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Expansion of Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant Suspended
mdsolar writes in with news that plans to build two new reactors at the Comanche Peak nuclear power plant have been put on hold. "On Friday, Luminant, a subsidiary of Dallas-based Energy Future Holdings, suspended its application to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build two new reactors at the plant. Its partner on the project, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, said it was focusing on getting its nuclear reactors in Japan back in operation. The majority of Japan's reactors were shut down because of safety concerns following a 2011 tsunami that caused a radiation leak at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex 150 miles north of Tokyo. Mitsubishi 'has informed us that they will materially slow the development of their design control document for their new reactor design by several years. In addition, both [Mitsubishi] and Luminant understand the current economic reality of low Texas power prices driven in large part by the boom in natural gas,' read a statement from Luminant."
Thank you for being a friend
Traveled down the road and back again
Your heart is true, you're a pal and a cosmonaut.
And if you threw a party
Invited everyone you knew
You would see the biggest gift would be from me
And the card attached would say, thank you for being a friend.
A slow economy and depressed energy prices due to shale gas have certainly delayed plans for new nuclear. As we shut down more coal plants and when the economy picks up, we will be faced with the choice of becoming heavily dependant on gas, or building more nuclear. Shale gas prices will rise as our dependency increases. some dream that solar and wind can fill the huge gap but as most if us know it simply can't. Meanwhile, the worldwide expansion of nuclear continues, and appears to be picking up steam.
Side note: The reactors at Fukushima are GE design, not Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, as some readers might conclude from the author's attempt to tie the two together.
Obviously nuclear power is technically non-renewable, so how long would it be expected to last, assuming no refinements to extraction or fission methods? This is a question of curiosity rather than an attempt to criticise nuclear power.
ya, i mis-read the title on the first pass...
A couple hundred years quickly turns into decades if nuclear is ramped up.
In my experience, that usually translates as: we've come to realize that X was a bad idea.
It would have better if you'd posted this in the topic about RUSSIANS in SPAAACE!!!!!!
In this case it sounds more like, "we've got to put out fire Z first"
Remember when America actually developed and MANUFACTURED its own technologies and was an industrial powerhouse? Those days are long gone, and this is the poisonous fruit of the Globalist traitors who have infiltrated the US government, in the globalist plot to destroy America. Are we really better off than we were in the 50s and 60s when the US still manufactured most of what it uses and globalisation was not common? If globalisation is so wonderful, why have the last 3 decades of globalisation produces a shrinking middle class, a stagnant economy that has not grown at all for the middle class in over 3 decades, to the point that a growing percentage of the US population now earns less than the Mininum wage of 1968, to that a massive percenrtage of the country is now on food stamps and this grows relentlessly? The US economy was growing by leaps and bounds in those two decades of the 50s and 60s, every year of those decades poverty declined, and the middle class was growing in the 50s and 60s. The middle class has not grown at all since the 70s, and there has been no reduction in poverty since the 70s. Ever since the offshoring of the US economy (read: gutting), there has been virtually no growth of the middle class in the country. Instead, the super rich have pocketed massive amounts of money by laying off American workers and replacing them with third world labor. I think its time to realize that globalisation is a scam and the perpetuators of this free trade snake oil are liars who have sold out this country and destroyed it. Further reprensible is the immigration invasion which is turning the US into Mexico North and is quite frankly a genocidal assault that is destroying the traditional identity of the United States. Studies have been done that Mexicans have a 20% lower IQ than European Americans and studies have shown that this is almost entirely due to genetics. This means that he average population IQ is declining because of the influx of low IQ racial groups and the country is basically being turned into a third world cesspit. We need to go back to what worked, what we had prior to the 70s, that is 1) very low levels of immigration that maintain the racial demographics of the country, exactly as it was in the 1924 Emergency Immigration Act (in effect 1924-1965), re-enacting this law and repealing the 1965 immigration law, and reflected in the countries first citizenship and naturalization law, the 1790 Naturalization Act which was signed by President George Washington and signed by the founding fathers themselves 2) Strong tariffs, favouring national industry and keeping manufacturing and industrial know how in country 3) recognize that manufacturing and blue collar professions are noble and worthwhile, abandon the absurd "everyone must go to college" mentality, and encourage more people to go into blue collar work, including by building a pipeline from high school into vocational/trade schools and apprenticeships for everything from trucking, car manufacture, to plumbing 4) encouraging a family values society with large families to encourage internal birth population growth, by incentivizing a high birth rate among the middle class through larger per child percentage income tax incentives for the middle class 5) cap export of foodstuffs to other countries in such a manner that allows maintainence of current population level in other countries but does not incentivize population growth in those countries, to allow for compensation of temporary decline in food production due to natural disasters, but prohibits an increase in exports due to population growth in those countries.
Globalisation and importation of cheap labor via immigration, benefits one group of people, the super rich. It is destroying the country for the rest of us, and as well is anti-diversity because it is destroying the unique qualities of countries.
This is an ideal time for Obama to support thorium plants and get them going. We have 2 companies minimum that with .5B each could have designs and perhaps small prototypes done within a relatively short time.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Wind power sometimes puts the wholesale price of electricity down to zero in Texas. http://cleantechnica.com/2011/10/20/wholesale-price-of-electricity-drops-to-0-00-in-texas-due-to-wind-energy/ So natural gas may simply be acting a the medium through which wind discourages nuclear power. This has been the case in the Midwest. http://will.illinois.edu/nfs/RenaissanceinReverse7.18.2013.pdf Wind power has cut off the top of the gas generation price curve and forced a reactor to close down there through the subsequent lowering of the wholesale electricity price. Gas can still be expensive if the less efficient turbines are used. Wind lowers demand for those.
estimates 72 years at the current rate of use. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium#Pessimistic_predictions
It is worth noting that the uranium from seawater idea is flawed by the huge amount of ocean current you'd need to get at the uranium. It becomes a project with climate implication owing to disturbed currents.
We will all be incredibly fucked as the United states energy portfolio has been shifted to be almost entirely dependent on natural gas. Get another hurricane in the gulf and americans will be shivering in the dark the next winter with massive rate hikes and energy shortages. People will be whining about why we didn't build nuclear reactors. Meanwhile america will be shivering in the dark for another 20 years because that's the lead time to build a nuclear power plant.
CNN has started doing these long-form documentaries and the 2 I've seen have been mind altering. I went from being a total nuclear power skeptic to being 99% in favor. The documentary is done from the perspective of environmentalists who did their own research into nuclear power and were really surprised by their findings. The clincher for me was the milliSievert readings from all over the world; including Fukushima and Chernobyl.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
That should be "we have an EARLY 20th-century energy grid".
It was friggin' amazing when it was built, a time when few could even envision multi-gigawatt cities such as Las Vegas.
It all began with the dramatic and brutal the battle of the currents. Tesla/Westinghouse AC was the right choice for small scale and the subscriber level, enabling the use of transformers to step voltage. The self-synchronizing 60 cycle grid grew, and in the age of miracles (practically) no one objected to corridors of uninsulated cable suspended between power plants, which grew to become the mighty pylons of today. Unlike the trans-continental railroad however, Eastern and Western grids cannot meet without a DC interface. At 60 cycles there is too much span across them to achieve stable synchronization.
Yet Edison's DC is needed today -- for the long haul, to re-configure the grid for greater current capacity and efficiency, better bridge existing grids allow massive direct energy transfer coast to coast. Burying these lines brings protection from natural disaster such as cataclysmic ice storms, Yellowstone or what ever. We'll also be able to reclaim much of the real estate presently allocated to these corridors.
[Faulkner, 2005] "There are different trade-offs for AC versus DC power transmission. For example, voltage can only be taken up to about 500,000 volts (500 kV) for an overhead AC power line because beyond that, power dissipation through dielectric loss becomes severe. Voltage for DC overhead power lines can be taken up to double the maximum AC voltage, to about 1000 kV (one million volts from ground potential; 2 million volts between the conductors); beyond that, power dissipation through corona discharge becomes severe. Underground DC power lines can use even higher voltage, and can be quite large; the main factors limiting size and design details are the need to insulate the conductor and to dissipate heat. Wire diameter is limited for AC transmission lines, whether overhead or buried, due to the âoeskin effectâ that prevents an AC current from penetrating to the center of a large wire, whereas a DC line can be arbitrarily thick. For these and other reasons, underground high capacity power lines are necessarily DC.
The simplest way electric power could be sent coast to coast is to build power lines based on conductors with much lower electrical resistance than any long distance power lines in service today. These âoeelectric pipelinesâ can be either conventional conductor or superconductor-based, in principle. The superconductor approach to electric pipelines has gotten some press and research interest, but is not technically ready to deploy yet. There is also a more pedestrian way to decrease the electrical resistance of a power transmission line: use more conductor..."
Faulkner goes on to describe several electric pipeline projects with projected cost.
___
My letters on energy:
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Thanks - I know the history of the grid, the war of currents, etc.
No matter how amazing it was then, it's badly outdated now.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
The long HVDC connections are only possible with technology using not even thought of in Edison's day. I suggest you look at wikipedia for a far better description than the "flying cars of tommorrow!!!" thing from a guy dreaming of something that's already in use, but he just doesn't know it yet.
It would have been extremely difficult to do without semiconductors but now it is done wherever people have their solar panels hooked into the grid - there's your tens on thousands of power generators in each of quite a few cities around the world.
So there you go, counter evidence to the AC's rubbish that sounds like it came from someone ignorant in the 1980s is probably in your own street.
When that question was asked in the early 1960s it was "it won't last very long, so let's build plutonium fast breeders". Then mining exploration turned up a lot more Uranium in places where it was really just a unexpected extra in the same ore as copper, silver or gold that was well worth mining anyway.
Coming from the other direction newer Uranium reactors (late 1960s) were running on fuel that didn't need as much enrichment so less Uranium would be needed to be mined to run them. So now we are in the situation where Uranium mines have been closed (eg. Niger) or expansion delayed indefinitely pending a rise in price (eg. Australia - Olympic Dam), plus a large number of known untapped reserves, supplying what could be a diminishing market. So that means Uranium is going to last for a while, then you can add to the mix Thorium reactors which can start up on Thorium (of which there is a lot) and continue on higher grade waste than what current reactors can use plus the very large stockpiles of expired weapons material (it's not usable forever). If they are liquid fuelled reactors they can avoid all of the very difficult reprocessing used to make new fuel rods from bits of the old ones.
So that means the answer is a long time even with current experimental technology but depends entirely on how much is used.
An earthquake caused the greatest nuclear disaster in history - a triple melt through. It was locally only mag 7.1 which is just on the edge of design spec. Neutron radiation damaged pipes broke at all afflicted reactors during the quake. Leaks, steam and explosion reported by multiple workers.
The tsunami just came to mop up.
This is why they bag on about the wave, quakes can fuck an ancient, primitive reactor anywhere, any time, especially the 15 identical GE BWRs in USA.
Should be "after construction starts".
As an example consider the AP1000 which is close to completion and consider the date when China was considering what to get and where to site it. Most recent reactors have taken far longer still than that.
I agree with you at some level. But what I think we need is a DC standard for SOME things and an AC standard for others. For example, everywhere an AC/DC power supply is used (and that's almost everywhere) DC should be available in the home. Lighting is an obvious exception to that unless you recognize that all LED bulbs must convert AC to DC to make use of it and that much efficiency is lost due to conversion.
Some devices are better off remaining as AC and for the transmission of power, AC is just better as well. But we do need more DC at home powering our computers, our lights, our TVs and more. The efficiency would save a lot of money.
Don't forget, also, that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries was a major contributor in the decommissioning of CA's San Onofre plant (providing faulty steam generators that eventually proved too expensive to satisfactorily repair) and So Cal Edison, the main owner of the plant, is going after MHE for all they can get, including lost generation, design costs and a whole lot else.
There are myriad other dynamics involved (NIMBY folks in Orange County, et. al.), but it appears that poorly designed software at MHE was a root cause of the problem.
Well Mr Lying weasel backing away from your strawman attack, here is what I actually wrote - which renders your "assign" bit yet another lie:
In other words a needlessly polite way of asking "why are you lying" instead of stating "Mr D is lying due to his motivation of ..." which appears to be what you are accusing me of now you can't get the solar shill bullshit to stick.
While I suspect you are a clueless fanboy of the 1970s technology the US nuclear lobby wants to stick with to get welfare from the taxpayer, I do not really know, so I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt with your motivation for being a liar.
Since I'm replying to obvious fanboy lies why should I keep all emotion out it and merely stand by and watch the manipulation? Your strawman daily submitter is obvious fiction that is yet another part of your manipulation.
You also don't seem to know enough about nuclear to understand what I was getting at about the 1970s tech, yet you call me pathetic? Learn about your topic before wasting space here screaming about mythical solar shills.