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900 Ton Containment Vessel Bottom Head Installed At Vogtle 3
Yesterday, Georgia Power announced that they successfully lifted the first part of the Vogtle Unit 3 containment vessel into place. From World Nuclear News: "The component — measuring almost 40 meters wide, 12 meters tall and weighing over 900 tons — was assembled on-site from pre-fabricated steel plates. The cradle for the containment vessel was put in place on the unit's nuclear island in April. The completed bottom head was raised by a heavy lift derrick and placed on the cradle on 1 June, Georgia Power announced."
Georgia Power has a pretty cool gallery of high resolution construction photos (the bottom head is the background on my XBMC machine). Below the fold there is a video of the crane moving the bottom head into place.
No idea.
Am I supposed to know what they are talking about here? Where is this going? Why? What is a bottom head used for? Vogtle Unit 3?? I feel like Lord Helmet in Spaceballs shouting "WHO??" in confusion just before his mask falls.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Yesterday, Georgia Power announced that they successfully lifted the first part of the Vogtle Unit 3 containment vessel into place.
Ah, good. What? This is presumably something to do with nuclear power - as it's come from Nuclear World News - but are they building a reactor or a waste site?
Is this Georgia, the U.S. state? Or Georgia the country, perhaps? Or is it actually somewhere completely unrelated to anywhere called Georgia, but where the company called Georgia Power just happen to be working?
When I was a rugrat, "bottom head" was just something I called my brother when he was being mean.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Laron helped build the Crane that is lifting that 900 Ton vessel, and I just so happen to work for Laron :)
It involves big cranes, heavy things, and nukes. What else do you need?
"Southern Nuclear lists the capacity as 1,215 MW"
Now, all they need is a flux capacitor...
Umm -- where did the "3 years to complete" come from? In the Wikipedia article linked above, it was reported that it would be 3-4 years to get a license, before construction began. That was in 2008, and construction started in 2013. Not bad for getting through the NRC.
----- Why sig when you can sign? PGP key id 7675D05E
You are probably thinking of the reactor vessel, rather than the containment vessel. The reactor vessels are all currently made by Japan Steel Works as they appear to be the only provider capable of manufacturing the 230 mm steel required for the job.
Vaguely related subject – I wish we could get a LFTR built to evaluate.
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
About the only place that builds nuclear power plants on time is South Korea. This is probably because of permission issues. It also helps they have a large naval construction industry that can build the required steel pressure vessels. Sometimes the problems are due to licensing issues, and lawsuits stalling construction. Other times there isn't enough financing to build it at the originally planned speed. Then there are the issues with happen when you are building any new kind of reactor with untrained personnel. This is the first AP1000 reactor being built in the US (although there are a couple under construction in China for quite some time now).
Maybe they should be using the 'Agile' nuclear reactor construction methodology.
I've been programming professionally, as methodology fads
have come and gone. Among those I've encountered were the agile family and its precursors.
Much of that experience was in the auto industry, where
practically any software might end up being life-critical. and
some in telecom, where the reliability requirements are
tighter than mil spec.
My software is noted for robustness,
to the point that a colleague once remarked that I was the
only person he'd trust to program an artificial heart for him.
(Said colleague was one of the evangelists for an agile
precursor.)
The very thought of deploying a nuclear reactor designed
using an agile methodology makes me shiver. I expect to
have nightmares about the possibly for a while now.
Please DON'T mention this bright idea to the pointy-haired
bosses.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
They want to thoroughly cement their position on the energy market, of course.
Ezekiel 23:20
We probably could build safe reactors
Yes, we can build safe reactors, just not water-cooled reactors. Fission reactions are "just getting warmed up" by the time water starts boiling. That is a bad combination. This is why water-cooled reactors have to operate at 100+ atmospheres of pressure. Just taking water out of the equation makes fission several orders of magnitude simpler and safer to use.
That's why we should be working on new designs based on molten salt cooling, such as LFTR. Of course we aren't doing that because too many corporations with deep pockets and long tentacles prevent Congress from funding the research. But not to worry... China has a multi-billion-dollar program underway with a thousand PhD's working on it. So eventually we'll be able to buy the reactors from them.
Still, it would be a shame to have to buy from them, when they're just commercializing technology that we (the USA) invented 50~60 years ago.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
One of the big reasons they won't be profitable without state sponsorship is the military applications of enriched Uranium. The US made Energy a whole cabinet level entity chiefly because of nuclear prolifieration issues. Any effort by the far right in the US to "drown government in a bathtub" runs into the problem of how you can have a tiny federal government with a multi-billion dollar Dept. of Energy.
( As a small proof of these statements, the total budget for DOE 2014 is a tad over 26 Billion dollars, and the portion of it that is for dealing with weapons and prolifieration related activities is the largest single section of that total at just over 11 billion.)
http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/04/f0/FY14_DOE_Budget_Highlights_Final.pdf
(If readers want to cut to the chase, try the table on page 19). Interested people may note that the costs of all kinds of energy generation and of environmental activities are grouped together as one section, but they still come out smaller even lumped together, than the 'blowing things up and stopping other people from doing the same back at us' section does. Scientific research is smaller yet, only about a sixth of the budget. Then there's the question, how much of that environmental clean up and scientific research is actually to support the military parts of DoE activites and maybe ought to show up as another cost of war and proliferation?
Those costs are going to be incurred so long as the US runs a Nuclear Navy, has H-bombs in its arsenal, and wants to stop various 'rogue nations and state sponsored action groups' from getting their hands on the resulting materials. Stop all civilian energy research (of all kinds, not just nuclear) and all civilian nuclear power plants cold, and you still have that 11 billion, plus its share of general administration costs, internal safety inspections, workforce health compliance, and such. The complex legal procedures for civilian nuclear involve taking fees that are supposed to help offset other DoE costs, then giving more back in exchange, more that is paid for by common taxation, so that it is very hard to say just how much of the grants actually go to the civil corporations and how much of them involves using the corps as a pass through to transfer money back to the military side.
No other power generation technology faces this problem. We don't have to worry about the costs of military prolifieration of, say, wind or hydro technologies. But, what will happen if we start having to pay to prevent dirty coal projects in other countries? What if, for example, the US starts taking Kyoto seriously and wants to really cut coal prolifieration? About the only options we would have (short of just stopping all those nations from building enough powerplants of any sorts to keep their people alive), would be to let some of them develop nuclear plants. Those costs would then again be counted as part of our nuclear power costs. In other words, A large part of the cost of reducing other nations dirty coal emissions and greenhouse gasses would show up in the US budget as a nuclear proliferation control cost, even if the US completely stopped building or running all civilian nuclear plants on its own soil. Our economic system isn't just built to reward dangerous cost cutting, it is built to push costs that are only tangentially related to nuclear power into counting as 'Nuclear power' costs. That alone means Nukes will never be economically viable without taxation, but it's an artifact of the way we do the budget.
Who is John Cabal?
Water is a popular cooling medium because its specific heat is higher than just about anything else. If you want to transport a large amount of heat energy from one place to another, heated water is about the best way to do it.
The fact that water vaporizes when overheated or depressurized is a safety mechanism too. When water vaporizes, it absorbs nearly 7x as much energy as it takes to heat water from room temperature to boiling (2260 kJ/kg vs 4.19 kJ/kg*C). Or nearly 2x the energy it takes to heat water from room temperature to the operating temp of a pressurized water reactor. So a leak or depressurization of the water automatically and instantly results in cooling.
The large volumetric change when water vaporizes is also ideal for driving a generator. Volume change = mechanical work, which is easily captured by a turbine. Without a volume change, you're left trying to capture energy via an inefficient and bulky Stirling engine.
So yeah molten salt reactors have a lot going for them. But the use of water for cooling isn't because of some grand conspiracy. Water is just an extremely good medium for cooling and converting thermal energy into mechanical work, and was the obvious choice when reactors were being designed ~50 years ago.
A great idea as long as you can guarantee the heat exchanger with molten salt on one side and hot water on the other side never let the two mix - because when they do, it asplodes.