videos recently. After watching the super computer tour and now this one, I just want to say thanks for uploading these! Wish I was there in person. It's one thing to see your diagrams of buildings and how they work it's another to see the actual application in the real world and see the processes to make electricity and deal with the byproducts.
Looks like 17 people thumbed it down just because it's not renewable that's not the point of the video the point of the video is education and this guy is great at it.
@@onetwothree4148 yes and no. It's been proven time and again to reduce shrinkage issues, be more resilient against frost, and it is far, far more workable. That is in comparison with a modern mix without it. As far as older concrete goes, you are right, it is often better, but that's usually due to better aggregate sizing, (possessing a gradient of agg sizes as opposed to 1 diameter only) design that was not dependent on structural steel, and a massively lower labor cost and higher material cost. - It pays to make guys do things much better when the material is far more valuable than their time, now it is the other way around. I used to be dead set against fly ash, preferring mixes with more powder instead, and the local plant agreed with me. Having now gotten more experience and having seen the research done by ACI on the subject, the verdict is clear- concrete with a pozzolan is superior to concrete without a pozzolan. And the cheapest pozzolan is fly ash. Fun fact- the romans used to mix a reddish clay into their concrete that would behave similar to a pozzolan, while also rendering it far less permeable than regular concrete- its how they built water retaining structures so well. They also cured them for 1-2 years to avoid shrinkage cracks. It left their concrete a light pinkish red, at least until the clay weathered out of the pores.
@@onetwothree4148 Also, since the fly ash replaces some of the powder, the concrete is technically weaker, you do have that right. It has a lower MPA. But MPA is not the only measure of a concrete's value. The modulus of elasticity (resilience to flexing basically) is higher in mixes where fly ash is used. It is also less likely to have shrinkage cracks, as the ash in the mix doesn't shrink, reducing the total shrinkage of the structure. Sorry bout the obscenely long reply, but there really is a lot to it.
@@hosmerhomeboy you're right, the main difference between modern concrete and older concrete is not fly ash, it's water content. I thought about that right after I posted. Modern commercial almost always has way too much water, and that is a far larger culprit. Coal fly ash is an inferior pozzolan (and the Romans used volcanic ash, not clay, as a pozzolan (that's where the word 'pozzolan' comes from). The secret of how to make concrete was lost for about a thousand years, because the Roman empire was broken up and the tradesmen who kept the secret no longer had access to volcanic ash. Concrete was rediscovered in the 19th century when special clay containing similar chemicals was discovered to create Portland cement. Realistically the biggest reason the Roman concrete buildings still stand is what you said, perfect mixing technique, and most importantly the Roman concrete was installed damp and packed into place, not poured, and therefore cured much slower.
@@onetwothree4148 I stand corrected on the pozzolan. As far as the fly ash being inferior goes, you may be correct, it's just ubiquitous due to being so cheap. I also think that when it comes to roman concrete we have some level of survivor bias. Most of the bad stuff is gone. That being said, we (despite our much deeper understanding of chemistry and greater access to energy) mostly build inferior things designed for a relatively short service life.
The scale of coal power didn't hit me till I got trapped red light waiting for a train to pass. As it happened I was at a bit of a decline just high enough to see the top of the railcars. This train was easily a mile long, 100 or more cars and every single one of them was filled to the top with coal.
@@bradhaines3142 trains, barges and trucks lol. I live near a few coal fired plants. Worked I. Most of them. W.H. Sammis for example is burning 60 ton an hour.
I wish I had trips like this and this professor. I would have learned so much more I think. In fact, I probably learned more watching these videos than I ever did in physics classes, which were boring as hell.
Funny bit is now that all the electrical plants and diesel fuel have had the sulfur removed farmers are having to purchase higher sulfur content fertilizers. Even that gypsum would make a good soil additive depending on specific metals content.(Though not likely economic to remove any excess toxic metals)
By far this is my favorite channel and watch the videos All the time. That being said, I visit and work in power plants on a regular basis and it is, or was, very very rare to see ash and gypsum taken back to the mine site. Until recently ash was or is pumped to open ash ponds in a water slurry as there is no way to load 50 train cars back up with all that byproduct. Only recently has the larger plants started trucking the ash away and I think they have been selling the gypsum. The larger plants also have activated carbon and or anhydrous ammonia scrubbers to clean the air as well as PA and gas recirc fans to lower NOx emissions. Great video but I think a video at a newer plant, say Prarie State Generation, would give everyone a better idea of what a large power plant is all about. Keep the videos coming Dave. 👍🏻
Thank you so much for this video. I am trying to educate myself as I am doing a contract job as a historical writer for a power company and need to know the very basics all the way through. Your explanation and tour was amazingly clear and helpful. thanks again.
Coal fired plants are going away in most parts of the world. Here in the US too. Way too dirty. I toured one in the late 70's in England as a first year welding apprentice.They built the plant next to a coal mine and conveyored the coal to the pulverizers to almost powder the coal for maximum burn. Large plant, powered Manchester. Was called Agecroft, the colliery and the power plant. All gone now.
The speaker at the 21 minute mark or so in this video that "Coal is half hydrogen". Wrong. Coal (brown and black varieties) is around 5% hydrogen. Indeed, it's the fact that coal has little hydrogen and is predominantly pure carbon fuel that makes it such a uniquely "dirty" fuel from point of view of greenhouse gas emissions. So this is a central, critical, key property of coal the speaker is either lying about, or profoundly ignorant of. To his credit, the speaker does at the 19:30 mark make a critically important point in alluding to the relative energy densities of coal vs uranium (nuclear power fuel). I was very unimpressed!
You would need to educate people and drill through their thick skulls that nuclear power is not scary at all. Nuclear power is the way to go, but when you have people afraid of the word "radiation", you will have a hard time moving forward.
As usual, great job! Power generation and the science and technology underpinning it have become perhaps the most critical issue of our time. So much change is on the horizon. I think it is really important , even as a lay person, to learn some of the basic concepts and principles involved. How else will we be able to make rational choices at the ballot? Keep up the good work Illinois EnergyProf!
#2 Item In my quest to assist the professor to be more accurate and educational with his wording starts at 1:15. The professor corrects his errors, with errors and emissions in his attempt. Water doesn’t turn into steam in the furnace pipes as the correction infers. Circulation ratio in a furnace is a complicated thing and can’t be dismissed by simply stating there is water in these tubes that turns to steam when typically a ratio of 5 to 1 (water to steam) is present in the furnace risers for a key fundamental reason. In this case an individual water molecule passes through the furnace 5 times before it absorbs the latent heat to be liberated in the steam drum. A more accurate reword for the professor “ Relatively cold water is supplied to the furnace by the downcomer tubes strategically placed to not pick up combustion heat. The heat provided by the combustion process in the furnace is transferred to the riser tubes thus creating the natural circulation by gravity necessary for the process. The risers tubes are typically designed to limit steam generation to approx a 5% steam to water ratio. Limiting the steam to 5% in the furnace riser tubes is required to protect these tubes from overheating and subsequent metal creep failure”
Volt's Repairs : that’s a good guess. This guy is just about facts. It’s refreshing. Each video is the ups/downs of energy. I learn so much from him. It’s a bummer ppl get upset over laid back facts
The claim that fly ash is returned to mines is false. Power plants are not required to tell the public what they do with fly ash. Concrete and drywall manufactures however are required to disclose what goes into their products, and both drywall and concrete commonly contain fly ash.
Andrzej everyone should, it’s amazing stuff...there so much use. It’s good the activists have pushed so hard against the old practices. It forces ppl to think hard about doing something better for everyone
I can't believe I just sat there for more than 5 Seconds looking in Illinois thinking it said ilononis and almost guest oh okay I guess that's a company name
Lol pink hard hats. It's what the site super would give you if for some reason you came to the site with your hat and everyone would lulz at you all day long
After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the cleanup sent truck loads of drywall (the major component of which is gypsum) to landfills and major hydrogen sulfide problems have surfaced as a result.
I have taught college for 35+ years. I can tell you that most students look like this and very few display smiles and excitement. They are not bored or disinterested; they are just tired and overwhelmed with homework and exams.