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First New US Nuclear Reactor In 20 Years Goes Live (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The Tennessee Valley Authority is celebrating an event 43 years in the making: the completion of the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant. In 1973, the TVA, one of the nation's largest public power providers, began building two reactors that combined promised to generate enough power to light up 1.3 million homes. The first reactor, delayed by design flaws, eventually went live in 1996. Now, after billions of dollars in budget overruns, the second reactor has finally started sending power to homes and businesses. Standing in front of both reactors Wednesday, TVA President Bill Johnson said Watts Bar 2, the first U.S. reactor to enter commercial operation in 20 years, would offer clean, cheap and reliable energy to residents of several southern states for at least another generation. Before Watts Bar 2, the last time an American reactor had fired up was in 1996. It was Watts Bar 1 -- and according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, it cost $6.8 billion, far greater than the original price tag at $370 million. In the 2000s, some American power companies, faced with growing environmental regulations, eyed nuclear power again as a top alternative to fossil fuels such as coal and oil. A handful of companies, taking advantage of federal loan guarantees from the Bush administration, revived nuclear reactor proposals in a period now known as the so-called "nuclear renaissance." Eventually, nuclear regulators started to green light new reactors, including ones in Georgia and South Carolina. In 2007, the TVA resumed construction on Watts Bar 2, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The TVA originally said it would take five years to complete. The TVA, which today serves seven different southern states, relies on nuclear power to light up approximately 4.5 million homes. Watts Bar 2, the company's seventh operating reactor, reaffirms its commitment to nukes for at least four more decades, Johnson said Wednesday. In the end, TVA required more than five years to build the project. The final cost, far exceeding its initial budget, stood at $4.7 billion.
And what else do you think is coming out of those cooling towers... hint: evaporated water.
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Who do you think he was communicating to? People who really needed, just that moment, to process the distinction between steam and condensed water droplets making visible emissions? No. He was making sure that low information twits understood that wasn't smoke or Eeeevil Radioactive Fog.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Rubbish. Steam engines produce steam.
We're talking about a nuclear power plant here so those are nuclears coming out of that tower.
Can I have a hit of whateverthefuck you are on? Read that post 4 times, still have no clue what you are talking about.
(If you can see it, it's not steam)
You're thinking about 'wet steam'. He's talking about normal steam.
Uranium "breeder" reactor technology is a throwback to the days of nuclear arms proliferation because if you can continually use the fissile material it generates then it will eventually create weapon's grade Plutonium. What we really need is to invest in the research needed to make a fourth generation reactor that transmutes Thorium a few times before finally making it into a Uranium isotope that is "burned" for power, destroying the fissile material instead of stockpiling it. This makes the possibility of a meltdown physically impossible making it safe enough fully automate without the need for human oversight. If made into small unmanaged units (one buried every X miles) it would be a poor attack target (minimal impact). Basically, you stream in some water, start the reaction and it will churn out electricity and warm water for the century, given a small pile of Thorium.
The idea has been around a long time and in the 80s, congress even refused to fund the research to build a reactor because it couldn't be used to make weapons.
It's past time to start using nuclear physics to cleanly and safely power the globe.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
As a proud, card-carrying TreeHugger(TM) I am happy to see nuclear power remaining a viable component of our national electrical baseline capacity. Let's be real: when coal (especially) is the main alternative for providing the huge baseload requirements of a solid electrical infrastructure, it's a no-brainer to have nuclear be a portion of the multi-legged stool we need.
Disclaimer: Until recently, I was in the business of building nuclear plants.
When I say that over-regulation, discord between the NRC and ASME, NIMBY trolls, and congressional oversight cause cost and lead time issues, I don't mean that energy companies are trying to bypass safety regulations to accelerate building - there are literally too many people who don't know enough about nuclear plants in decision-making positions.
Here's a true story.
WEC is the prime contractor constructing Summer and Vogtle. After farming out subs to various entities, with defined scopes of work, timelines required to design / install / test / etc - the entire gamut of a multi-billion dollar project...work began. In 2012, during one of the ASME conferences, the ASME committee changed the definition of SA316 forged steel. I won't bore you with the details, but the change they implemented into ASME standards changed the dimensions that SA 316 bar stock could be forged into (for fear that too large of a bar would create structural weakness in the center) - whereas the primary use of 316SS within the context of ASME Section 7 is for creating safety valve bonnets - in this case, for the valves in containment. A bonnet is cored out - hollowed out - leaving no internal metal in the 4" center radius ASME flagged.
However, ASME is responsible to no one. Their decision was decried and appealed by the entire nuclear industry, but ASME answers to no one, and the NRC has no input into ASME standards. Since Summer and Vogtle required congressional approval to build, including design approval - ASME changing the definition of 316SS required a design change in the plans for the nuclear plants, which in turn required congressional approval.
1. Tens of millions in material got scrapped.
2. Tens of hundreds of millions in labor hours between prime and sub-suppliers were wasted - design, engineering, procurement, project management...
And this is ONE tiny decision made by ONE body with regulatory oversight amidst dozens of stakeholders making decisions and changing scopes - not least of which are political bodies. I have dozens of stories just like it.
(If you can see it, it's not steam)
Some of it condenses, but much of it does not. It is steam.
If you want to really get pedantic, you never actually see anything other than photons striking your retina.
Nuclear power has always been a lot more popular on K Street than on Wall Street. At least these sort of overruns pale in comparison to some of the ones in Europe - one in the UK has now become the second most expensive thing ever made by man (after the International Space Station). Lots of nuclear plants on that list, too. One in Finland is now a decade overdue and commercial operation still isn't expected until 2018 - assuming there's not even more delays.
One of nuclear's biggest problems is, it doesn't work very well small. There are some "smallish" modular reactor designs, but as a general rule, nuclear plants are very large structures. Which means, you're not making a lot of them. Which means you don't retire the risk (both financial and safety) very quickly. Nuclear inherently contains a lot of both of those. It can take decades to learn what problems are. And when we redesign systems to start over with a new "generation" of nuclear power plants, that "ironing out the financial and safety kinks" process starts over.
It's unfortunate, but the very nature of fission means going through every element on the periodic table except the extremely short-lived/superheavy ones. Which automatically means facing very significant corrosion and containment challenges. The very nature of a high neutron flux means degradation on its own. The very nature of having exceedingly toxic materials means that you can't allow even tiny amounts to escape, and have to go to extreme levels to prevent serious problems like fires - and not only is your fuel source challenging from a chemical and materials standpoint, but it also can't be shut down quickly. Criticality can be, but the daughter product decays keep the core hot for a considerable length of time.
Nuclear is eminently doable from a technological standpoint. But like rocketry, a lot of things conspire to make it very difficult to do affordably and safely.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
In this area we had 5 reactors being built, one day they just called a halt to them. I had a friend who was studying to be a reactor operator who was told to go home, you haven't a job anymore, just one of the thousands told the same thing.
In January 1982, the WPPSS board stopped construction on Plants 4 and 5 when total cost for all the plants was projected to exceed $24 billion. Because these plants generated no power and brought in no money, the system was forced to default on $2.25 billion in bonds. This meant that the member utilities, and ultimately the rate payers, were obligated to pay back the borrowed money. In some small towns where unemployment due to the recession was already high, this amounted to more than $12,000 per customer. http://www.historylink.org/Fil...
At the time the largest default in the U.S.
$4.7B for a nuclear plant. Is it worth it? Will the company get $4.7B worth of use from this asset? If they put it on the market today, what price would they get?
Does this price reflect the cost of building a new nuclear plant today, or is it horribly inflated by the troubled construction history?
The new planed UK Hinkley Point station has (Wikipedia) "estimated construction cost of £18 billion, or £24.5 billion including financing costs." This is two units with combined 3200MW output. Watts Bar II is 1200MW - so the UK is planing on spending more per MW than this plant cost.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
All of it does. It's water, not steam. :)
You were aiming to correct me but you mist
That's what the economists think but they've missed out a very important step the engineers know. You need R&D and pilot plants so that you can design a GOOD standardized design before you build a lot of them. Otherwise your standardized design costs a fortune in the long run from retrofitting a lot of units each time you find a problem.
Instead of that the R&D money got blown on PR (probably literally on hookers and blow for Senators) and we have nothing to build on apart from reactors from the 1970s and imported Japanese technology (Westinghouse made up for their lack of R&D spending by taking advantage of the Japanese taxpayer instead).
Maybe we will be like the UK and just give up and buy Chinese?
The idiot there is the guy (not you obviously) that didn't put a date on the end of the specified standard to be used in the designs/legislation/whatever. With respect that's a newbie mistake. Standards change. If you don't refer to the one you actually mean and leave things open to referring to one that has not been written yet it's pretty obvious that things are going to go wrong someday. This fuckup looks like what happens when you get office workers with English Lit. degrees to do an engineers job.
As a former member of ASTM (I stopped paying the fees about 15 years ago) I'm a bit curious as to why the ASME standard was used instead of ASTM which has the advantage of being more recognized internationally so would vastly increase the pool of potential suppliers.
Steam? Do you burn yourself on misty mornings?
It's really fog and nothing like steam at all. It's all just warm (~40C) droplets of water coming off the condensate that has come out of the condensors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_power_station#Steam_condensing) before going into the cooling towers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower).
If you listen closely you can hear mdsolar screaming.
"after billions of dollars in budget overruns" - How is this cheap? Doesn't even consider the still unsolved problem of long term nuclear waste storage. These billions would have been better spent on battery research so that we have effective means to store the power generated by wind, water, and solar.
From a physics standpoint, this is not true. Larger reactors help you have higher total neutron cross sections, both for elastic scattering / moderation and fission. A "small" nuclear reactor is defined by the IAEA as one that's less than 300MWe, although even reactors as big as 500MWe are sometimes referred to as "small". Per-reactor, not per-plant. Don't get me wrong, you can make reactors at any size - some companies are looking at modules as small as 25MW (per reactor). But it makes your already problematic economics even worse.
That said, I still do have more hope for small reactors than large ones, just simply from the standpoint of getting some degree of mass production and refinement through use. Still, the "nothing may go wrong" situation one faces with nuclear reactors and the "need to start from scratch if some flaw is developed in the basic design that prevents you from 'nothing may go wrong'" still bites.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Likely, the $370M was in 1973's dollars, which would be around $2B in 2016 dollars.
Frrom the article:
TVA President Bill Johnson said Watts Bar 2, the first U.S. reactor to enter commercial operation in 20 years, would offer clean, cheap and reliable energy to residents of several southern states for at least another generation.
Clean - as long as you don't count the radioactive waste that has to be stored somewhere for the next thousand years.
Stored for the next thousand years, but ideally (if it weren't for NIMBYs) stored in secured and protected underground caverns where the radioactivity is isolated and contained. As opposed to coal, which spreads radioactivity all over the place or fossil fuels which release massive amounts of greenhouse gasses. Isn't it better to make a very small, unused area really dirty compared to making large swathes of used and inhabited lands only kind of dirty? And in those thousand years that we are storing the nuclear waste we may come up with technology that can reuse that waste for some other purpose.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The GP is correct. Solar farms are a pretty dense energy source - comparable (when the reservoir is included) to all but the highest head dams, and an order of magnitude or two more than a typical dam. And some designs can get even more dense, such as linear fresnel reflectors (which cover a higher percentage of the ground because of less issues with self-shading as the sun moves). Plus, solar can be paired with wind. Wind is a low energy density source with respect to total acreage, but very high with respect to actual surface area required on the ground.
Beyond this, a few notes. Much solar doesn't have to take up any new land at all, as one notes from rooftop solar (ideally industrual/commercial), parking shelters/covered walkways, etc. And places where solar plants are made are most typically desert areas. And there's a curious reversal in the desert when it comes to life: while shading terrain hinders life in moist areas, it encourages life in desert areas. In the desert, places that provide shade (ironwood trees, saguaro cacti, large rocks, etc) tend to turn into oases of life - not simply by providing relief from the blazing sun, but slowing down the rate of water loss from the soil. Now, this doesn't usually happen with solar plants because at this stage, most are kept cleared. But that does not have to be the case.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Just the sheer amount of deaths per terawatt caused by nuclear power should make people rethink it. Nothing even comes close.
You mean that whopping number of ZERO?
You're right. Pretty much everything out there has a higher death count than nuclear, even when taken individually. So you're right. Nothing even comes close.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
sheer amount of deaths per terawatt
Compared to coal mining?
Why even bother screwing up the desert when we have millions of perfectly-good unused rooftops to fill up with panels first?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
About 3 Ivanpah power stations ($2.2 billion), which produces about 1/10th the amount of power of this new plant. So this new nuclear plant represents about a 3X increase in output-per-dollar spent on construction - and the power costs about 1/10th as much as well, meaning over a 40 year lifespan, the nuclear plant will produce it's power for $78 billion less than Ivanpah.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Someone on Reddit already ran these numbers. For the money spent on this nuclear plant after it was stopped/restarted/held up by red tape/hit by NIMBY BS/etc, you could build enough solar to power 274,000 homes; a fraction of what the nuclear option provided. You also have to consider how much area that much solar or wind would cover and the impacts to the local environment and wildlife. Finally, there's the death toll. Both solar and wind power - per kWH generated - cause more human deaths than nuclear power. And I don't believe any of this considers actual power generation vs nameplate generation. That solar plant is going to generate roughly 30% of what it's slated peak output suggests due to weather, night time, etc. In the US, we run our nuclear power plants at about ~93% with the remaining time lost to maintenance, refueling, etc.
In other words, your "renewables" cost several times as much even with all the red tape thrown in nuclear's path, they generate far less power, they kill more humans, have a much greater environmental impact, and basically just fucking suck in every comparison. When we're talking about solar, the panel construction requires all kinds of horrifically toxic stuff to be put together. Both wind and solar require huge amounts of batteries; also a toxic mess. Reprocessing nuclear fuel cuts the waste down to almost nothing. A family of four that has their entire lives powered from birth to death by nuclear will be responsible for nuclear waste that fits in a Coke can. And once you're reusing the high-energy waste products, almost everything that's left is so low-energy it poses no significant risk.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."