About half of the electrical energy used in the United States is produced from coal, a fossil fuel that has hundreds of years of reserves. The power generation process is straightforward (heat from burning coal creates steam that spins a turbine/ generator) but generally not particularly efficient. Coal is inexpensive (being a fraction of cost of natural gas) due to an ample supply, but this comes at the price of emissions, particularly CO2. While most of the air pollution can be sharply reduced, major CO2 reduction efforts dramatically increase plant construction and operational costs and cause the power plant’s efficiency to plummet.

Major efforts and expenditures are occurring to re-introduce a more than 100-year-old technology involving turning coal into a gas. Coal gasification entails heating but not actually fully burning coal. The synthetic gas produced can then be used in a combined- cycle power plant. The cost to build a gasification plant is somewhat higher than a coal plant, and emissions are somewhat lower. As with the coal plant, technology can reduce CO2 emissions but at much increased costs, although not to the level that would occur with a coal plant. Large-scale CO2 reductions introduce large-scale complications for all fossil fuel based facilities, including troubling issues as to “sequestered” CO2 removed from the plants. Increasingly strident political opposition is casting doubt on the practical ability to construct new coal and gasification plants that burn an abundant but environmentally challenged fuel.

Applying the hybrid-nuclear design to coal gasification allows for emissions free compression of the air used extensively by both the combustion turbine and gasification plant while simultaneously increasing the overall efficiency of the baseline plant. Also, the size of the gasification and power blocks are about half of that otherwise required. These effects yield highly competitive and environmentally friendly hybrid power plants that inherently produce significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions than equivalent conventional coal or gasification power plants. The reduction is so large that the sequestration of CO2 is not necessary.