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Next-Gen Nuclear Power Plant Breaks Ground In China
An anonymous reader writes "The construction of first next-generation Westinghouse nuclear power reactor breaks ground in Sanmen, China. The reactor, expected to generate 12.7 Megawatts by 2013, costs 40 billion Yuan (~US$6 billion; that's a lot of iPods.) According to Westinghouse, 'The AP1000 is the safest and most economical nuclear power plant available in the worldwide commercial marketplace, and is the only Generation III+ reactor to receive Design Certification from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.' However, Chinese netizens suspect China is being used as a white rat to test unproven nuclear technologies (comments in Chinese)." Update: 04/20 07:28 GMT by T : As several readers have pointed out, this plant will generate much more than 12.7 Megawatts -- more like 1100 MWe.
It is an abbreviation you are not aware of. I am not aware of it before but I am now.
... suspect China is being used as a white rat ...
By now everyone should know it's the rats that are using us (or the Chinese in this case).
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
The AP-1000 isn't a new technology reactor. That's the whole point. It's a conventional pressurized-water reactor. It's built mostly from existing Westinghouse components which Westinghouse had type-approved by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, so that multiple identical units could be built without going through a full design review for each one. So far, nobody has ordered one. Until now.
Most US reactors are unique designs, which is a headache. France has 34 reactors of the same design, which has cost and maintenance advantages, although there's been at least one common design flaw found.
Westinghouse is no longer a US company. It's owned by Toshiba.
The brochure web page for the AP1000 also says much the same thing, 1154MWe.
It also states that this is a Pressurized Water Reactor, so it's probably more about generating by-products (esp. tritium) than it is about generating energy.
I'm guessing it's about 12 GW rather than MW. Nuclear plants' power is usually in the order of (a few) gigawatts.
If this is, indeed, a 12 GW power plant, it's one of the largest I've heard of.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
It is very unusual to just build one reactor in a modern nuclear plant. If there is a problem in the only reactor, you loose all your output. Also, you can save a lot of overhead by having more reactors in one site. So most plants at least have two reactors of roughly the same design. A single-unit plant would also not justify a $6-billion pricetag.
A modern high-capacity PWR delivers somewhere between 0.8 and 1.3 GWe per unit. Anything below 300 MWe would probably also not be economically viable.
If it is 12.7 GWe, then there will probably be around 12 reactors on that same site. It would equal or outperform the original designs of Chernobyl (which had 10 or 12 units planned (depending on the source), all around 1-1.5 GWe per unit) and it would be larger than the current largest site in Japan (which is currently largely off-line due to earthquake damage), delivering a max. of about 8 GWe.
If that is the case, the $6 billion price tag is not very high.
> Western nuclear technology is safe, for if it were not safe, then anyone harmed by it can sue the manufacturer for restitution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price-Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act (the page name says it all really (but IANAL...)
crash nuclear weapons development project? IIRC, every nation which has developed nukes has similar stories of abuse and malfeasance by top officials.
Except the irresponsible waste handling at Cold War manufacturing plants Hanford, Oak Ridge, etc weren't part a crash project. They were just criminally cheap bastards who couldn't see 5cm beyond their noses.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
>>And China's per capita CO2 emissions were already about 1/4 of those in the US
Having a large percentage of your population living in abject poverty will do that for 'ya.
I don't recommend copying their strategy in that regard.
Hence my many comments in this forum about Westinghouse stuff just being the old stuff painted green.
The important thing before building a lot of a new design is to get something that works well for the purpose. With France they needed something that could give them military material with civilian power generation as a side benefit so they were not in competition with other forms of energy. Purely civilian nuclear power has a lot of competition and for one thing needs to be economicly self supporting without government handouts - thus it needs a lot more development before it is viable.
Unfortunately the fantasy mindset of nuclear PR has taken over, as seen by those people above saying stupid things like "it's not really just 12.7MW - it's all because steam lets nuclear down". If it's considered in the realm of reality and not nuclear fantasy perhaps it's a small pilot plant and a step forward and catch up with nuclear technology elsewhere. Personally, since it's Westinghouse, I think it's just a demonstration plant to get the US taxpayer to shell out for a whole pile of this 1970s technology and be a burden on the taxpayer for decades. IMHO we should forget about them until they show some progress - they are about twenty years behind South Africa!
$2.35 per watt.
The problem with Nuclear plants is they tend to build them in the middle of nowhere, usually on the coast so they can pump the "waste" heat into the ocean. This means they can never really be much more than about 40% efficient. Really you should implement a District Heating and District Cooling systems as well if you're spending billions on new nuclear power plants.
The other thing is the current generation of plants (and AP1000 is such) are basically once through designs. The fuel is enriched, left in the reactor till the poisons build up, then removed and ... well, left lying around for 10,000 years till they figure out what to do with it. They're really pretty inefficient with the fuel as well as being inefficient with the heat produced.
The most efficient Nuclear plant would be.
1: In the middle of a city.
2: Attached to District Heating and District Cooling networks as well as the electrical grid.
3: Of a design which breeds it's own fuel and burns the radioactive waste within the reactor. (Thorium cycle, molten salt reactor or integral fast reactor).
So they're basically 3 times more expensive and much dirtier than they should be.
Deleted
China is building up powerful clean power-stations, while the US is wasting billions on bullshit projects intended to keep people working, rather than doing something useful.
Why aren't we building these stations so as to be able to stop polluting the atmosphere with coal and whatever else gets burned to produce electricity here? The Chinese bloggers suspect, we aren't sure of the technology and want to test it in China first, but the truth is much less sinister — and much more worrying...
We have simply lost the drive and our ability to take bold steps and initiatives. Would I like a nuclear plant in my backyard? Yes, as a matter of fact, I would certainly prefer it to a coal-burning one (with its radioactive smoke) or to a wind-turbine, which would take up the entire plot to produce enough electricity for a single light-bulb.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
So, which would you rather spend $0.049/kWh on -- a nuclear plant ... [blather] ...; or [exactly the same figure on] a wind farm ... [blather]?
Well, I'll go for the nuke, thank you, but then I'm not a luddite. I prefer my power not to fail every time we have a calm day, and not to have ridiculous amounts of land used per unit of power generated. Your own optimistic figures show no advantage to wind power, and do not take into account that the cost for nuclear power plants would drop precipitously if they were mass produced.
How much land does that 50 MW wind farm take up?
More important how much land will those 58 (8.9 billion / 153 million) 50 MW wind farms take up? Not to mention what is the cost of building conventional power plants to supply the power on days when it is not windy. Did you factor that in to your price =)
I'd also venture a guess that maintenance costs on 58 wind farms (+ supplemental power)would actually be more than the one nuclear plant just due to the quantity of them.
I'm all for alternative energy as supplements and for using it where it's practical, but at our current state of technology we can't depend on it yet.
The only one that I can give any level of dependability to is geothermal and obviously you can't build those just anywhere.
The U.S. needs Nuclear power plants, but I fear it's not going to happen until it's too late.
Moderation is not supposed to be used as an indicator of agreement.
The technology may have been different, Chernobyls technology may have been inferior to modern nuclear power, but considering both the Chernobyl accident and three mile island were caused by human error, it doesn't bode well for any kind.
In the case of Three Mile Island, "The mechanical failures were compounded by the initial failure of plant operators to recognize the situation as a loss of coolant accident due to inadequate training and ambiguous control room indicators." (here ) and in the case of Chernobyl, they set up a reactor test which ran overdue and it was left to the undertrained and underskilled night-shift to handle the plant at the time (here)
In both cases, better training and adhering to safety protocols would have saved lives and possibly the reactor. So don't go dismissing Chernobyl as an argument against Nuclear power. It's an argument against cutting corners and the lowest-bidder mentality that still exists today in the building of new nuclear plants.
"How cheap is safe enough?" is something few people want to ask, and even fewer people want to answer.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
I work at a pressurized water reactor so I'm really getting a kick out of these replies....
No, seriously, I'm not an expert on the radionuclide table, but that's hardly why one would choose a pressurized water reactor over a boiling water reactor. (Those are the two big established types. The United States has dozens of both varieties in commercial operation.)
One big reason to pick a pressurized water reactor is that you limit your contamination to the primary reactor coolant loop and it's support systems. The steam plant- the electricity generating side- stays completely radiation free.
This makes servicing the steam-electricity side of the plant much cheaper and simpler.
Most electricity generating power plants in the US operate on steam power.
In a pressurized water reactor, there's a separate reactor coolant loop that passes heat through metal tubes, boiling 'feed water' in the steam generator, and the steam spins the turbine that makes electricity. The primary coolant and the feed water/ steam do not come in contact.
In a boiling water reactor, the reactor directly boils the water that spins the turbine. One big advantage of this is cheaper construction.
Both types 'burn' Uranium to generate the heat that boils the water. Pressurized Water Reactors simply have an additional segregated loop of water.
There are probably a number of advantages to either type that other folks could fill you in on. I assure you though, as an operator of an American Westinghouse Pressurized Water Reactor, tritium is nothing more than an occasional annoyance.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
And Tsar Bomba was only a half power test. The Russians didn't add a hot third stage to avoid fallout on their own territory. Interestingly, it achieved about 97% mass to energy conversion - impressive.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Try getting in. I was supposed to go to Shanghai next month and I gave up because of the ridiculous paperwork requirement to get a tourist visa (and since I have an italian passport it would cost me only $30, while US citizens have to pay $130). You must have round trip ticket and all hotels booked. Not the kind of travel I do when I'm out on a photographic trip. I usually book the first night and after talking to locals I decide what to do next. Plus they keep the passport for an unspecified amount of time while issuing (if ever) the visa. But sure it's no problem at all to get a lot of chinese people in Italy (not that I mind, but I'd like to be treated the same way we treat them).
Wrongo Bub.
TMI was a huge disaster for the nuclear industry, as it revealed that the status quo was totally inadequate.
So many aspects of the design, thought to be first rate, turned out to be totally foobar. The stuck valve, a critical item, turned out to be prone to sticking, as it was based on a valve designed to handle high-fat raw milk, an excellent lubricant.
The control room design was worse than useless, with critical water-level guages hidden off in a corner. A computer system that ran 20 minutes behind real-time. Dozens of blinking and hypnotizing alarms, with no hierarchy of priority.
Total unmitigated disaster.
Investors rightly saw that what had been touted as the best of all possible worlds was actually quite awful.
And it was not a "small controlled release". The original overflows into the auxiliary buildings was uncontrolled and could be measured at 15 times above background level many miles away.
Which does not matter, because you can get that energy from other solar panels. :D
So in the end, you only need the power the production of the first panel with anything other than solar power. And you can use that panel, to gain energy back for another process that would normally need another plant.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The AP-1000 is a new technology reactor. The entire safety system is Passive. There are no diesel generators for this reason. This has never been done in an existing plant yet.
New pebble bed designs using Silicon Carbide "Pebbles" and helium heat transfer offer incredibly more safety than previous designs. These plants are designed to be literally "Run Away" proof, in fact, left fully engaged they will automatically reach top operating temperature then ramp down, never reaching supercritical temperatures or levels on nuclear reaction.
As well, because of the functional design, these reactors can be used as safe breeder reactors, meaning the there will be little nuclear waste to deal with.
I think this is absolutely one of the better energy alternatives we currently have before us.
Apparently, cold fusion seems to be making a solid comeback (in case you didn't see 60 minutes this last Sunday, A number of companies are producing very real products using cold fusion technology, and DARPA has verified the cold fusion technology, and plans on using it for a number of portable high energy power cells.
Seems we are at a very interesting place in our history.
"Free" energy has been suppressed for decades because it would not be centralized and under the control of the government/corporations. see: interview of George Green, and interview with Brian O'Leary. This needs to stop.
~ awaiting spiritual enlightenment ~
In the short term, pebble beds sound good. The problem, if I understand correctly, is that those pebbles are next to impossible to recycle later in things like Fast Reactors. I'm not sure how many decades it will take to convince people, but the future of nuclear fission has to be technologies which reuse/breed the 'spent' Uranium. The joke about calling Uranium 'spent' or 'waste' is that we currently get like 1 percent or less of the potential energy out of Uranium. In this PBS Frontline interview, the former director of the IFR project explains some of the concepts of the now-cancelled Integral Fast Reactor project.
According to Dr. Till, the possibility exists to get approximately 100 times more energy out of Uranium, by recycling it, than any 'conventional' reactor technology (including pebble beds) currently extracts. I'm no engineer, but I believe that it is very hard, once you've put the Uranium into those graphite balls, then run them through a pebble bed reactor, to get the uranium back out of the pebbles for recycling.
Any reactor design which inherently makes it *more difficult* to recycle the 'waste' Uranium is, in my book, a dead-end technology and we should run far and fast away from it.
I remember a talk given by a Shuttle engineer at MIT (I wasn't a student there, unfortunately) where he stated essentially that "All disasters are fundamentally caused by human errors, nature doesn't make mistakes." Even so called "acts-of-god" can be considered human errors: if a plane crashes in bad weather, it was perhaps a bad decision to try to fly in that area, or if people are killed by an earthquake it's because of humans who built buildings not designed to withstand the earthquake, not the earthquake itself.