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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.
Not the very near future;
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-22/wind-turbines-take-a-break-just-as-hot-weather-hits-europe
Nine years! It took five years to build Hoover Dam, and that was in the early 1930's.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It is, actually. It's a huge problem.
Space may be cold but that makes no difference because you can't use convection or conduction.
OTOH if you're actively cooling your reactor then there's something wrong, you're throwing energy away.
No sig today...
Nuclear power with its massive cost overruns is so expensive that no private investors will touch it, only governments will build reactors. (correct me if I am wrong)
Damming rivers is an environmental disaster.
A lot of rivers will always have dams because the flooding that comes if you don't can be a literal disaster.
Incorrect, building in a floodplain is the cause of the disaster, not the lack of a dam. In fact, if you want to restore large parts of the ecosystem, relocating towns away from floodplains and reinstalling beavers to better regulate the flow rate of rivers than we currently do with concrete dams by slowing the water down so that more water gets absorbed into the groundwater table and allows for more habitat for wildlife that man made dams don't allow for.
Because of course you want to give up the most valuable and productive farm land AND the greenest source of base load power because of some river fish. Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Let them. Maybe in a couple of decades, after we figure out that wind and solar alone aren’t going to cut it and nukes are the only other carbon neutral option we have, we can buy cheaper, better plants from the Chinese. Perhaps even a viable thorium reactor from India.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
That's one of the reasons why China is pushing hard to be the world leader in battery manufacturing, the other being automotive demand.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
China is also betting its future on coal -- the government there is planning to produce between 1TW and 1.25TW of electricity annually from coal, about half their increased electricity production target, by 2025. That will mean burning about 3 billion tonnes of coal a year, roughly the amount they're burning right now but in more modern, more efficient and less polluting power stations. The CO2 produced will still be dumped into the atmosphere though.
They're aiming have 300GW of installed nuclear power operational by 2030 although that target might be missed. They're bringing five or six reactors a year on-line, each about 1GW net of non-carbon electricity (the Taishan1 EPR produces 1.6GW net but they may not build any more of them after finishing the other EPR at Taishan).
The current "wars for oil" is at about $8T. How does that compare with atomic energy?
At two cents a KWh the sales of electric cars start to go through the roof. But "cheap" oil (externalized costs) and high electric rates strongly favor oil-powered transportation.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)