bigwheelzip
Absent Comrade
Almost no one.
Go Dawgs!! Georgia Power is putting the final touches on Plant Vogtle units 3 and 4.
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It's Official: Texas has achieved Third-World Status
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Go Dawgs!! Georgia Power is putting the final touches on Plant Vogtle units 3 and 4.
bigwheelzip
Absent Comrade
Or look a couple hundred miles further north at Raggovidda in Norway, the worlds most efficient wind energy farm. It's perched at the northern tip of Europe, overlooking the Arctic ocean.
World's most efficient wind power plant doubles capacity | The Independent Barents Observer
It is a concern and dealt with in various ways. Double walled tubing is one, having an intermediate heat exchanger is another, a third is dropping the steam loop and using a gaseous exchange fluid like He or CO2. Na has a lot of good properties but reactivity with water isn't one of them.
Monju in Japan had a secondary Na leak. No explosion, but NaOH powder all over the place. The Russians are confident enough that they have the problem solved to keep scaling up their Na cooled fast designs. Now up to 800 MWe.
I think the days of the big 2GWe plants are gone. Smaller plants remain a possibility, but gas is (soon to be was) so cheap. The economics of building a gas plant with a short life cycle is much better than fronting all the cost for a big nuke plant that may last 100 years.
bigwheelzip
Absent Comrade
REF: The estimated cost of the two new 1250MWe units at Plant Vogtle, that are scheduled to come online in the next 15 months, is 25 billion dollars.
ggibson511960
Member
I'm a retired mechanical engineer that worked in nuclear power and petrochemical energy technology for 45 years. I know too much. The current political bickering and CYA bellowing make me sick. Here are a few facts to digest.
Wind power is a truly remarkable technology, refined over decades of development. It is un-dispatchable, that is a grid operator cannot depend on it like a gas fired plant. A well run grid cannot run with more than about 30% wind power lest it become unstable from frequency instability or outright failure when the wind doesn't blow.
Why does fossil fuel rich Texas have so much wind power? There are windier, better places to put a wind turbine. Easy answer. Texas is business friendly. It it possible to put up turbines that devalue real estate and equally important, build transmission lines to get power to market. Land is also cheap in west Texas.
Why are so many built? The feds continue to subsidize wind power plants and wind production making it extremely attractive for investment money. The lone exception is Warren Buffet who refuses to invest in an industry that is wholly dependent on subsidy.
How expensive is wind power compared to other sources? Accounting is tricky, but if true life cycle cost is brought to present value wind power costs about 22 cents a kilowatt hour to product, compared to 4 cents for natural gas produced power, and 6 to 8 cents for coal and nuclear. Why would anybody pay more for wind power? Easy. Legislative mandates that are bludgeoning states to convert to renewables and federal rules that compel grid operators buy this expensive power when it is available, forcing older, cheaper coal and nuclear plants to sit idle, even though more reliable and dispatchable.
This sudden unavailability of wind plants from freezing caused ERCOT to summon massive gas plant response which cascaded to natural gas pipelines and storage caverns. Many had gotten lax about glycol moisture control and froze up, an almost unheard of problem since ancient days.
Politicians are blaming Texas and ERCOT for poor planning and isolation from adjacent grids. ERCOT has interconnects to MISO (Midcontinent Independent System Operator) that date back decades and have been use on rare occasions to bail out MISO. MISO was hanging on by a thread and could not spare power. One of its power distributors, Entergy had extensive blackouts in Texas. Nobody is talking about that, except one ill informed congress person whining to get power from Louisiana.
The move to deregulate power generation and distribution set loose market forces on the public. Franchised electric utilities had gotten a little lax about cost control, and deregulation let customers pick and chose from an array of merchant power producers. ERCOT sits in the middle of that market, managing the technical resilience of the grid and serving as an economic clearing house for electricity flowing back and forth from many producers and consumers.
This same kind of "incident" is happening regularly in California. This past year the California grid got dangerously low on power capacity and called on its regular savior, a bunch of coal fired power plants in Utah to bail them out, a normal, if somewhat expensive practice. Spot market electricity can get expensive. Unfortunately, Utah was down for maintenance, so rolling California blackouts and brownouts ensued.
What is a person to do? This old country boy, living in Houston has invested in a whole house generator that was put to good user. We enjoyed warm house, warm beds and hot showers while most suffered. I guess that makes me a prepper. I feel pretty smug, but awfully dismayed at the political opportunism that has sprung up. If the feds had not spent taxpayer money to create this market distortion, it likely would not have happened. It's going to get worse as the true cost of renewables becomes due. Windmills are aging and must be disposed of. Solar farm panels age out even more quickly and are pretty much shot at 15 years. By then the investors, politicians and green energy renewable advocates will be on the the next crisis opportunity. The even more cruel irony is that we left several technologies behind decades ago that would provide almost limitless energy, sodium cooled fast breeder reactors and thorium fueled reactors, but fear mongering politicians getting re-elected by an ignorant electorate run the world, not engineers bent on providing ever more efficient machines to make life easier and preserve the environment.
Wind power is a truly remarkable technology, refined over decades of development. It is un-dispatchable, that is a grid operator cannot depend on it like a gas fired plant. A well run grid cannot run with more than about 30% wind power lest it become unstable from frequency instability or outright failure when the wind doesn't blow.
Why does fossil fuel rich Texas have so much wind power? There are windier, better places to put a wind turbine. Easy answer. Texas is business friendly. It it possible to put up turbines that devalue real estate and equally important, build transmission lines to get power to market. Land is also cheap in west Texas.
Why are so many built? The feds continue to subsidize wind power plants and wind production making it extremely attractive for investment money. The lone exception is Warren Buffet who refuses to invest in an industry that is wholly dependent on subsidy.
How expensive is wind power compared to other sources? Accounting is tricky, but if true life cycle cost is brought to present value wind power costs about 22 cents a kilowatt hour to product, compared to 4 cents for natural gas produced power, and 6 to 8 cents for coal and nuclear. Why would anybody pay more for wind power? Easy. Legislative mandates that are bludgeoning states to convert to renewables and federal rules that compel grid operators buy this expensive power when it is available, forcing older, cheaper coal and nuclear plants to sit idle, even though more reliable and dispatchable.
This sudden unavailability of wind plants from freezing caused ERCOT to summon massive gas plant response which cascaded to natural gas pipelines and storage caverns. Many had gotten lax about glycol moisture control and froze up, an almost unheard of problem since ancient days.
Politicians are blaming Texas and ERCOT for poor planning and isolation from adjacent grids. ERCOT has interconnects to MISO (Midcontinent Independent System Operator) that date back decades and have been use on rare occasions to bail out MISO. MISO was hanging on by a thread and could not spare power. One of its power distributors, Entergy had extensive blackouts in Texas. Nobody is talking about that, except one ill informed congress person whining to get power from Louisiana.
The move to deregulate power generation and distribution set loose market forces on the public. Franchised electric utilities had gotten a little lax about cost control, and deregulation let customers pick and chose from an array of merchant power producers. ERCOT sits in the middle of that market, managing the technical resilience of the grid and serving as an economic clearing house for electricity flowing back and forth from many producers and consumers.
This same kind of "incident" is happening regularly in California. This past year the California grid got dangerously low on power capacity and called on its regular savior, a bunch of coal fired power plants in Utah to bail them out, a normal, if somewhat expensive practice. Spot market electricity can get expensive. Unfortunately, Utah was down for maintenance, so rolling California blackouts and brownouts ensued.
What is a person to do? This old country boy, living in Houston has invested in a whole house generator that was put to good user. We enjoyed warm house, warm beds and hot showers while most suffered. I guess that makes me a prepper. I feel pretty smug, but awfully dismayed at the political opportunism that has sprung up. If the feds had not spent taxpayer money to create this market distortion, it likely would not have happened. It's going to get worse as the true cost of renewables becomes due. Windmills are aging and must be disposed of. Solar farm panels age out even more quickly and are pretty much shot at 15 years. By then the investors, politicians and green energy renewable advocates will be on the the next crisis opportunity. The even more cruel irony is that we left several technologies behind decades ago that would provide almost limitless energy, sodium cooled fast breeder reactors and thorium fueled reactors, but fear mongering politicians getting re-elected by an ignorant electorate run the world, not engineers bent on providing ever more efficient machines to make life easier and preserve the environment.
Yet in South Korea, it can get done about 1/4 of that. Hmmm.
(PDF) Historical construction costs of global nuclear power reactors
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Ziggy2525
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Working backwards....
The plant I was at also had containment at negative pressure. That allowed people to go into containment through the air lock during operation without radiation leakage back into the Aux Building. Still, I looked up an old annual NRC report back when they were running full bore. In that report they were running 3,300 curies of gaseous effluent over the year. It's not huge, but they leak.
But, that's exactly the problem. There's always an excuse. The plant wasn't sited correctly (true for Fort Calhoun also). There's always a consulting engineering firm that will write a safety analysis that says it's OK. IMO, what's needed is an excuse proof, foolproof plant design. If it's not sited correctly and floods, it safely shuts down. Operators don't follow procedures (e.g. TMI), it safely shuts down.
That points directly towards most of the Generation IV designs.
GIF Portal - Portal Site Public Home
bigwheelzip
Absent Comrade
Not a surprise. I worked engineering at several nuke plants under construction, including Vogtle units 1 and 2 beginning in 1983. Good times.
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OK, I don't know what 3300 curies translates to, but apparently the NRC didn't consider it an issue. OTOH, Coleman has sold gazillions of their lantern mantels to anyone. Yet if you take one inside a protected area, it won't pass the portal monitors for exit and has to be disposed of as rad waste. Just because it may register doesn't make it a significant issue.
BTW, the airlock is there to maintain the vacuum in containment while people enter/leave containment under power.
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Jon651
Member
On the lighter side...
When I originally saw the title of this thread "It's Official: Texas has achieved Third-World Status", the first thing that went through my head was:
"They ACHIEVED Third-World status? Does that mean they had to WORK FOR IT???"
When I originally saw the title of this thread "It's Official: Texas has achieved Third-World Status", the first thing that went through my head was:
"They ACHIEVED Third-World status? Does that mean they had to WORK FOR IT???"
bigwheelzip
Absent Comrade
Your commentary may be accurate in Texas, but the "in an industry" phrase globally judges the technology.
Numerous countries in Europe have eliminated subsidies, yet are still installing wind farms. The Dutch, with much to lose from rising seas have the world's first unsubsidized offshore wind farm, and are expanding it.
Vattenfall proves offshore wind can be profitable without subsidies
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Not without skewing the market in other ways.
From the linked article: ".
"The closure of these plants should lead to an increase in wholesale prices in the Netherlands, making the operation of the wind-power projects profitable even without the aid of subsidies".
If you eliminate all the cheaper ways of making power, for sure it's viable.
Look at Germany- highest percentage of wind/solar and also the highest electricity prices in Europe.
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All I know is this...
35 yards from the shoreline.
89 hours no water or power.
29 degrees IN the house.
The island and houses are not capable of below freezing
temps for the this prolonged time span.
Nary a house around here is without a busted water pipe.
Power kicked on about an hour ago....
Hot meal and shower in the am.....
God Bless Texas...
35 yards from the shoreline.
89 hours no water or power.
29 degrees IN the house.
The island and houses are not capable of below freezing
temps for the this prolonged time span.
Nary a house around here is without a busted water pipe.
Power kicked on about an hour ago....
Hot meal and shower in the am.....
God Bless Texas...
LVSteve
Member
Probably because the German government use prices to control consumer demand while cutting industry a break.
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