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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."
The aging of our reactors doesn't compare to T Hunter. Done.
It's going to be pretty ugly in a couple decades. It would be nice if people could be rational and let us build newer reactors.
At least the kind of jumbled-up ad hoc reactors Americans like to build. What's going on with space-based solar power?
Mostly random stuff.
I'm skeptical as well. From http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_Station&oldid=560938909#NRC_response
So the "forward-looking planning" seems to rely on two mothballed power stations. Was this *actually* part of some government and/or utility plan, and these two plants were held in reserve as a contingency? Or is it more that they planned to look forward to saying "oh crap" and quickly scrambling to find a stopgap solution?
Isn't that how they did it in the Star Trek storyline?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
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.
Wind subsidies are actually harmful in that windmills are being put in in places where they aren't cost effective and don't belong. Wind energy is profitable, but not everywhere. If you wanted more oranges, would you subsidize orange trees in Alaska? With subsidies, there's no incentive to be more efficient or cut costs -- quite the opposite in fact. This is government accounting run amok -- You need to burn through your budget at any cost to get an increase next year. Saving money is counter productive.
They also had dilithium reactors too.
Wind and solar, sufficiently distributed, can run the planet all by themselves. With some batteries (hydro storage is already deployed in some areas), you get some pretty good baseline power capabilities.
Your dislike of the options doesn't make them bad.
Learn to love Alaska
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 *
Quoth TFA:
It is unrealistic to assume that complex new technologies will have a significantly better experience.
I might be wrong, but I was of the understanding that the 1970's generation of nuclear reactors were mostly based on designs proven a decade or more earlier. Is the article suggesting that in fifty years there has been little progress in making them more economical to build and run? This seems hard to believe.
Nuclear power, for good or ill, strikes me as one of the few ways to lever ourselves out of the hole we dug mining fossil fuels. It boggles the mind that in Europe despite having the potential for clean, cheap and abundent energy in nuclear power we're still building fucking gas fired power stations.
'Sufficiently distributed' wind power can also eliminate all those pesky birds.
It doesn't scale well in a world with other species we need to coexist with.
Instead, what is needed is for us to produce new reactors such as thorium or the IFR, so that these can replace what is on-site and then burn the 'spent' fuel that is there. By doing this, we can cut our 70,000 tonnes of waste down to 5,000 tonnes of waste, while making a tidy profit and preventing any future accident.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
The United States built a lot of nuclear power plants in the 60s and 70s, before nuclear power plant designs matured. Fortunately, the nuclear construction stopped. France picked up the torch, starting with a GE reactor, made dozens of identical nuclear reactors. They cooperated with Germany, and designed the EPR reactor in the 90s. The EPR is the culmination of several decades of light water nuclear research and design. The EPR has some bugs, that will be fixed. Then, we should build lots of EPRs.
There are still lots of small, unique, old nuclear power plants in America that will be retiring soon.
Please don't talk about "early" retirement like it's bad to retire nuclear plants too early. The real problem in the world is that they are not being retired at all long past their originally intended lifetime. These power plants are literally blowing up. Every first world nuclear disaster involves an old power plant that should have been retired a long time ago. This is a serious problem caused by people thinking that they can just eke a little more out of these reactors instead of spending the huge amounts it takes to build new ones. So please, don't tell the world that we should be wary of "early" retirement like there are even any reactors that young anymore.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
1.21GW-- That's a Back to the Future reference.
'Sufficiently distributed' wind power can also eliminate all those pesky birds.
Better tell the Audubon Society, because they support wind power.
If it's hot outside, you won't be able to use your air conditioner because environmentalists have opposed every single method of electrical power generation. Eventually, we will be all shivering naked in caves because burning wood will violate the EPA's particulate emissions standards.
"early retirement of plants to extract concessions" -- leverage and coercion right there.
Shut down all the nuclear and coal plants and subsidize solar and wind energy, and by the end of this century we will have more than met our energy needs.
So what powers your home when the wind stops and the sun goes down? What keeps the grid up without brown-outs destroying all your A/C->D/C power converts and the equipment they power (which is pretty much EVERYTHING from TV's and computers, to cell phones, refrigerators, and washing machines)? You need BASELINE power stations on the grid. There has yet to be a solar or wind BASELINE plant invented (there is a theoretical one for solar that requires launching panels into space outside of the earth's and moon's shadows and using microwave beams to transfer the energy back to earth, but there are ALL kinds of issues and safety problems that it will NEVER be produced... I mean, just imagine a small piece of dust moving at thousands of km per second impacting it and throwing off the alignment even .001 of a degree, at the millions of km distant of the array, that will result in microwaving potentially millions of people).
So, given those issues, you still need something to generate baseline power. Thermal energy is a potential source, however, current research says we have already tapped 80-90% of the thermal sites that our current technology can access. Unless we figure out how to mass create diamond structures, or something of similar thermal conductivity and strength, we won't be able to access any more thermal power than we already have, and it isn't enough for the grid. Wave plants have possible potential, but even those have limited uses for the grid, and first you would essentially need to convert almost all coasts into plants to provide the power needed, which means needing to fight against the lawyers of the rich and famous since they own most of the land in/near these locations and will not want their "views" and "neighborhoods" tarnished by said structures (just look how well wind farms have been doing trying to be installed off the coastline? Ask them how well they have been doing fighting lawsuit after lawsuit for the last 15 years trying to build them). These coastal plants also have the issue of only working, well, on the coast. Transferring that energy from say the Gulf coast, or the Pacific coast to say Nebraska, or South Dakota will be EXTREMELY expensive in terms of line loss. We would need to invent atmospheric temperature superconducting materials, which would also need to be cheap, and be made of elements/materials which are plentiful for this to be a viable solution.
Long and short of it, there is no current technology, or group of technologies that can replace nuclear and fossil fuel power plants. If you want to save the environment, than the best current solutions are nuclear + solar + wind + hydro + thermal. You can't remove nuclear from that mix as there isn't enough hydro + thermal baseline power plants to keep the grid up. You may also still need some combination of gas in there for immediate usage situations (i.e. it is 5-6pm and a lot of people are getting home from work and turning up/down their thermostats, turning on computers, televisions, lights, stoves, microwaves, etc. and the power requirement of the grid just jumped up 30%). Nuclear is the cleanest baseline load plants that we know how to make. Issues with storing the waste can be solved. In fact, 80-90% of the waste can simply be reprocessed and made almost inert, but no one has built a reprocessing plant because no one has been able to fix the NIMBY problems that such a plant would cause (this is 1000x worse than the fights that wind farm plants face, as no one wants to accept the risk of not only a nuclear plant, but also having nuclear radioactive waste constantly shipped to that plant).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Bird issues are greatly exaggerated by the fake-green pro-oil Luddites. Or Maine Millionaires who wish to have free power without having to see a generator or power lines.
Learn to love Alaska
I have always been greatly disturbed that many of our nuclear reactors were built by General Electric, but they've assured us that they did not engineer them with their usual tight life-cycle controls.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
It's inevitable now. Western civilization is facing its collapse. The east is hungry for success and is building their economic empires, while the west is fat, complacent, lazy and is overwhelmed with guilt and self pity for its own past success and is willing to let its own economies and infrastructure crumble from decay. Building things in the west is impossible now that you have to you navigate the millions of pages of government regulations and consult multiple levels of government to see if you are actually allowed to do what you intend to do. Assuming you clear all those hurdles, then you have to contend with ideologues with deep pockets and lawyers who will then go to court and block you. Even if you build, the the ideologues and the government may make it all illegal or too costly tomorrow. It's not just nuclear reactors, its all industry.
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...
You know, it could be that the author is somewhat biased... The entire article is about problems with the design of large nuclear plants-- hard to repair and expensive to build, it says-- so the obvious conclusion would be to build smaller, more flexible designs, right? But just to guard against Wrong Think it closes with this note:
And:
I might point out that since in fact, the safety of the nuclear industry is exlemplary by any reasonable standard -- like deaths/kilowatt -- maybe one should also be skeptical about these accusations of broken promises?
Niggard : (noun) an excessively parsimonious, miserly, or stingy person. See here
That won't work.
There are plenty of high powered sociopaths that actually have a need for other people to suffer or be subjugated.
And there's also greed and jealousy.
You can't make everyone happy at the same time if one of your needs is relative superiority.
Any isotopes with half-life > 100 years or so should be considered fuel rather than waste. Reprocess and use it. In any case the radiation emitted by such materials approaches that of the natural background.
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
Jesus, I may be a lazy fucking bastard and you probably made great points, but I couldn't make myself attack that gigantic paragraph. It's hard enough reading a page with colums 18 inches wide without having to contend with gigantic paragraphs. There is a reason newspapers and magazines have colums 2-5 inches wide with most paragraphs 1-2 inches high.
I already know I am a lightweight not to make the effort anyway, but my eyes aren't the greatest these days. If I can find some decent verbal screen reading software I will read your comment. Meanwhile I will take the inevitable karma hit for whining like this.
But you have to give our AC credit. His reponse was spectacularly funny in a whooshy kind of way.
These are not nuclear technology problems, they are toxic politics and even more toxic business practices.
The actual technical issue is failed replacement steam generators, in both cases due to management gambling on cheaping out and losing. Somehow though, it's 'impossible' to replace the defective steam generators even though they were already replaced once?!? I guess we';re getting stupid fast if we already forgot how.
Put the owners on the hook for it (rather than the ratepayers) and watch how fast they come up with a solution that gets the plants safely back online.
You're a moron.
What is your source for the wind gust behavior? (I mean this non-confrontationally, but my geeky lack of social skills betrays my intentions). I am an industry that occassionally intersects with wind power generation, and my understanding is that gust are universally bad - they want steady and reliable. Gust mean problems, period. If you have a source, it helps me learn professionally. I've been taught that they can't operate in gusty conditions, bad for the machinery as well as the grid.
someone on slashdot understanding peak shaving, yay!
Nuke plants are steam-based. Steam turbines have long startup and shutdown times as a consequence of the heat soaking requirements. The demands of rapidly changing the heat of different parts of the plant are very damaging. I only really know a little about the turbines themselves - the machines are so large and the steam so hot that you get differential expansion on the parts of the machine if you do not follow a very specific (and slow) regimen during startup. Heat to this temperature, this speed, soak for 3hrs, move to the next heat/speed, soak for hours, repeat 4 or 5 times to get to running speed where you can generate electricity. Other parts of the generation stream (the boilers, piping, heat exchangers, water treatment, water recovery, etc. all have demanding startup requirements of their own.
If you don't follow the plan, the rotor/blade-rotating part of the machine may thermally expand into the stationary casing (that isn't absorbing heat as fast, and consequently not expanding as fast). I've heard stories of machine trains where the expansion is measured in inches. If the innards grow an inch, but the case doesn't, well, it's bad. You will not be generating electricity today.
Power demand, for the curious.
http://www.caiso.com/SystemStatus.html
>>1. The reason reactors are not being built has to do with the cost -- they're not cost-effective for utilities unless they get huge subsidies.
---
Thank you for that brilliant observation.
I had forgotten how economically viable all those solar and wind farms are.
For some reason I thought they were based on huge subsidies.
No brain, no pain.
Note that this is an opinion not backed up by references. It smells like B.S., and I'm not talking Bank Speak.
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.
It's not just government, lots of businesses do that for their internal stuff... at least some of my friends' places do that and they're in the private sector.
They have to go through their budget... else the bean counters will literally say "well you obviously didn't need that much so here's less" and subtract the difference next year. Which in THEORY would be fine... except not every year is the same. Maybe THIS year you were light on the budget but next year you know you have to buy hardware or whatever
Government isn't the only place where this inefficient accounting and mind-set exists.
Steam... I have to say once I learned the basics of Nuclear reactors I felt a little depressed.
I thought they were these cool things, like the equivalent of Solar Panels arranged in a sphere to absorb the radiation that was being emitted. Or some other really cool thing converting radiation -> electricity.
Instead, they are glorified steam engines only using hot radioactive rods instead of coal.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not belittling how complicated and advanced these reactors are. I'm just saying... it was like figuring out a magic trick as a young child... it sad.
Not exactly. There where serious bird issues. There was a wind farm that was killing thousands of birds a month, many of the raptors.
This actually makes sense, because where would you put a windmill? where the est wind is. Where would birds fly? where the best wind is.
FYI: there are difference qualities of wind.
However, since then they general don't put wind mills in major migratory pathways anymore.
I find it interesting that the State of California pulled are the 90's findings form the web.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's FAR more prevalent in the private sector then the public sector.
It's also done a lot better on the public sector. In general when they see a TREND of decreasing need for money, they will make preparations for a bump. That way they have something in place in case the trend was a temporary one.
The private industry financials are a mess compared to government financials. In general.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You managed to show off you ignorance and make it look like a unabomber screed, well done.
1) SOlar furnace provide 24/7 ;power.
2)Wind is always blowing somewhere.
3)You can use excesses wind to build a water gravity system.
"terms of line loss."
and that statment is the real reason I bother to reply to you vat o' ignorance.
Do you know what the line loss is for 4000 miles using high voltage AC is?
HInt: the answer is No. No you do not.
There about 6.5%. whoop-dee-fucking-do.
I"m a fan of nuclear, but I will not let that kinds of misinformation, lies, and ignorance pollute any issue. W can NOT make good decision as long as we allow people making statements like your a seat at the table.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
No, this is a private company deciding that can't make enough money so they are shutting down. Private companies general do not care about mane people go without electricity
Once again, this is why nuclear power stations should be government owned and operated.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They were exaggerated, in that there were some issues with some specific locations and migration paths. But today, we get the Maine Millionaires fighting offshore wind farms based on false accusations of bird strikes on off-shore wind-farms not near migratory paths.
Learn to love Alaska
As soon as you start using political campaign contributions from existing power brokers to design the system, you've left sound engineering and real science behind. I have just described corn ethanol schemes in a nutshell.
Solar + Wind + Hydro would have worked back when Jimmy the Peanut wanted to do it, but Reagan-style governments (such as we have today) have wasted precious time and irreplaceable resources to the point where it's hard to imagine getting the infrastructure up in time to decommission the aging fission plants before they fail. The numbers are difficult - look how many wind turbines in remote windy areas you need to replace even one BWR sitting right next to a major population center. I'm all in favor of trying, but then I'm all in favor of pursuing LENR, too - I just wouldn't bet the entire bank on it.
As for batteries, honestly energy storage is a solved problem, despite Exide's suppression of the nickel-iron battery (happily, once again available due to Edison's patents expiring) and Chevron's purchase and suppression of many of Ovinshky's key NiMH patents. If you don't like batteries you can always run a turbine backwards and pump water uphill; it's been done for over a hundred years now and it works. It's an interesting subject, yes, and important, but I don't think we need fuss over the details of energy storage in discussions about scheduled-to-fail nuclear plants.
Your remark about the land area required for agriculture based energy production is very relevant, though; even more so if you live in England - there just isn't room in the UK to do the job without major technology advances. I imagine many other nations have this problem as well. However, in the USA we already pay farmers tax dollars not to produce food; we have vast croplands that are simply not used, and even vaster areas that are not suitable for growing food which could be used for algae tank biogas and biodiesel production at less tax investment cost than the current expenditures on foreign military adventuring and various forms of corporate welfare.
Fundamentally, US taxpayers really can't lose by making more investments in all forms of distributed sustainable energy production. However, the tax allocations are controlled by people who can lose - and lose big - if energy production stops being a militarized, government protected and insured racket like nuclear fission plants are, and becomes a widely distributed, reliable and sustainable system employing huge numbers of people profitably at local levels.
While I wasn't a huge fan of the deal, Canada sold its nationalized nuclear reactor program CANDU to a corporation.
For peanuts (15$Million), royalty rights (so I guess if the manage to turn a profit we get some return), but did retain the IP.
So technically the IP is still Canadian. However now that a corporation has it, I am not sure how much pure R&D is going to be done now generating IP as I am sure it will be refocused to simply building more less current designs.
CANDU has build much more abroad than actually in Canada to begin with, likely now with a focus on China and India (who has built a bunch of them already in the past).
You're still thinking that we will be around to do so. This mentality is dangerous.
In any case the radiation emitted by such materials approaches that of the natural background
From your knowledge, can you explain how?
Certainly. Fission occurs at a rate inversely proportional to the half life of the radioisotope. The longer the half life, the less fission is occurring. The most dangerous emitters are generally accepted to be Cesium-137 (emits beta and gamma) and Strontium-90 (beta). Both have half-life in the vicinity of 30 years. Thallium-204 is pretty nasty too, but half-life is under 4 years, so it is gone pretty quickly. Long-lived isotopes release by their nature release far fewer particles. Toxicity is often more a problem than radiation. Plutonium-239, often cited as an extremely scary substance, has half life of about 24000 years. Why would anyone want to expend resources to sequester this, when it is of great value as fuel? That's far worse than spending thousands of dollars on a gasoline can that can last a lifetime, instead of burning it.
If humans are not around to do so, I guess I don't care that much what happens. Nature will adapt as it always does. There are organisms which would enjoy the energy source provided.
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
Thank you. I really appreciate your response. I know you won't receive any karma since this thread is already dated, but what are your thoughts about cases like Chernobyl and Fukushima?
Chernobyl was a travesty. The reactors there had no business being in operation. They lacked even a containment vessel, and were of a design (RBMK if I recall correctly, too lazy to look up right now) which had huge fundamental problems, notably use of graphite as a moderator which increased the resulting contamination by at least 10x. The Soviets used them because they were cheap, and provided plenty of plutonium to build weapons. The operators and their higher-ups in 1986 were incredibly stupid, disregarding just about every procedure such as doing an improper shutdown, not waiting to restart the reactor until xenon gas had a chance to dissipate, and finally removing something like 3x the number of control rods permitted by whatever constituted a "safe limit" for Soviet procedures. The result was terribly predictable. No reactor of that sort could ever be built in a western country.
Fukushima should not have been a problem. Number one, the reactors were very old generation 1 (maybe 1.5 if you feel charitable), past their design life and should have been replaced. I'm not aware of any in the US that old still operating, but there might be one or two, and they would not be in major earthquake zones. Second, what moron decided to put critical backup diesel generators where they could be flooded by the tsunami resulting from an earthquake? Incremental cost of properly siting generators for that facility amounts to pocket change. Third, while the images are striking, actual contamination around Fukushima is very small. Radiation levels pretty much everywhere except the damaged buildings are similar to natural levels in some areas where people have lived for thousands of years, iirc southwestern France.
I probably sound like a nuclear shill. I am not. The reactors in use all over the world however, have done a decent job of generating electricity without contributing to global warming. Imo the biggest problem with them is that they were originally designed and built to provide material for nuclear weapons, with power being a useful secondary benefit. There existed at the time designs for inherently safer reactors based on thorium. Those are incapable of runaway and meltdown as happened at the above sites. Nixon killed the thorium reactor program though, for weapons, and to steer pork to a buddy in California. The Chinese and Indians will now take the lead on reactor building.
Bottom line, nuclear power is dangerous. So is every power source that has any possibility of supplying humanity's needs. Wind, solar etc. are useful, but I am very skeptical that any of those will ever provide more than 25% or so, due to their diffuse and intermittent nature. Fossil fuel plants are absolutely the first thing we need to do away with, and only nuclear has a hope within my lifetime of replacing that massive baseload generation capability.
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.