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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."
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.
The ideal situation would be to re-process used fuel. In that scenario, fuel supply would be plentiful for about as long as you want to project. Under the existing structure, with little re-processing, the known Uranium supplies are plentiful, but I don't know what the amount really is. I feel comfortable saying we could go for centuries, but again, I have not looked up the number.
Obviously nuclear power is technically non-renewable, so how long would it be expected to last, assuming no refinements to extraction or fission methods?
One answer is here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last. The short version is that with current techniques, and usage levels, the available uranium will last a couple hundred years. However, there are methods that we expect would increase that by multiple orders of magnitude.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
A couple hundred years quickly turns into decades if nuclear is ramped up.
Thorium was dropped from R&D because it didn't produce fissile material for bombs. And once we had working nuclear reactors, that we thought were safe, there was little need to create another type of nuclear plant.
Now there's a pressing need to not have the downsides of uranium based reactors, and thorium may fit that bill if the engineering challenges can be worked out.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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.
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.
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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>