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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.
[...] has a net output of 1.117 GWe.
Damn. So close. How will I get back to 1984?
PLEASE NO. The future is renewable solar, wind and geothermal.
This thing should totally meltdown. Jet fuel makes steel framed, rebar reinforced concrete buildings turn to dust, we now know, thanks to fake TV news. ae911truth dot org
Wikipedia: âoeThe AP1000 ... is a pressurized water reactor with improved use of passive nuclear safety.â Ha ha. Passive safety means, if there is a reactor issue, the passive systems are expected to stop the reaction and cool the core. What is never said is that, even assuming it all works as expected, this is only a very short term process; longer term requires active measures to be taken. The problem is that after shut down the core still holds a very large amount of heat â" and still generates it. So you must cool it, for a long time (months). Eg, when all the systems failed at Fukushima, they needed to bring in trucks to pump seawater into the reactors, and this took a lot longer to set up than planned. Nuclear reactor safety is very hard. If you take a very small number (chance of a disaster) and a very large number (cost in human lives) and multiply then to get âoeexpected cost of disasterâ, is the result really meaningful? In theory, practice is the same as theory; in practice itâ(TM)s not.
Westinghouse AP1000 Nuclear Reactor Starts Generating Power
Well that IS what it's suppose to do. As opposed to what? Whistle, "I'm a little tea pot..."?
we would need 20 of those for the region i live in, let alone the whole country
Generation of power always needs to meet demand. You need baseline power plus on demand power from a reliable source. You need to adapt to changing power demands with a variable source. 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. Most "green" power sources increase carbon emissions because they need a fast on natural gas power source to balance out their variable power.
China: "Thanks for the nuclear reactor IP, we'll take it from here."
Nine years! It took five years to build Hoover Dam, and that was in the early 1930's.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Hello
"Framatome said the unit had been connected to the grid at 5:59 pm local time."
And they probably did it on a friday afternoon too!
What type of engineers are those!
Cyrille
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.
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)
You need baseline power
Imagine this song without a decent baseline.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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.
Fast Acting.... you mean like a massive battery connected to a wind farm?
https://www.teslarati.com/tesl...
https://www.news.com.au/techno...
http://www.abc.net.au/news/201...
Have a nice day.
"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?
But not really wrong. The taxpayer will generally give a loan for the plant, subsidise the production, etc....insurance is covered under the Price-Anderson-Act in the US although the cynic in me would surmise it would fail today and the taxpayer would have to cover it again.
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
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.
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.
Sunny days. Man, if there was just some method to get power from the sun. Better go tell German power engineers, as the idea that there may be windless or sunless days has never occurred to them, or that power generating capacity needs to be spread across a grid - same as it is for coal or nuclear power.
Why go to all the power of inventing huge batteries that don't store enough power when nature has provided an extremely efficient one in the form of radioactive material?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
It's "only" a matter of price.
Run! Run to the hills!
[fiddles with earpiece] Oh, apparently it's meant to do that. Carry on, folks.
After the break, woman prevented from boarding with her emotional support crocodile sues airline.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Generation of power always needs to meet demand.
True! (well, to a first order approximation)
You need baseline power plus on demand power from a reliable source.
False! (well, the first half is false) You need enough "on demand power [generation ability]" and/or enough demand response ability to ensure supply meets demand. None of that generation ability need be "baseline," commonly called base load.
Most "green" power sources increase carbon emissions because they need a fast on natural gas power source to balance out their variable power.
False! (with no caveats whatsoever; this is just plain wrong and OP has no source to verify it)
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Not all are owned by private companies. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A4W_reactor
Baseline power doesn't need to be nuclear. It can be geothermal, it can be hydroelectric.
It's also something of a myth, since battery storage can solve and even out wind and solar. Hydroelectric is basically a large battery of potential energy, and you can use the same strategy to create an artificial reservoir and any other water source (eg desalinized water) for both energy and potable water. You just create two reservoirs, and pump reservoir 2 back into 1 using your other energy sources, and run everything off the generation station for reservoir 1. That's not efficient in general, which is why we run it off rain/glacial water, but that may be end result once global warming destroys those as energy sources, and have to be turned into batteries.
Or a better one in the form of Hydroelectric power.
I did the 3D drafting work on those panelboards and switchboards for those 4 plants in China.
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)
How do you charge that extremely efficient battery?
Why go through all the effort of fission when nature has put a massive fission reactor in the sky?
In the ideal case renewable plus storage should meet baseline and peaking demand most of the time. Backup should also be able to meet total demand, but since it's not delivering any demand most of the time it's by definition not baseline. The whole concept of baseline doesn't really make sense any more once you get the amount of storage necessary to make say 95% renewable work. It will be an archaic and useless term.
Of course we have no technology to economically create that much storage currently.
Because the safety of nuclear power plants is too expensive. And they are centralized energy sources.
Ha. Haha. Hahahahaha. Oh how cute, someone else has drunk the Tesla kool aid.
The Finnish EPR construction started in 2005, and it was supposed to be fin{1,2}ished in 2009. The current estimate is that it might be completed in 2019 and become the second most expensive building in world history.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Wiki for the reactor says "The design is intended to passively remove heat for 72 hours, after which its gravity drain water tank must be topped up for as long as cooling is required."
In other words our passive system is actually active but with great marketing.
(A corner case where everything before the 'but' matters greatly.)
From an economic standpoint, I'm ok with China having this IP.
They deserve it.
Hopefully because the rest of the world has done little to improve this technology and perhaps they will figure out a way to make it safe.
Hopefully not because it raises the odds that the next event will be far away.
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.
The last one you're definitely wrong- The Yucca Mountain facility was constructed with taxes collected under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, and the fund has an unspent balance of $46,000,000,000- and that's with construction at Yucca complete! Other posters have pointed out that there's really a lot of usable energy left in that 'spent' fuel. As I understand it, the current economics of Uranium mining don't justify the capital expense to restart spent fuel reprocessing in the United States, but it works just fine for Japan and France.
Since you're wrong there, the rest of your statements require re-examination. Beyond that, if we're going to use subsidies to set and direct energy policy, nuclear has several significant advantages over solar and wind- not the least of which is that it makes power on demand!
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Are you saying Hydro (e.g. pumped storage with pumping powered by Solar) isn't "green"?
No, it's not really green. Greener than fossil fuels, for sure, but dams have a massive carbon footprint and a massive ecological footprint.
Concrete production is one of the most CO2 intensive activities that humans undertake. Dams take a massive amount of concrete to build.
Damming a river also changes the environment substantially, and can also release a lot of CO2. If you drown all the vegetation for miles, all that stored carbon is released as it decomposes. The new lake can also speed decomposition of anything that ends up in it, whereas it might decompose a lot slower if it was somewhere dry.
Granted, the CO2 release is most intense during the construction and first few years of a dam's life, but during that time dams do directly generate a lot of CO2.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Take the entire annual output of Tesla's gigafactory. Dedicate it 100% to batteries for storage for Shanghai. Charge it completely. And you can run Shanghai for about 3 hours.
It's one thing to provide a few minutes' backup in a tiny-consumption area, it's a completely different thing to be useful in a modern large city.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
For many governments, hydro is not renewable and is not considered green. Sad but true!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Where can you get electricity for $0.02/kWh? We pay about 12X that here in California, and in Germany and Denmark they pay upwards of 20X that price...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Depends what you define a private company then.
The EDF is only a private company on paper in so far that it is a stock company, its mostly owned by the french state. And the new reactor in China is cough cough owned to 30% by EDF. See: https://www.edf.fr/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"Power on demand" - i.e., peaking, comes mainly from hydro and combustion (gas) turbine units. Steam-cycle systems like nuclear don't like rapid changes and are therefore best when brought online and left at full load for extended periods.
Concrete production is one of the most CO2 intensive activities that humans undertake. Dams take a massive amount of concrete to build.
I always like these excessive generalizations. Ever heard of an earth-filled dam?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
How high is the baseline in relation to peek at your place? In percentage of peak?
Most "green" power sources increase carbon emissions because they need a fast on natural gas power source to balance out their variable power.
Obviously nonsense. Except you pair your fast reacting gas plant with a nuke. But what we are doing is replacing a coal plant with wind and solar. The coal plant needs the same gas plant the solar and wind farm needs, there is no extra CO2, there is only saved CO2 from getting rid of the coal plant.
Actually a no brainer, no idea why you write nonsense like above.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Vogtle is being built by a private energy company consortium, with some state loans, but that's because the major issue with such large timescale projects is the loan rate variability and loan size can kill the project. Similar issues with hydroelectric.
you need a cooling system for times when you can't immediately use that energy. Like say some big load suddenly goes offline and it takes time for the reactor to reduce its heat output
Could a reactor faced with a sudden significant reduction in load dump excess electric power into a football field-sized battery comparable to Tesla's Hornsdale Energy Reserve?
Why go to all the power of inventing huge batteries that don't store enough power when nature has provided an extremely efficient one in the form of radioactive material?
Off the top of my head? Because the byproducts of releasing the energy from that battery is insanely fucking toxic and radioactive?
Not railing against nukes or anything- I'm a pro-nuke person, myself... But acting like nuclear waste isn't a big fucking problem doesn't advance the cause anymore than a kid sticking his fingers in his ears and screaming "lalalalala" gets him out of doing his homework.
Thank god nature did no such thing.
I'm quite sure the sun's mass in any fissile material would instantly collapse into some kind of barely-if-at-all luminous ultra-dense not-life-friendly ball of spinning death.
You keep posting this, over and over and over again.
Why must it be done at once? Transitions can be slow, ya?
As you bring up more renewables, you bring up battery storage for them.
Concrete production is one of the most CO2 intensive activities that humans undertake. Dams take a massive amount of concrete to build.
I hate this argument.
It's not wrong, so who can argue it, right?
But *everything* takes concrete. Windmills. Nuclear plants. Coal plants.
When comparing a dam, which takes a massive amount of concrete, and also kills a bunch of vegetation as a steep initial CO2 cost- against a coal plant, which also takes a massive amount of concrete, and also kills a bunch (though less) of vegetation as a steep initial CO2 cost... and then continues pumping out the amount of CO2 it took to build the dam every 12 days... is fucking ridiculous.
In any valid comparison, a dam is 00ff00. It's green as fuck.
There, I have now doubled the number of times that "France" has been mentioned in a discussion that includes extravagant statements about the unaffordability of nuclear power, how it only survives by huge subsidies.
None of these people ever explain how France has not gone broke, relying on it for 75% of power generation for over 40 years. The power utility has separate books, so you're presumably including a vast nuclear-wing conspiracy to steal trillions from French taxpayers, decade after decade, right-wing and left-wing governments alike keeping the dread secret... of the money smuggled over to the electrical utility to fake up a profit.
Or we could go with Occam's and figure they really produce power with nukes at about a mid-range price for Europe, far cheaper than Germany and Belgium:
https://1-stromvergleich.com/e...
As for safety and all that, this is France, fercrissake; they take to the streets in crowds of black masks, smashing windows, in support of disgruntled train drivers: ...so I really think they would have called their government on the malfeasance if there had been any with nuclear reactors.
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
It totally blows me away how aggressively Americans preserve their lack of interest in other countries. The fact that something worked somewhere else never makes any impression on them. Everybody else has universal health insurance? Still can't actually work. (On the right.) France runs the country on nukes since Disco was cool? It's still technically and financially impossible. (On the left.)
It's about scale. How many gigafactories will be needed to bring it up slowly? If you need one factory for 4 years for just one city for half a day, and you have hundreds of such cities, then how long do we plan to take to build out that battery infrastructure, just to run these cities for a few hours?
Do the math for, say, Germany. Each German uses about 7000 KWh per year. There are 83 million Germans. The Gigafactory can make 35 GWh of batteries per year. Do the math for say, 1 day backup (19 kWh per German). You need about 45 Gigafactory-years of output to support that. And that is just for Germany for one day.
Batteries don't make sense on a large scale at all.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Concrete production is one of the most CO2 intensive activities that humans undertake. Dams take a massive amount of concrete to build.
What is the emission in that scenario that wouldn't also be there for any other solution?
So, Nuclear power stations are built using only, what, wood, with no concrete at all?
If you're bored, go look up how much concrete is used in a wind turbine footing and compare it to how much is used for a dam or nuclear power plant. Wind turbines are far greener than either of those, by a long shot. And they tend to have much smaller environmental footprints. The downside, of course, is that they can't really function as baseline, at least not without storage or country-scale distribution networks.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
No, they use more concrete than dams. This seems like something that anyone who has ever seen a nuclear power plant or a picture of one should know.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
You're certainly right that building a huge ass dam isn't as green as building turbines, but when someone argues that it's not green, I think they do it a disservice by not amortizing that CO2 cost over the life of the dam. That is to say, generally people arguing that have a sales pitch against dams and are trying to make them look worse than they are.
And when you compare the concrete costs MW to MW vs. turbines, is it truly so bad?
How is this design better than other designs. What are the advantages / disadvantages?
Keep in mind that Fukushima is the gift that keeps giving. I personally feel that the Japanese did a good job of managing that mess. But it is a mess to which no one has a solution. They have a core which is in the ground and radioactive water going into the Pacific. Anyone have a good approach to resolving this mess?
Maybe there is a lot of radio - iso's in the ocean and maybe they will be highly diluted. But the fact remains that there is no end in sight. The Japanese government is funding along with various companies ways to solve various bits of the puzzle. But no sign of a clear solution as of yet.
I am not pro / con - but I would like to know more about this design.
Mr. President, the Chinese are opening a Coal Gap with us! It's a matter of National Security! We must not allow a Coal Gap with the Reds!!
"I'm on it!"
Where are these 'hundreds of cities the size of Shanghai' ?
Those costs are already included in the battery costs you idiot. Or do you think Musk just gives away batteries for free, like you think he does with Teslas. Recycling those batteries after many many years, much longer than nuke fuel, would just make the next round of batteries even cheaper. No need to mine all that stuff again.
So go change the wiki article if you think nuclear has no maintenance, planned or otherwise. And they don't shut them down when their cooling reservoir gets too hot, ie every summer in some places.
Or you could just look up availability factor and learn what it actually means, instead of what you think it means.
Westinghouse got the business, GE is selling itself off like a scrap dealer!
Life is in a state of dynamic equilibrium, it both blows and sucks
Why don't we mitigate climate change with both nuclear AND renewables? Enough of the camps that want it all one way or the other. We have to hedge our bets anyway.
Do the math for, say, Germany. Each German uses about 7000 KWh per year. There are 83 million Germans. The Gigafactory can make 35 GWh of batteries per year. Do the math for say, 1 day backup (19 kWh per German).
Foolishness. You don't ever need 24 continuous hours of backup, and the more distributed, a.k.a. the more renewable your power harvesting is, the less you need. If you have 9 kW of solar panels on your roof (nameplate capacity), you need just 2 Tesla Powerwall 2s to have continuous backup power for a week of American power consumption, which is 40% higher than German consumption (33 kWh per day). For $13,500 installed, available now. That's a week with zero grid input, average. It could be months, depending on weather.
In any case, we (a global we) have years. We have decades to install more and more batteries, solar panels, and windmills, and there's every reason to believe it will happen. The current multibillion dollar investments in existing power generation is not going to go away overnight. Only Germany and Japan are foolish enough to shut down perfectly good nuclear reactors with a decade of operational life left, nevermind all the existing installed coal plants. The grid mix is going to change and is changing, but it will not be rapid, globally, no matter how dire IPCC predictions get.
80%-90% is taxes.
From the other side, coal can't shut down or start fast enough for overnight off peak times when less power is needed. So they often have to pay people to take the coal power no one wants because it's too slow to shut down overnight and turn on again the next day.
Well of course, if you and Lynnwood are using your own definitions of availability that don't match everyone elses. It's easy to pretend to be right.