Professional and Ethical Responsibility

Professional and Ethical Responsibility

Introduction

A conventional coal-fired power plant produces electricity by burning coal in a steam generator that heats water to produce high pressure and high temperature steam. The steam flows through a series of steam turbines which spin an electrical generator to produce electricity. The exhaust steam from the turbines is cooled, condensed back into water, and returned to the steam generator to start the process over.

Conventional coal-fired power plants are highly complex and custom designed on a large scale for continuous operation 24 hours per day and 365 days per year. Such plants provide most of the electrical energy used in many countries. Most plants built in the 1980s and early 1990s have a power of around 500 MW (500•106 watt), while many of the modern plants have a power of around 1000 MW. Also the efficiencies (ratio of electrical energy produced to energy released by the coal burned) of conventional coal-fired plants increased from under 35% to close to 45%. This paper discusses professional and ethical responsibility in a concise and comprehensive way.

Professional and Ethical Responsibility

For most coal-fired power plants, coal is prepared for use by first crushing the delivered coal into pieces less than 5 cm in size. The crushed coal is then transported from the storage yard to in-plant storage silos by rubberized conveyor belts.

In plants that burn pulverized coal, coal from the storage silos is fed into pulverizers that grind the crushed coal into the consistency of face powder and mix it with primary combustion air which transports the pulverized coal to the steam generator furnace. A 500 MW coal-fired power plant will have about six such pulverizers, five of which will supply the steam generator at full load with about 225 metric tons per hour.

In plants that do not burn pulverized coal, the crushed coal may be directly fed into cyclone burners, a specific kind of combustor that can efficiently burn larger pieces of coal.

In plants fueled with slurried coal, the slurry is fed directly to the pulverizers and then mixed with air and fed to the steam generator. The slurry water is separated and removed during pulverizing of the coal.

As noted earlier, every professional organization has a code of conduct. By definition, a professional organization drafts and enforces expected ethical behavior of its members and typically will banish members from the professional association for gross violations of the association's code.

A professional code, like most corporate codes, provides standards of practice by describing what is expected or prohibited practice by association members. These stipulations do not apply to everyone, just those who are members or seek to be members of the association. For example, in a business organization not all employees are governed by the American Institute for Certified Public Accountants, just those employees who also are certified public accountants (CPAs) in good standing with the association. In some organizations, there may be multiple professional codes governing individuals' activities, such as at a health care facility where doctors and nurses have ...