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Gas Cooled Reactors Shut Down In UK

Posted by samzenpus on from the closing-the-doors dept.

mdsolar writes EDF Energy, the British subsidiary of the French state-controlled utility, said on Monday that it was shutting down three nuclear reactors and that a reactor with a fault that has been shut down since June would remain so. The facilities, which are being investigated as a precaution, generate nearly a quarter of nuclear capacity in Britain. The British Office for Nuclear Regulation said that there had been no release of radioactive material and no injuries. Industry experts did not anticipate much effect on electricity supplies or prices in the short term. EDF said that over the next few days it would idle a second reactor at the facility, Heysham 1, in northwest England. The company said it would also shut down two other reactors of similar design at Hartlepool in northeast England to investigate whether they had the same flaws.

12 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. not big in UK by iggymanz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    UK gets about 18% of its power from nuclear (before this shutdown). Four new plants are planned at two sites that EDF energy owns, ground broken for those

    1. Re:not big in UK by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yeah, but like you said, the present neocon government is willing to give HUGE corporate welfare to make new nuclear reactor plans viable.

      I used to be entirely pro-nuclear on a scientific basis. Now I see how humans behave in practice when it comes to the trade-off between safety and profit/reputation. I see how much nuclear power is really reverse Hollywood accounting, where you hide how much of the real cost is borne by government. And I would prefer a transition from fossil directly to renewable, even if that means overriding the whiny bitches who somehow think fracking is safer and more economic than wind because you can't actually SEE what's happening underground.

    2. Re:not big in UK by DaveAtWorkAnnoyingly · · Score: 5, Informative

      Ground isn't broken and the company hasn't even committed to building them yet. (I work for EDF Energy)

    3. Re:not big in UK by Vanders · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Unsurprising after the Windscale Fire that nuclear power is unpopular in the UK

      Windscale was 60 years ago, in an air-cooled open loop pile who's only purpose was to produce plutonium and other nuclear isotopes as quickly as possible and damn the consequences.

      Most people now don't even remember what Windscale was or even recognise the name. Out of those that do, a lot of them understand the different between Windscale and their local nuclear power station.

      To the best of my personal knowledge, nuclear power is not unpopular in the UK, Windscale or otherwise. If anything the attitude appears to be "Get on and build the damn things!" and "Why are we letting the French/Chinese build them, I remember when the UK used to build things!".

      --
      Syllable : It's an Operating System
    4. Re:not big in UK by Rising+Ape · · Score: 3, Informative

      Especially in this case since Windscale was also gas-cooled.

      Air-cooled. Which is indeed a gas, but very different to the CO2-cooled reactors described here. Windscale was an air-cooled, open-loop plutonium production reactor designed in the 1940s. It didn't generate electricity and has very little relation to the later electricity-generating reactors.

  2. Sigh! by rmdingler · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Although it seems like they've recognized and are addressing a minor engineering issue before it becomes a problem, it seems like this will be portrayed as another in a continuing series of black eyes for the nuclear alternative to our energy needs.

    There is no present, perfect way to deliver the electricity those of us on the grid have come to appreciate. When you're talking about the mainstays of the grid's backbone (coal, crude, gas, hydroelectric, nuclear), none are generated without environmental consequence.

    Continue to develop the renewables, but for fuck's sake, don't take nuclear off the table based on the performance of aging plants.

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

    1. Re:Sigh! by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There are two issues unique to nuclear that case people not to want it.

      1. The extreme cost. As you are probably aware, the UK government has had to guarantee well above the going rate for energy generated from new nuclear plants for their entire lifetimes just to get them built. Even so, only the Chinese are interested in doing it. Current plants were built by the government that literally could not give them away in the 80s when they were privatised, until it agreed to shoulder most of the costs of running and decommissioning them.

      2. Single point of failure. As this event demonstrates problems with reactors can knock gigawatts off the grid for long periods of time. Other sources tend not to suffer from that kind of failure, and some sources like wind are extremely widely distributed and fault tolerant.

      As for judging nuclear by the performance of ageing plants, the newer designs are not significantly better in any of these areas. We can see what other countries are building and they have all the same problems.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  3. Re:EIGHT weeks??? Nukes need to be more modular. by DaveAtWorkAnnoyingly · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Correct. Sizewell B can load follow, but we (I work there) haven't done this for years. It is however getting more likely due to the increasingly unstable nature of the National Grid, partly due to lots of smaller generators of which the grid has no control over coming online (windfarms). I believe the AGRs can also load follow. The nukes generate at baseload, full output, whenever they're on. Our frequency control is maintained by the coal and gas generators.

  4. May have to close by mdsolar · · Score: 4, Informative

    "The reactor problems highlight that most of Britain’s nuclear installations, which generate about 20 percent of the country’s electricity, are approaching the end of their lives. The four EDF reactors under investigation were commissioned in 1983 and are officially scheduled to be removed from service in 2019. EDF Energy had been expected to seek extensions to the lives of the plants, but if the problems turn out to be too expensive to be worth fixing, then they might end up being permanently closed sooner than expected. “If this fault is as a result of the aging of the unit, this has potential implications for the operational life of these four units and, potentially, others as well,” said Antony Froggatt, a nuclear analyst at Chatham House, a London research organization."

  5. Already like that to an extent, but ... by dbIII · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Would be nice at the sub-unit level but take a look at a thermal power station to get some idea that the scale makes it impractical once you have enough steam to spin a turbine. Big turbines with lots of high pressure steam get the job done far better than little ones. Of course you could have something like a lot of little pebble bed reactors making steam in parallel on the boiler side making it possible to just shut down one reactor, but after the stuff is boiled it's pretty well the whole unit goes down for just about anything.

    Notice that I used the word "unit". A thermal power station can be made up, for example, of eight units, with eight turbine rotors, eight boilers (nukes would include reactors at that bit) and each unit using half a cooling tower each. You can take 1/8 of the plant down without impacting on the rest and that's what's done with scheduled maintanance.
    However it looks like this situation is like grounding all of a type of aircraft when a fault is found, so it's thought of being serious enough to check out all the reactors of that type at once and being worth shutting down every unit of that type. So modularity is not going to save you so long as at least one part subject to the "recall" is required by each unit.

    The French had this a few times and had to shut down all of their commercial nuclear power plants at once on occasion but it's not a nuclear thing, it's the drawback of a monoculture.

  6. Summary factually incorrect by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Although the story link in your summary seems factually correct, the slashdot summary is qute wrong.

    EDF Energy as a whole supplies 25% of the UK's energy needs (57.5 GW peak in 2012) with 16 nuclear reactors (about 9.9 GW of capicity) and 7 conventional coal and gas turbines (3,4 GW of capacity) and various renewable energy sources with about 1,5GW of capacity. Of the 16 reactors, 1 is a pressurised water reactor (PWR) and 15 are avanced gas reactors (AGR) and four of these AGRs are of the same design as Dungeness B with the faulty boiler pump. There are only 4 of those reactors offline and only 3 of which are offline for unscheduled maintenance and the other twelve are still running. Just because EDf Energy has 15 AGRs it doesn't mean that all 15 have the same boiler pumps as Dungeness B. Dungeness B has been shut down since june due to a pump failure and two other reactors were shutdown for an inspection of similar pumps. The fourth reactor currently shutdown (Heysham 1) is in a scheduled outage and Hartepool 1 pumps will be inspected in a schedue outage later this month.

    You can see the current status of EDF Energies AGR reactors

    http://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statuses

    or

    http://www.edfenergy.com/energy

    So the real impact of this problem is in fact only three reactors offline that should have been functional with a capicity of about 1,6 GW. As ratio of EDF energies total production capicity of 14,8 GW this is 12% of their capacity of 3% of the UKs total energy production capacity. As its summer the energy needs of the UK are in fact reduced and most scheduled outages of nuclear reactors in Europe and performed in this period are this reason, so a 3% loss of capacity in summer is frankly nothing.

    D.

  7. Re:Jaw dropping by brambus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You made the very basic error of comparing nameplate capacity. You also need to consider capacity factor, which for solar in UK latitudes is around 0.1 - 0.15, whereas the EPRs that they plan to construct here are 0.9. So taking that into account, your 13 GW utility scale solar suddenly shrinks to <2 GW, whereas the nuclear plant is still around 3 GW. So before we even get to dispatchability of the power source and seasonal loading, solar loses by about 1/3 to the most wildly overpriced nuclear power plant I've ever seen in my life. Next you need to consider that the nuclear plant is planned to operate for 60 years, whereas the solar plant is most likely going to need replacement after 30 or at most 40 years. Finally, the $27B cost of the plant seems to me to be wildly out of whack with what these very same reactors cost in places like China (cheaper by about a factor of 4x). Meanwhile Russia is also building modern VVER-1200s at an equivalent cost of 4x cheaper than the plant in the UK. Make of this what you will, but it appears to me that the western world is losing its industrial prowess and losing it fast.