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.

Comments

Re:Renewable needs baseline + storage to be effect

[John Da' Baddest]

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.

Baseload Bullshit

[Uberbah]

You need to adapt to changing power demands with a variable source.

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.

Re:NO NUKES

[jez9999]

2AU lol, that's still pretty close kiddo. Try Pluto, or deep space.

Re:Not Enough!

[drinkypoo]

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...