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Heat Wave Shuts Down Alabama Reactor
mdsolar writes "In a first for the US, one of three nuclear reactors at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama has been shut down because the Tennessee River is too hot to provide adequate cooling for the waste heat produced by the reactor. This is happening as the TVA faces its highest demand for power ever, reports the Houston Chronicle. This effect has been seen in Europe in the past, forcing reduced generation, but the US has until now been immune to the problem. The TVA will buy power elsewhere and impose higher rates, blaming reduced river flow as a result of drought."
As for a while, they were planning to use one engineer's idea of cooling it with ice cold beer.
In Soviet Russia, overheating nuclear reactor shuts down YOU!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
>but the US has, until now, been immune to the problem.
no, not immune. it just hasn't happend until now.
I work at a nuclear power plant. We have a limit for the temperature of the river downstream of our returned cooling water for environmental reasons, not reasons related to the power generation process. I suspect the TVA has a similar requirement.
I noted from the nrc website (www.nrc.gov) that their other reactors are operating at reduced load, which is what our reactors must do to limit the heat input into the river.
So this is nothing remarkable.
Why not just run the river through a refrigerator to cool it down? After all, you can generate the electricity for the refrigerator in the plant.
(I'd patent the idea, but the patent office has a silly rule regarding perpetual motion machines that gets in the way...)
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I hadn't heard of this before now but can see how it can really be a problem. It takes temperature differences to make heat energy flow and without that, or without enough of one, it doesn't. This will also affect regular power plants too.
;-)
Looks like future plants - nuclear or conventional (coal/natural gas) will need to be engineered to carry more of the work of cooling their water. It can be done. It's just less efficient as there are more parasitic loads on the system.
Just remember - there is no such thing as global warming. Hurricanes blasting up to category 5 in a few days, droughts, floods, etc. - all of it is just coincidence and would happen whether we pumped billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere or not.
This is not that unusual for power plants. Some coal fired units are off as well, for example Dynegy's Wabash River is currently experiencing similar problems. Obviously this hurts everyone (the company loses generation during times when wholesale power prices are high and, if load gets too high, the consumer might experience brown outs or black outs). This problem will likely get worse as well as global warming takes hold.
They are already red states. Might as well make them glowing red.
It would give a whole new meaning to Louisiana Hot Sauce...
I live in Alabama, and it's been in the 100s+ for at least a week now. Glad today's Saturday and I can sit inside!
To anyone arguing that Climate Change is actually a good thing - in general, it isn't, and this is an example. Especially in the US, our entire infrastructure, agriculture and manufacturing is built and created under the assumption that things will stay the same. Pipelines in Alaska were built under the assumption that permafrost was, well, permanent. Nuclear reactors were built under the assumption that the temperature changes of rivers are known and won't change. Levies are built with certain assumptions about local rainfall. Agriculture is built on certain assumptions about the local weather.
Yes, we can adapt to it, but it's an expensive proposition. All the stuff about cities flooding, people dying and malaria becoming the new bane of the US is extreme cases being blown up to make good news stories. It's the accumulation of small things like this that'll hurt.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Yeah, you guys had black people to do all the sweaty work.
It ain't about problems with the cooling itself, for that the rivers would need to be far hotter. The problem is enviromental, if you add extra heat to an already warm river you risk that it rises to the point were you destroy the eco-system. Simply put, the fishes get cooked and the algea grow out of control.
This is considered to be a bad thing.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The cooling problem is a result of TVA's interest in building more reactors. Browns Ferry is now operating with two reactors instead of three because they recently added a reactor. They are also planning on adding a reactor upstream at Watts Bar http://www.tva.gov/news/releases/julysep07/wbu2.ht m adding to the heat load on the Tennessee River. So, next time, they may have to take two Browns Ferry reactors off line at seasonal peak demand. This makes electricity more expensive because it requires buying rather than selling electricity when it is most expensive.
s -selling-solar.html
But, the fairly natural solution to the problem, reducing summer demand through net metering of customer generated solar power, a solution being implemented in 41 states and DC, is hampered in the TVA service territory by TVA's net metering policy: http://www.tva.gov/purpa/net_metering.htm which is a billing period-by-billing period policy rather than an annual carryover policy used in net metering states. Adopting a reasonable net metering policy would allow TVA to become a summer time peak demand power exporter and gain by arbitrage, reducing the risk of higher overall rates it is building for itself by not paying attention to the capacity of the river system to handle the 60% of wasted energy nuclear power generation creates.
--
Power when you want it most: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Why not just figure out a way to turn waste heat into energy to avoid heating the river up unnecessarily?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The Louisina Witch Queen Moussette is in charge of that area so forget glowing red she makes every thing glow green.
-b.
Eliminate nuclear and coal power in favor of solar and wind power, and replace the stupid cars with bikes. Eventually the global warming will take care of itself and we won't need as much energy as air conditioning will no longer be needed. The added bonus would be less obesity in the world.
Seems like an inherent design flaw, if the reactor meant to produce energy has a problem throwing some of the energy away.
In theory, it should be possible to have no "waste heat". In practice this is an engineering problem — as the energy is converted from heat to electricity, some of the heat "escapes". The newer designs should either eliminate the leak completely or reduce it significantly... Maybe, by using a significantly cooler gas, than the currently employed steam?..
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Interesting in the article that the journalist doesn't include power generated by hydroelectric dams as renewable energy...
"TVA gets about 60 percent of its electricity from coal-fired power plants, 30 percent from nuclear plants and 10 percent from its 29 hydroelectric dams. Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar account for less than 1 percent."
Any idea why that might be? Political slant? ignorance?
Umm, I mean the water flows through the dam, it goes out to sea, it evaporates, and it rains back up in the mountains and comes through the dam again. Seems pretty renewable to me.... at least some of it is coming back up through that cycle if not all...
Spelling matters.
How can there be "waste heat"?
This does not seem like an efficient use of the power generated.
Doesn't the fission reactor produce heat, to boil water, to make steam, which runs turbines?
Now of course there is the minor problem of having a tornado by the tail near a nuclear reactor -- but aside from the fact that you can channel hot water quite a distance economically, the hydrodynamic models (computational and scale) indicate that the base of the vortex can, indeed, be contained in a location. The real problem is that this system hasn't been scaled up to a sufficient size -- in an appropriately isolated test area -- to validate the models to the degree required by public safety.
Seastead this.
The TVA thinks this is remarkable:
"We don't believe we've ever shut down a nuclear unit because of river temperature," said John Moulton, spokesman for the Knoxville, Tenn. based utility.
I don't know about you, but I'm used to rivers being cool. From mountain springs to the Mississippi, I've never seen a whole river at 90 F. It's crazy and says something about global warming and the extensive drought the US is experiencing.
Someone who works at a nuke should care more than you do. Reducing capacity is one thing, but turning off a reactor is a pain in the ass. Depending on burnup and time down, you may have to wait weeks before binging it back on line. I pity the people who work there. An outage in that kind of heat is going to suck for everyone who has to crawl around. It's also bad for the people you serve. Essentially, you have lost 1 GW of baseline power. According to the article, that's about 3% of their best generation capacity. An idle nuke makes expensive electricity. Using coal instead is just going to make things worse - more pollution and more carbon emissions.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Heat rises. Vertical turbines in the nuclear reactor towers might work if they could figure out how to circulate the heated water around inside the towers?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
To heat domestic water, space heating and even to power adsorption chillers which can reduce AC requirements. Even coal power stations can hit 88% efficient.
t s.html
... Well you decide for yourself.
http://www.helsinginenergia.fi/en/tuotanto/benefi
US power stations are still only 40% efficient because
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The bicycle as a commuter vehicle works only under ideal conditions and only for the young and fit. You won't be taking a bicycle into Buffalo, NY in mid-winter. You won't be taking a bicycle into Houston, TX in mid-summer.
Especially considering the coming energy crunch.
Deleted
Interesting in the article that the journalist doesn't include power generated by hydroelectric dams as renewable energy...
Journalists ain't scientists, and scientists ain't journalists... in general. So if you're reading something in the news that's science related, don't count on it being accurate.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Heat is disorganized motion, right? Atoms and molecules just bumping around any which way. If you want organized motion, which is useful energy -- such as an organized motion of electrons, a.k.a. electricity -- then you have to get that heat motion organized, flowing in one direction.
You do this by making the heat flow from one place to another. But here's the catch: you need a source and a sink to have a flow. The hot reactor core is the source. The river is the sink. Heat flows from the former to the latter, and the turbines, in essence, dip a "paddlewheel" into that current.
If you get rid of the sink, nothing flows, your "paddlewheel" doesn't turn, and you get no useful energy.
How conveniant, Gomer. I work at a nuclear power plant too. I've been trying to take aways these people's AIR for the longest time.
I found its easier to induce birth defects into the populous to get them breathing another gas, and then I'll scare the world that they're illegal aliens from a far-away galaxy trying to steal somthing. I'll ship them out to a Mars outpost to begin colonization of Mars to mine iriidium and dilythium crystals. I'll put Hauwser into the Memory-Whipe machine and install him as a Governor of a dilapidated State full of under-terrestrial aliens, and begin shipping them out in my new-fangled Shanghai ice-cream booth service; they'll all think they're getting jobs driving ice-cream trucks, but the Saturn-Rocket boosters will kick-in and send their ass to Mars complete with a Klingon cloaking device to shield their exit from Earth from paranoid on-lookers.
Ha!
Yeah the big question to me is what other options are there for cooling a power plant other than using river water, and are they more sustainable / resilient to climate change? I don't think that underground cooling would be sufficient. I looked at how some of the desert plants operate and they too use running water - from the sewage lines of "nearby" cities, which is treated before use in the plant and then returned for reuse.
Seeing as how nuclear is really the only option we have for decreasing our power-plant C02 output on a large scale, and that low water levels, and increasing water temperature are only going to become more frequent (especially if more plants are using them for cooling) that seems like a pretty important issue. It may already be solved - this is just the first I have heard of it.
Sorry, just a compulsion. Here's a more readable summary:
"In a first for the US, one of three reactors at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama has been shut down because the Tennessee River is too hot to provide adequate cooling. This is happening as the TVA faces its highest ever demand for power, reports the Houston Chronicle. This has occurred in Europe in the past, forcing reduced generation. The TVA will buy power elsewhere and impose higher rates, blaming reduced river flow as a result of drought."
Um...isn't this the nature of time, life, existence, et cetera? Things change. Even if there were no such thing as man-made global warming, the Sun would still vary its output, the continents would continue to drift, evolution would continue to produce new and interesting diseases, et cetera and so forth.
What do we call individuals who run their lives under the assumption that things will always stay the same? That they'll never get old or sick, that their job will never disappear or their skills become obsolete? "Intelligent" doesn't come to mind.
Besides, consider the advice you give people bemoaning the fact that their life has changed (e.g. they had to get a new job, now they have a baby and can't party all night, et cetera). We tell them, hey, change is an opportunity. So it is with climate change, natural or man-made. It's not a lot different than new and disruptive technology (cf. the RIAA and the Internet). Some folks will lose, yes. But others, especially if they're flexible and intelligent, will win.
Personally, I think the lesson to be learned from global warming (from whatever cause it stems) is not to resolve to hold back the tide, this time or next time. That's just futile. The Earth will always be producing some new surprise or other. The general solution algorithm is not to try to put fingers in every dike that develops cracks. There aren't enough fingers, and too many dikes. The trick, as individuals and as a species, is to think creatively and adapt. Otherwise, we're just dinosaurs wondering what that flash in the sky was, and why the swamp is drying up steadily.
They don't "run off waste heat." They run off waste heat plus a cooler atmosphere into which they can allow heat to flow.
All you need to use the "waste" heat being dumped into the river is to find something significantly cooler than the river. Then you can set up a heat engine between the river and your cold thing and generate power.
The problem of finding something just lying around in Alabama that is significantly colder than the local river is left as an exercise for the student.
They have electricity in Alabama?!
There's already a simple, monstrously expensive system for doing just that:
District heating
District heating is the process by which the low-exergy waste heat (and even some medium-exergy heat, when a higher thermal/electrical generation ratio is favored) is delivered to end users. Usually this involves transferring the heat from the plant's steam/water circuits via a heat exchanger to a water circuit that goes directly to the customer's home. Steam was used in older systems, and can still be found in New York's (from the 1880's, IIRC). From there, the heat is transfered via a heat exchanger to the customer's hot-water heater and radiator systems. In Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, this system is widely deployed. Besides minimizing the environmental impact of thermal power plants (coal, nuclear, biomass) on rivers and water tables (in areas without sufficient surface water), it also hinders the expansion of electric and gas heating--transmission mediums with highly volatile prices and supplies. In addition, it's also an adaptable technology. A district heating net doesn't care how the water gets hot, so long as it gets hot enough. If your district heating plant goes bork, the net can be fed by emergency thermal or electric boilers. If your natural gas supplier goes bork, well, let's hope that Angolan LNG tanker comes quickly.
Most of the US has a climate that requires large amounts of cooling in the summer and large amounts of heating in the winter, with low electrical demand in fall and spring. While a much less deployed technology--and, then, usually only in large apartment buildings and office blocks--district cooling can also be utilized by using the waste heat to run an evaporative cooler which then cools a circuit of near-freezing water. The details of this are too much for my poor brain to recite, but, in short, instead of throwing that ~30% of your plant's heat input which converted to electricity at the problem, you can use some of the ~70% that becomes waste heat to take care of at least part of your customers' cooling needs.
Unfortunately, the capital costs for these systems are immense, and mostly due to all the piping you need to lay. As a result, the technology only took off in Communist or mildly Socialist countries whose central planning did what finicky venture capitalists wouldn't. Another hurtle, besides the cost of the actual piping, is the amount of infrastructure a new net would need to plan around. This is undoubtedly the biggest hurtle for the locations which would benefit most from this technology (that is, places with high demand per unit area). Current labor costs and supplies are no small issue either.
However, there is one niche market for waste heat which has the potential for a great deal of expansion in the United States: biofuels. Most forms of ethanol and biodiesel plants consume large amounts of heat. A frequent feature in proposed ethanol plants is the siphoning of steam or hot waste water from a thermal power plant to cover some or all of the heat consumption of the plant. This can be problematic, since there are no simple correlations between the time of year, the power output, and the heat demand, as there are with district heating. As a result, some hybrid ethanol-power plants are proposed in which the power plant's electricity would be a salable by-product.
-b.
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"Before air conditioning, yankees stayed in yankeeland. After air conditioning they moved to places where they weren't welcome."
Actually, refrigeration technology took off in the South before the North. The Yankees you so deride didn't need large plants to manufacture ice for their iceboxes, they had the Great Lakes.
As for electricity generation, you'll note that the New Deal and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA in TFA) was interested in improving electricity generation in the South long before consumer air conditioning was available, let alone viable. Southerners were interested in those new-fangled electric lights Northerners were beginning to take for granted.
"We used clothes lines to hang and dry our clothes, not electric driers."
Another technology that caught on in the South more than the North. It's not the North that has to deal with trying to dry clothes in 157% humidity, at least not year-round.
Take it easy and download OpenOffice.
Seastead this.
They surely need a more efficient method for disposing of waste heat. The more efficient one would have "no waste" heat to dispose of.. but life is not perfect.
I have supported the restarting of Browns Ferry Unit 1 for a long time. Because despite the issues nuclear power is an immediatly available and fairly clean power source. Browns Ferry Unit 1 has had a bumpy road to travel since it was commissioned, and then shut down, and then restarted. Since its restart it has contributed clean energy at a time when the Tennessee Valley has been hammered by record high temperatures.record rainfall deficits that have severely curtailed hydroelectric production and made for conditions calling for record power demand levels.
One occurance that also recently occured at Browns Ferry was the automatic shutdown of the reactor due to a coolant leak. TVA reported to the NRC that an unknown amount of reactor cooling water had indeed leaked and they spent last weekend repairing it. After restart the high water temps forced this shutdown. In fact this is nothing new though. We had the Sequoyah reactor using its cooling towers last year due to elevated water temps.
But yeah its been hot for sure. Also of interest is it looks like we are going to get the newest reactor in the US and that it be at Watts Bar. Unit 1 has been online there since 1996, and produces enough juice for 250,000 homes. Unit 2 at Watts Bar was roughly 80% complete when construction stopped. TVA is currently and exploring finishing the construction of Unit 2 giving us yet another clean power source. In September 2000 Watts Bar Unit 1 set a record for continuous operation of TVA reactors of similar design.
http://www.copyblogger.com/5-common-mistakes-that- make-you-look-dumb/
"It sounds to me like this is less of a safety issue..."
Where did you get the idea that it was a safety issue in the first place?
It's renewable in some sense, but not others. More specfically, big hydro genereally ends up not being sustainable:
fish spawning, methane, changes to the microclimate. On the other hand, we've not done enough with run-of-river.
Were that I say, pancakes?
And people wonder why there's such an overreaction whenever any quibble about climate change science pops up.
Geez, can't it just be fucking hot in summer without someone invoking "Global Warming"?
Sure it can be higher than 47%. Just conveniently neglect to mention where you're using the HHV and the LHV...
"The South never had a "carbon footprint" before yankee glutons moved to Miami and Atlanta."
It sure burned the heck out of wood, Bo! The spelling is "Yankee gluttons", BTW.
"Most of us grew up without air conditioning and were happy that way. We used clothes lines to hang and dry our clothes, not electric driers. Life was good."
HAHAHAHA! When I see local folks volunteering to go back to an AC-free life I'll buy the connection between "no AC" and "happiness".
I still use clothes lines to dry clothes (clothes smell fresher besides the energy savings), but there is good reason AC is popular among non-Yankees. I don't see any nostalgia for doing washing in wooden tubs and ironing it with (aptly named) "sad irons" either. The tubs are planters and the irons are doorstops, the shotgun shacks whose layout helped somewhat with cooling are empty, and (most) of the people don't look the the folks in a James Agee book.
I'm a "Damn Yankee" (the ones that came and stayed) myself, though I'm far more genuinely countrified (and right wing) than most locals.
If you wanted to keep out the sort of Yankees that wouldn't fit, not selling them everything at fire-sale prices would have done it. The Southeast got rich and is getting richer by urban and suburban sprawl, so if ya want things the way they used to be, move into the Deep South and away from the coast.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Careful there. Remember that we have more guns than you do, we know how to use them, and we're already pissed. Maybe it's time for another War Between the States?
I heard on the radio a couple days ago that they're building an ethanol plant to use the waste head of the local coal power plant.
My first thought was 'great'. I love hearing about waste reduction. When what was previously waste to be disposed of becomes a valuable resource.
I don't read AC A human right
I am just glad, your name is not even available — because all you know is shit.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I'm confused. Why are they throwing away large amounts of hot water at all, if they generate power with steam turbines? Wouldn't it make more sense to keep the hot water and reheat it, instead of heating cooler river water? Or am I missing something? It seems like a hotter river would make them more efficient, since it would take less energy to boil it.
Disclaimer: Evolution comes with NO WARRANTY, except for the IMPLIED WARRANTY of FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
fish spawning, methane and changes to the micro climate don't effect the dam's ability to generate electricity, so it is still renewable energy.
Renewable != earth loving hippy compatible.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
...decentralized power. A million rooftops in alabama covered with solar panels would be picking up the slack right now, with no problems. Of course, the really big electric generating companies don't like this idea, because eventually those panels get paid off, and gosh darn it, those luser customers wouldn't be mailing in their monthly checks! Can't have that now, can we? Got to keep them attached with the fatwallet umbilical cord to megacorp forever!
,. it will kill all the life in that river downstream for a considerable distance with THERMAL POLLUTION. And too cheap to meter, something I heard as a kid and have never seen demonstrated yet, and if anyone claims otherwise PROVE IT, seems like anyplace that has nukes sends you a decent electrical bill that is *quite* metered and you can never pay it off, you can't do a multi year or multi decade pricing contract, and it is as unreliable as anything else is, it works a lot of the times, but when you need it the most, like right now with hundred degree temps, it doesn't, or it can't without causing a ton of honest, real, in your face damage that they did NOT build an engineering solution to, despite decades of hundreds of billions of dollars of direct subsidy and consumer cash thrown at them..
But nukes are good for the environment, and too cheap to meter! Nope, here's another stealth example of how they *aren't*, if they don't shut it down
Nukes aren't perfect. they are NOT the magic bullet solution for all our energy problems, because there is no one size fits all solution, nothing will do it all, and they SURE as hell are not cheap, not when you factor in ALL the costs involved. Even with fossil fuel prices being high in a lot of places nukes are still more expensive than natgas plants. They have their place, but let's see just a bit of adult grown up crow eating here and admitting you are at least partially wrong from the "nukes are god" crowd.
We need to radically diversify how we get our energy, and a dandy way right now is to start to install solar PV by the millions all over, for more points of production (less points of regional failure) and to get economies of scale moving faster and to help you me and the other guy eventually keep some of our loot in our wallets, rather than transferring it forever into the pockets of already rich guys..
What the hell ..
from the story
TVA gets about 60 percent of its electricity from coal-fired power plants, 30 percent from nuclear plants and 10 percent from its 29 hydroelectric dams. Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar account for less than 1 percent.
my question is ?
When did hydroelectric become a non-renewable source ??
How about something like a gas absorption refrigerator?
From the article, "The absorption refrigerator is a refrigerator that utilizes a heat source to provide the energy needed to drive the cooling system rather than being dependent on electricity to run a compressor."
Sounds like just the thing for that excess wasted heat...
Because I screwed up too. I originally was going to say that the infinite series converged on the Carnot limit. Then I got sidetracked with all the other problems. So it's even bleaker than I suggest. After all, the heat has to go somewhere, and that somewhere heats up...
A little noted fact of the cold war is that a very large amount of the US total electrical generation capacity is in the TVA region (Tennessee River - Dependent) The loss of this reactor is serious as the whole USA has no reserve capacity at peak load and with the heat wave over the East USA this is a critical loss. If it were the only reactor in danger this might be of no concern. The US TVA operates 5 big reactors and numerous coal fired plants all of which have the Tennessee River at thermal capacity to cool them and the river is dropping daily.
If heavy sustained rain does not fall on the Tennessee River Valley over the next 3 to 4 months an event which is historically unlikely, the loss of something close to 15 times the Browns Ferry reactor in capacity is likely to hit the USA. There is nothing to pick up the load. The loss of this one reactor is nearly equal to all the wind energy the USA generates. This loss threatens the operations of every one of the 48 US States. With the possible loses in Alabama Power pools and their reactors etc as well as Georgia Power, this poses the very real risk of cutting the energy supply of the USA by a very large fraction. As I write the North Alabama region is short 60 inches of rain over the past 18 months. The US TVA has been drawing down storage for 5 years now. There is no reserve and little prospect of one for some years to come.
I had warning of this imminent event when the City of Huntsville requested from TVA more water for its treatment plant and was turned down for supply. I knew then that the supply was gone.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
You shoulda learned from the gas-crunch of the 1970s. You based your whole living arrangement and life on cheap gas and lo and behold, it has gone up in price!
The "Free Market" will work this out for you. You'll either die, or you'll move. Your lifestyle might take a hit, but hey, you shoulda been saving for a rainy day.
Blar.
Dams silt up.
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"We used clothes lines to hang and dry our clothes, not electric driers." We still do use a clothes line, in the summer. In the winter, well, at 28 degrees F and a freezing fog, the usual December conditions here, your clothes will not be getting dry outdoors.
Take it easy and download OpenOffice.
If you have a google mail account you could send the slide to yourself and then view it with Google's online PowerPoint converter.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Wow, my brain isn't functioning today.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I pointed out that it is not particularly renewable in the generally assumed, broader sustainable sense.
Were that I say, pancakes?
Can't handle it nuke sucker? Your precious infallible energy source and reason we have billionaire energy monopolists has a little teeny flaw? You guys are the same as exxon or enron, vendor lock in, your engineering is never as good as you say and you still pollute, toxic waste and no way to run your plants without killing plants and animals. Tell those folks who's bills keep going up every year to just shut up and stop complaining and tell that to the people when we have cascading failures and people start dropping like flies in the heat because we've puit all our energy eggs in just a few huge centralized plants, meaning we can easily start having massive failures. You've been lying for years about how safe, good for the environment and cheap they are, so just admit it. It wasn't me who pushed that design or got it built or paid for it, now it has to shut down or it will severely damage the environment, and that's just the raw data, so YOU don't need to shut the hell up, you guys need to just admit you are at least partially wrong about it and stop worshipping at the altar of lies that is represented by the chant "all nuclear power". It is not the end all and be all solution to our energy needs, and this is just another of a huge list of examples of why not. You've had half a century now to get your engineering ducks in a row and guess what, you still fail it. Close, but when it is really needed, it fails. It wastes too much heat, and you relied on what to you was just "free" cooling water, no thought to the environment until you were forced into it. Yes, you pollute, the leftover toxic waste you still have no idea what todo with besides bury it and guard it for a million years, plus your thermal pollution, plus the groundwater pollution at the mines, something you still ignore as well.
And your biggest lie-that it was going to be too cheap to meter. ha! How many hundreds of billions have you sucked from the taxpayer and energy consumers for your rube goldberg designs that still harm the environment, yet you guys are the same ones to bitch the loudest if solar gets a few million in R&D? Nope, pure greed, you want that cool energy vendor lockin and your fat paychecks forever.
The cat is out of the bag now though, too many people have gotten hip to wind and solar power, something that people can eventually own outright or get built for smaller local coops, and break that energy monopolist greed cycle.
You already lost once. You didn't learn then?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The important point is that it would work here. Well, for certain definitions of "here". Denmark and New York both have cold climates. I'm not sure how practical this would be in the South.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
They're called "hurricanes". If one goes slowly enough through that area, it could get over a foot of rain.
And guess what? Hurricane season just got going.
"freezing fog"
157% humidity is 157% humidity. It may take far less grains of water to saturate a pound of air at lower temperatures (which is why it feels so dry when you step into a heated building), but saturation is saturation.
I live the same area, and even gone to guntersville as a weekend get away (American Idol winner, Taylor Hicks just bought a house on the river), if the river gets too hot, just the heat energy!
I hope the levels dont go down too far, as alot of shipping is done on the river and that would create more heat as things would need to be moved by truck instead!
it is sustainable, because it can be sustained, that's what sustainable means. It may fuck up the environment, but sustainable does not mean it is environmentally friendly, it means it will not run out. If the sun spat out pieces of coal that fell onto the earth like rain, then burning coal would be sustainable, it would still be bad for the environment, but it would be still sustainable. Rewnewable, means that the resource is renewed, in this case hte resourse is water which is higher than sea level, and it is renewed, even if I kill a thousand tigers, destroy a dozen farms and poison a hundred babies collecting that water to generate power, more water will fall, renewing the water I used. Hence Renewable.
You need to stop munching your muesli and take a remedial reading class yourself.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
Because they decided that using a once-through cooling cycle was cheaper, rather than worrying about the 0.1% of the time where they wouldn't be able to run the plant. It's really not a big deal.
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Hmmm - you don't live in TVA's service area do you. We are in the midst of a very severe drought. Lakes are way below normal levels. Therefore TVA can't generate hydro electricity without literally running out of water. The lakes are used by virtually every city in the Tennessee Valley for a water supply and you have to meter water out to the rivers in order to prevent an ecological disaster - think fish, trees, acquatic mammals, etc. Proper management of the water supply dictates that hydro generation has been very sparingly used all this year.
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The reactor was shut down because the water exiting the plant's cooling system exceeded an average of 90 degrees F over a 24 hour period. The plants have an agreement with the state to limit the temperature of the water they put into the river. The water in the river is not even remotely 90 degrees F.
Brown's Ferry also just recently started one of its reactors after a long downtime, so this only kicked us back a few months. It's not a big impact to the nation's grid, not even to the local area.
As for why we don't recapture the energy in the heated water to make even more power, well, they just didn't think it was necessary back when we used to build power plants back in the 60's. Investing money in anything nuclear in the US is political suicide.
"TVA gets about 60 percent of its electricity from coal-fired power plants, 30 percent from nuclear plants and 10 percent from its 29 hydroelectric dams. Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar account for less than 1 percent."
That was their choice. Now it's clear that wasn't such a good choice.
TVA is one leg of the old dinosaur. Sounds like gangrene is setting in.
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Fish spawning certainly does effect the dam's ability to generate electricity. Water diverted to fish ladders is water that doesn't go through the turbines for example. Depending on the fish species and river conditions sometimes dam operators have to sometimes either withold or increase water going downstream to control conditions downstream.
Global warming at work folks.
climatology models predicted first rises in heat waves, then increased frequency of droughts and storm severity.
Predictions for the long term include the distinct possibility the south and great plains become arid enough to challenge farmers and possibly become desert (and canada's central region becomes warm enough to become the new world's bread basket).
the poetic thing about this is most of the people living in these regions are the ones using the most polluting of vehicles and voting for people who gut environmental protection laws. I'm agnostic, but it makes you wonder sometimes : )
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I ride year round in Chicago, and it's not all that bad. You need to spend about $50 on gear to keep you warm to -10F, but you'd need that anyways unless you've got a car with remote start.
In other words, it's renewable, but we have to say it's not for some mysterious reason. Keep in mind solar and wind also have "nonrenewable" problems that look suspiciously like the list you just named.
I guess as an idiot AC you'll never return, but:
"rain there is *not* "historically unlikely"
Is just what he said! Idiot.
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they could use waste water, in the correct temperature range, to chill a smaller water feed drawn from the river and mix it with the waste water downstream to bring down the mean temperature to within acceptable boundaries ie they could incorporate this into their cooling regime. assuming the volume of chilled water was high enough this could be used with their current water cooling facilities to regulate the output temperature into the river with a high degree of accuracy.
One heat-to-mechanical cycle is limited by the Carnot cycle, but the waste heat can still be used for other purposes even driving other heat-to-mechanical cycles working at lower tempertaures. Of course if you placed the reactor at the coast you could use the waste heat to do things like desalination.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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Where they bet on whether or not we have one?
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Using this to impeach nukes is profoundly wrong.
I'm in favor of alternative, renewable energy sources, but each source has varying degrees to which it is useful in particular situations for technology and production cost reasons. (For example, many places just don't make a good wind farm - and some places make an extremely mediocre and very expensive one.) I think we're going to have a bloom of much better solar at some point, but there's definitely still some room for improvement there.
I'm also certainly not supporting the current federal administration's energy policy, and I certainly do agree that a greater mix of power would be better.
However - despite repeatedly building coal fired plants that release literal tons of radioactive (definitively cancer causing) uranium into our air to be sucked up into our lungs - we're so afraid of anything called nuclear that to my knowledge we haven't issued a license to create a new nuclear plant in many years. I think we should wipe that kind of pollution from the map with large and increasing taxes that are specifically based on the pollution released. The only way we're going to do that in the short term would be to use more nuclear, not less, in combination with many other technologies.
So a lack of capacity is certainly not nuclear technology's fault. A reasonable answer to the GPs fears would be to have nuclear capacity spread out a little more so it wasn't so easily susceptible to drought, ANOTHER reasonable defense would be to have simply more average capacity, and a third defense would be to make plants which are more efficient - which would undoubtedly happen if we compared one we might build now to one decades old. Just look at the efficiency of cars from a similarly long time ago.
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How about .. all the good sites have dams on them so there's no point talking about it either way? It's not like anyone can expand hydro power generation on any kind of scale.
That's a matter of infrastructure maintenance, not fuel supply.
...to put not too fine a point on it.
Suburbia is a huge aggravating factor in our energy problems, whereas urban environments with avg building height of 4 or more stories are far more efficient. They suddenly enable walking, biking, convenient bus and lightrail networks. Heating and cooling become more efficient just from building configuration.
But since the White Flight in the 1950s, most Americans have hated urbanity. I think many are going to have to change their minds.
Actually, you still have pumped storage into underground reservoirs. Great way to store power from other sources. But yes, expanding hydro isn't going to be practical for a lot of the world. But still it seems unfair to ignore hydro in a listing of renewable energy sources even if the TVA can't expand their use of it.