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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."
I see those huge cooling towers and water cooling systems .. and I have to wonder ...
How efficient is a power generation plant that throws away gigawatts of power as waste heat?
Isn't it about time you find a more efficient way to generate power, turbines and generators that don't waste so much heat that we just went to all that trouble to make in the first place?
I don't expect 100% efficiency, but what we're doing now is crazy.
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.
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Power when you want it most: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
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...
"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.
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