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The Aging of Our Nuclear Power Plants Is Not So Graceful
Lasrick writes "This is a very thoughtful article on nuclear power plant aging: how operators use early retirement of plants to extract concessions from rate-payers and a discussion on how California's 'forward-looking planning process' has probably mitigated disruption from the closing of San Onofre."
There is another important thing to consider which is demand. Often demand is thought of as inflexible and that we must simply supply what people choose to use.
There is huge potential for power savings in efficiency. Take cooling costs, for example. Air conditioning is a huge part of electric demand. This cost could be greatly reduced in a number of ways:
1) Appliance efficiency standards. A more efficient air conditioner doesn't cost the owner much more up front and saves a bundle in the long run.
2) Insulation standards for new construction. (Its a whole lot cheaper to put it there before the walls are up.)
3) Energy use labeling for home sales. Imagine if the seller were required to provide an energy use estimate. Imagine if mortgage companies required these as part of the application process to see what you could afford. Now owners would be have a stronger incentive to improve the efficiency of their homes, even if they were not sure how long they would stay. Imagine if renters were required to receive the same information.
4) A lighter colored roof. Imagine how many fewer power plants would be required if buildings in warm climates had roofs that reflected more sunlight.
Here in the UK we enjoy almost uninterrupted mains power. No brownouts (a brownout perhaps every eight months which is usually due to maintenance, extreme weather or emergency works), no requirement for external generators nor for a UPS for your desktop PC.
I understand that the power supply in the US is patchy at best, with frequent brownouts. I think you guys really do need a stable source of power. Nuclear is a good way to supply this. Focusing on renewables won't begin to replace this, nor will it give an easily modulatable power supply that reacts to user demand. Sure they take a long time to build, and there's legislation preventing waste processing being done that would wring out more power from the same uranium. So you end up with large waste disposal sites where you wastefully allow spent rods to decay needlessly. That's assuming you still are building old-style reactors. Newer ones have much less waste, more power and frankly are less dangerous.
Gas Power? Coal Power? Great, Cheap to build but pollute like crazy. Not to mention coal burners actually more radioactive than nuclear power. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
Solution lots of smallish pebble-bed nuclear reactors to do the heavy lifting, augmented with solar, with the odd gas & coal power stations taking up the slack.
The last time I commented to a post on this subject I saw my karma go from excellent to good because of rabid pro nuke folks modding down anything that asked questions of real long term cost and un subsidized cost of nuclear power per G/Watt versus wind or solar actual costs.
It would be nice to have a real discussion about this with citations to factual numbers, but there seems to be a foaming at the mouth "nuclear power is the only answer" bunch here that wat to obfuscate real data.
Even asking questions about factual discussion of long term nuclear power ACTUAL cost will prolly cost me Karma.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Here in the UK we enjoy almost uninterrupted mains power. No brownouts (a brownout perhaps every eight months which is usually due to maintenance, extreme weather or emergency works), no requirement for external generators nor for a UPS for your desktop PC.
I understand that the power supply in the US is patchy at best, with frequent brownouts. I think you guys really do need a stable source of power. Nuclear is a good way to supply this. Focusing on renewables won't begin to replace this, nor will it give an easily modulatable power supply that reacts to user demand. Sure they take a long time to build, and there's legislation preventing waste processing being done that would wring out more power from the same uranium. So you end up with large waste disposal sites where you wastefully allow spent rods to decay needlessly. That's assuming you still are building old-style reactors. Newer ones have much less waste, more power and frankly are less dangerous.
Gas Power? Coal Power? Great, Cheap to build but pollute like crazy. Not to mention coal burners actually more radioactive than nuclear power. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
Solution lots of smallish pebble-bed nuclear reactors to do the heavy lifting, augmented with solar, with the odd gas & coal power stations taking up the slack.
I like a lot of what you say, but your "patchy at best" lead in isn't very convincing. An average American home that hasn't just been through a hurricane, tornado, or earthquake might see 5 minutes without power per year and no brownouts in the occupants' lifetimes. Yes, these things happen, but they're isolated and rare. The brownouts in California about a decade ago, which were the only widespread American brownouts in recent history, were caused by Enron manipulating power markets, not a lack of real power.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
But when you try to tell someone that, all they can think of is Chernobyl and Fukushima. Both were outdated and should have been scrapped but due to irrational fear, were allowed to keep running past thier expiration date.
That's exactly what TFA is talking about: when calculating the gain-cost-ratio of any new technologies, you have to always calculate in a) the cost of getting the technology to mature and b) the cost of keeping the technology up-to-date and c) the cost of finally scrapping the technology. Yes, we have several technologies. No, those technologies are not mature (e.g. we have no clue how they will scale, how much fine tuning it will take until they are at their designed power output and for how long they will maintain this output). And we don't know which incidents will happen in the future that force us to retrofit the technologies, and more so, at which point in time it will be cheaper just to scrap the new technologies instead of continous retrofitting.
The experience with those mature technologies like the ones used in the U.S. (which didn't, with the exception of Three Mile Island, have had any large and costly failures) proves so far, that the time frame in which those technologies ran at least at 90% of their capacities were much shorter than expected, and 70% capacity would be a much more realistic assumption.
No, it's more like an auction where you can program your appliances to stop bidding on electricity when the price gets too high. Allowing the price to fluctuate in response to demand gives people a greater opportunity to economize than exists with flat rates. If the fall of communism is any indication, the "one price fits all" model just doesn't work very well in the real world.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
What I find utterly baffling is that research in this field appears to be dead in the USA, Europe and Japan. We seem to be content to watch China, India and a few others design and build the next generation of nuclear reactors. Then we will have the privilege of spending money to decommission our own hopelessly obsolete reactors. We will pay higher rates as the availability and diversity of power sources is reduced. We will endure unreliable swings and reduction of supply. We will pay for electricity generated by the new guys on the block. We will watch as yet more industry moves where there is cheap, reliable power.
When we've had enough of all that, we'll spend money to license their designs since we made a point of making "intellectual property" central to our international agreements. Those countries will be more than happy to throw our IP regime regime right back in our collective face.
The NIMBYs, the willfully ignorant, and a few well-meaning critics have "won" in the West, and so thoroughly that even building research reactors has become impossible. The above will be their "prize".
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
a couple of decades? Let's see with San Onofre offline California residents are paying more in electrical rates now and the power is being generated by more mainline gas generation to make up the shortfall. This article indicates to that it may be difficult for California to meet it's CO2 goals because of the need to burn 360 million cubic feet of gas per day to make up for the loss of the reactors at San Onofre.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
The issue is economical.
As far as burning light/heavy water reactor nuclear waste, the way to go is Sodium Cooled IFR reactors, that burn existing nuclear sludge, in the end producing waste that has less than 1% of the radioactiviy of the nuclear sludge that fed it, and can burn depleted uranium too, and thorium too.
Those reactors will be the solution to use the remainder of the nuclear waste, as we move to a nuclear free world in the near future. Those will be the last reactors to be shutdown eventually.
Resulting spent nuclear fuel from IFR reactors take just a few dozen yrs to have just a few times more radioactivity than the original raw uranium ore.
In about 100 yrs their spent fuel is just as radioactive as raw uranium, but have almost no uranium, since it used 99,5% of the original nuclear yield of the ore.
It's now mostly transmuted to atoms about half the nuclear weight, just two or three quick nuclear decays away from completely stable (non radioactive) elements.
Except that unlike you that seem to have utter faith on those proposing new nuclear technologies, I have read the GE/Hitachi PRISM reactor stuff, but I'll only believe when they put their money where their mouth is and build the first fully operational reactor out of their own pocket, instead of waiting for govt handouts/subsidies first.
Yes, over the course of a full day, it averages out that a Raspberry Pi or TI Graphing calculator has enough power to do all the work an end user is doing. However, end users hate watching the hour-glass spin for several minutes while Excel crunches some data, or Word reindexes a document, or Windows applies some needed updates. As the BOFH has tried to explain to the management in his stories, 100% utilization is 100% utilization; when some financial trader for the company needs to dial into a company modem, they need to dial in right then and now; they cannot wait until a modem frees up, or be placed in a queue because that would be a more conservative use of resources. Same idea here -> people aren't going to wait 15 minutes for Windows to boot up in the morning, not when they have better options.
We must save the wild animals. We must save the ozone layer. We must save the whales. But God help you if you try to take away anymore of their lives than you already do because you're trying to save a few bucks / watts. Cities will burn, and when there are no more cities to burn, the country side will burn.
I am John Hurt.
No, it's more like an auction where you can program your appliances to stop bidding on electricity when the price gets too high. Allowing the price to fluctuate in response to demand gives people a greater opportunity to economize than exists with flat rates. If the fall of communism is any indication, the "one price fits all" model just doesn't work very well in the real world.
And the best parts of smart meters!
First, the utility can program them for differential rates, so if you are being antisocial to the grid by installing solar at your house, they can pay you less for the electricity you are generating than they charge you for the electricity you are consuming, which is something that's not possible without a smart meter!
Second (and this is the great part!), they can charge you less for electricity when you aren't there during the day to use it, and more, when you are home at night, and have no choice but to use it, since even with huge storage capacity, there's no way you are going to be able to recharge your car while you are asleep after lighting up your house and appliances after getting home from work, because, hey! The sun isn't out at night!
Good thing it's illegal for them to force you to install a smart meter in most places in the bay area...
And this makes me wonder why we still build refrigerators, and the place they sit in within homes, the way we do.
In some parts of the country, there are several months of the year when we try to remove heat from our homes. But the refrig goes to all the trouble (i.e., energy use) to "separate" heat from already air conditioned air. Then, what does it do with the heat? It dumps the "heat" back in to the conditioned air in the house to repeat the cycle!!! Stupid...
Why not put an exhaust vent (and maybe fan) to the exterior and an outside air intake, perhaps with remote actuated dampers, by the refrig in new homes (and kitchen remodels). Hook that to a new class of "integrated climate control" refrig that takes its condenser cooling input air from either the room or the outside source and exhausts it either to the room or outside -- all depending on input from the thermostat controlling that zone of the house. Obviously input/exhaust dampers would be closed except when the refrig was running (in case of failure, it would default to taking house air in and exhaust the hot air back into the house).
Seems more efficient - a bit of up front cost (and, unfortunately, a need for some simple standardization between architects, the HVAC industry, and appliance manufacturers) but over the years it seems like it would pay for itself in areas with much hot weather.
(Sorry for my likely abuse of the word "heat" et al)
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
1. Xenon, not Radon poisoning. This has been known much much before Chernobyl. Since 1950s. That's why when you shut down, you have to wait for Xenon to disappear before you restart. A few days.
2. GE's safe limits? The reactor was RBMK
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
3. Design issue in RBMK causes water to be pulled into reactor when reactor is at 100% power. Water is a moderator. So when Xenon was burnt off, they tried to reduce power, but that resulted in more power because of water pipes getting pulled in when graphite was completely pulled out. RBMK are probably still operated (or maybe they just shut down) - you just have to be careful to not operate them outside the safe range!
Anyway, manually overriding reactor controls so you can pull out extra control rods manually, well, not a good idea. Configuration not physically possible in any modern reactor.
4. TMI main problem was human error in believing one indicator over another. The faulty indicator was that valve indication of closed (on valve), meant that it actually closed. But there were plenty of other indicators that showed the valve was open but operators ignored those!! So while instrumentation contributed, it was primarily human error. If it wasn't for new crew coming in and immediately recognizing the problem, it probably would have been much worse.
5. Fukushima was placing backup power in floodable locations. It does not matter *where* they are built provided they cannot be flooded. If 3 backups were in sealed, pressured buildings, there would have been no problems. Single point of failure. Of course, there wouldn't be a problem if they had backup plans in place for that condition. You live, you learn I guess.
So how you not plan for tsunami in Japan is beyond me.
6. Pebble bed reactors are very bad - ask Germany and their experiments with it. They leak lots of crap.
7. Molten lead are a maintenance nightmare. Nothing says "easy decommissioning" like a molten reactor core!
Anyway, there are plenty of safe reactor designs today without going to some radical, untried unknowns..
One of our customers is a power plant operator, and they showed us the problems they have. Because of many small powerplants in regions where in former times only were consumers of eletrical power, they now have a huge balance problem. In the region, which uses at maximum about 100 MWatts of power, there are power plant installations of 400 MW. If there is a larger failure somewhere outside this region, and those 400 MWatts kick in as replacement power, the grid, which is fine for normal operation, will be completely overloaded, if all 400 MWatts suddenly push energy into the grid.
Another problem is the direction of power distributions. With a big plant design, the grid is built in a way that power runs only in one direction: away from the power plant to the consumers. Thus all regulation mechanisms are adapted to only one direction. If you have several power plants which run at different times, and consumers of power which sometimes take power from one plant, sometimes from others, you need a grid that is able to handle bi-directional or multi-directional power distribution. Most grids are not adapted to such a scenario.