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Westinghouse AP1000 Nuclear Reactor Starts Generating Power (world-nuclear-news.org)
Longtime Slashdot reader TopSpin writes: The Sanmen 1 nuclear reactor in Zhejiang, China, has been synchronized to the power grid and is generating power. The reactor has been under construction for nine years and became the first AP1000 in the world to achieve criticality on June 21, 2018. The AP1000 design received final design certification from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2005 and has a net output of 1.117 GWe. Three other AP1000 reactors are under construction in China at the Sanmen and Haiyang sites and two reactors are under construction in the U.S. at the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia. On June 29, the Taishan 1 reactor became the first Areva Evolutionary Power Reactor (EPR) design to generate power. Four EPR reactors are under construction in Finland, France, and China.
Please yes. None of those work in space far away from the sun. We have to figure out this nuke thing better than we have if we're ever going to be an interstellar species. Possibly even if we want to be much of an interplanetary species.
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Fuck you. If it weren't for assholes like you we would have had thorium reactors by now.
Damming rivers is an environmental disaster.
I imagine there was a lot less regulatory red tape back in the 1930's than there is today.
Meanwhile the USA is betting on coal.
The USA will soon be a footnote in history.
No sig today...
There's a big difference between "not adequate" and "useless".
Eg, "sunshine is useless because you can't get a suntan at night" is effectively what you just said.
Solar is working just fine 2AU away from the sun, thanks. Opportunity and Spirit lasted way longer than designed and ran off of solar from so far away.
The real trick, boss, is power efficiency.
Learn to make shit efficiently. That includes your goddamned code.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Yes, you're wrong. Governments haven't built reactors for a very long time in the west, all are built and owned by private companies.
"Variable power from "green" sources (wind, solar) is useless if it can't be stored and released, or balanced by fast acting sources like natural gas or hydro power."
Are you saying Hydro (e.g. pumped storage with pumping powered by Solar) isn't "green"?
What is the emission in that scenario that wouldn't also be there for any other solution?
No reactor has ever been built that wasn't massively subsidized by taxpayers. Subsidies for construction, subsidies for security, subsidies for insurance, subsidizes for decommissioning - and that's before the ultimate subsidy, storing the waste for millennia on the taxpayer's dime.
Laughable. Nuclear power is by far the most expensive power source ever invented by man - it costs too damn much (and too damn long) to build, to secure, to maintain, to decommission, and to store the waste for millennia. You can build out wind and solar power in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost with none of the safety issues. And all the FUD against wind and solar can be addressed by technology that's already in use for coal and nuclear power plants - like pumped storage facilities.
Variable like your nuclear power plant going down for planned (or worse, unplanned) maintenance, blowing a megawatt-sized hole in your power grid? Sometimes for years at a time?
All the FUD aimed at wind and solar can easily be addressed by tech used to back up coal and nuclear power plants - like pumped storage. If a large hydrostatic battery is good enough for nuclear, it's good enough for a wind farm.
2AU lol, that's still pretty close kiddo. Try Pluto, or deep space.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
>Current estimate is 2019. Mostly due to government constantly moving the regulatory requirements endlessly to try and greenwash themselves.
ftfy.
safety is expensive
Safety is not expensive. Paperwork is expensive. Safety is achieved by implimenting off the shelf components and in the nuclear industry it is done with cookie cutter designs. Then we throw millions of dollars of worthless paperwork at it.
Add a zero to the price for certifications when a similar part is used on a nuclear submarine.
Funny how the pro-nuke faction always overlooks that there is not enough Uranium to make nuclear power long-term sustainable.
Where did you get this idea? That we say there's 40-70 years of reserves?
That means 'identified and located reserves' It takes effort to find Uranium mines. Effort means money. When they've located enough Uranium for the next several decades, they stop looking. When we stumble on more doing other things, or when we're down to 30 years 'reserve' , then the companies involved go and look for more. Bam! Years of reserves go back up again. Not to mention it might be possible to economically extract uranium from seawater. Some folks at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory just found a way to extract yellowcake from seawater with a method that's cost competitive with mining. If that holds, then current nuclear technology is effectively unlimited by fuel.
Surfing around a bit I found we've got some 100 years of uranium available at current prices. Even if that's all the Uranium that exists on the earth, isn't 4 generations of electricity a worth while investment?
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I now wonder what is the comparison with mining the raw materials to make all those wind turbine blades and solar panels,
Wind turbines are made mostly out of metal and fiberglass. Solar panels are made out of decreasing amounts of rare earths, which you can typically get from quite close to the surface. Uranium mining is strip mining massive areas.
Then there is an army of techs necessary to climb those towers and maintain the equipment in the generator room of those wind turbines,
Nope. Wind turbines require very little maintenance, especially modern ones whose blades can be fully stalled so that they don't even have to use the brake to slow the turbine. And they are now being inspected by drone, which further cuts the labor. The drones are actually autonomous now, but due to FAA regulations you still have to have a licensed pilot/spotter. A friend of mine runs a drone inspection company.
Solar is probably less maintenance intensive, but can only generate a limited number of hours per day. Right now we have few ways to store generated power, so that situation isn't ideal either.
We could have been building cost-effective battery banks ever since the invention of MPPT.
I have trouble believing that that one method is greatly superior to the others, save that coal is a huge polluter that doesn't have its full costs figured in, because nobody in fact actually cleans up all that pollution.
A similar objection applies to nuclear; the actual costs are always vastly in excess of the estimated costs, in large part because decommissioning always costs multiples of the estimate. And then there's the fact that there is literally no productive nuclear reactor ever made by man whose waste has been rendered harmless...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There's no accounting for the CO2 released from installing turbines. They have a massive concrete base,
You mean like a nuclear reactor?
and 2 km x 8 m of roadbed that is also a chunk of destroyed ecosystem losing carbon into the atmosphere.
They don't put them in the middle of thriving ecosystems, because that would be inconvenient. They put them in places which are already cleared by fire or agriculture, so that they are easy to access. They also gang them together, so while the initial access road is long, the roads between turbines are not. And finally, all types of power plant require an access road.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Nuclear power is by far the most expensive power source ever invented by man
Virtually everything you spouted off about is incorrect. The only reason nuclear power is so expensive is because a bunch of smelly hippies and other do gooders that didn't bother to research the science decided to protest everything with the word "nuclear" in the name. Medicine, power, fisson, and fussion, both practical and theoretical.
It takes to long to build because, thanks to hippies, it takes years, decades, to get permits. We have to store the waste, on site, because a bunch of bong smoking hippies decided that shipping the waste to recycling facilities was to unsafe. Which it isn't. We can't reprocess the waste because of this silly restriction.
If its so expensive to build and use then why is China building them? China would have no problem just tossing up a cheap coal plant and walking away. China can do it because they didn't have a bunch of idiots protesting the plant.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Funny how the pro-nuke faction always overlooks that there is not enough Uranium to make nuclear power long-term sustainable.
Incorrect. There is plenty of nuclear fuel available, not all of it has be uranium. There over 80% of unspent fuel available in the "spent" fuel rods just sitting around at plants. The reason we can't reclaim this uranium and reuse it is because anti nuke kooks decided that it was unsafe to do so.
Virtually every problem with nuclear power is man made, because of anti nuclear kooks that didn't understand anything more than the bong they where smoking out of.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.