Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: where smart happens. I am Marshall Brain With today's question,
Speaker 1: how much coal is required to run a one hundred
Speaker 1: watt lightbulb twenty four hours a day for a year.
Speaker 1: We can start answering this question by figuring out how
Speaker 1: much energy in kilowatt hours that lightbulb uses in one year.
Speaker 1: To do that, we multiply how much power it uses
Speaker 1: in kilowatts by the number of hours in a year.
Speaker 1: That gives us point one kilowatts times eight thousand, seven
Speaker 1: hundred sixty hours in a year, or eight hundred seventy
Speaker 1: six kilowatt hours for the year. The thermal energy content
Speaker 1: of a typical ton of coal is six thousand, one
Speaker 1: hundred fifty kilowatt hours per ton. Although coal fired power
Speaker 1: plants are very efficient, they're still limited by the laws
Speaker 1: of thermo dynamics, so only about of that thermal energy
Speaker 1: and coal gets converted into electricity by the power plant.
Speaker 1: So the actual electricity generated per ton of coal is
Speaker 1: forty of six thousand, one hundred fifty, or roughly kilowatt
Speaker 1: hours per ton of coal. With a little math, we
Speaker 1: get seven pounds of coal. The light are one hundred
Speaker 1: watt lightbulb for a year. Once you take line losses
Speaker 1: and a few other things into account, it takes about
Speaker 1: a pound of coal to produce a kilowatt hour of
Speaker 1: electricity in round numbers, that's a pretty big pile of coal.
Speaker 1: But let's look at what else gets produced to power
Speaker 1: that light bulb. First of all, there's sulfur dioxide. Coal
Speaker 1: usually contains a little bit of sulfur and it's the
Speaker 1: main cause of acid rain. You get five pounds of
Speaker 1: that when you light a one hundred lightbulb for a year.
Speaker 1: Then there's nitrogen oxides. These cause smog and acid rain.
Speaker 1: They occur when the nitrogen in the area gets heated
Speaker 1: up during the burning process with the coal. You get
Speaker 1: about five pounds of that lighting your light bulb. And
Speaker 1: then you get the carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas suspected
Speaker 1: of causing global warming. You get one thousand, eight hundred
Speaker 1: fifty two pounds of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: Coal also produces smaller amounts of just about every element
Speaker 1: on the periodic table, including the radioactive ones. In fact,
Speaker 1: a coal burning power plant emits more radiation than a
Speaker 1: properly functioning nuclear power plant. A typical five hundred megawatt
Speaker 1: coal power plant produces three and a half billion kilowatt
Speaker 1: hours per year. That's enough energy for four million of
Speaker 1: our light bulbs to operate year round. To produce this
Speaker 1: amount of electrical energy, the plant will burn something like
Speaker 1: one and a half million tons of coal. Be sure
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