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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 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.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
Fuck you. If it weren't for assholes like you we would have had thorium reactors by now.
You sound like you know what you are talking about.
Sincerely,
Dunning and Kruger
As deployment of solar and wind increases, so do electricity prices. How much more do you want to pay for electricity?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Damming rivers is an environmental disaster.
Believe it or not, some governments don't consider hydro a renewable.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
To add to what you say: it's amazing how many problems can be solved when energy is cheap and plentiful. Water purification from the ocean suddenly becomes economical. At a higher energy level, transmuting lead to gold becomes economical. That's a lot of energy, but if you can transform between elements, a lot of the problems of living on Mars go away.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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...
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)
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."
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 it is extremely hard, as there is very little direct matter contact in space, so you cannot use convection or conduction as your means of temperature regulation. You are stuck with emitted radiation as your only real means of keeping cool.
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.
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.
There are more precise explanations, but I'll try to put it in layman's terms;
Space is mostly empty and thus NOT good at transferring heat.
This is why a vacuum flask works:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Heat can be thought of atoms vibrating with more or less energy depending on how 'hot' things are. If you want to cool something down, a good way to do it is to put these energetic atoms in contact with others 'cool' ones which have less energy. Put ice in hot water and energy levels out.
In space, there is nothing to transfer to, so you have to irradiate (using radiators)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Getting very cold is not trivial, and can be problematic:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news...
"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?
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.
2AU lol, that's still pretty close kiddo. Try Pluto, or deep space.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
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.
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.
Nice maths, shame that an AP1000 produces over 1000MW of power needing 1000 times the radiator area or 100 million square metres, which works out at an 11km diameter radiator. Oh dear...
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)
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.
Why can't I run an AP1000 in deep space?
It's design assumes gravity.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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.
At current consumption, we have 90 years's worth of uranium ore around. We expect to find more, because there's got to be more.
Imagine ramping up from 20GW to 200GW of electricity production by nuclear in the US, and similarly around the world. 9 years's worth of uranium ore.
I'm not certain the known uranium resource is enough to power our current electricity consumption for one full year.
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Power plants need to reject heat into their environment in order to function. PWRs typically do this with a nearby river or cooling canals. Here's a few facts.
1. PWRs are about 35% efficient. This means that to generate 1.117GW, we need about 3.3GW of heat.
2. Thermodynamics says that you would need to radiate away this heat. If you do not radiate enough heat out of the system, you will lose your temperature gradient which is what does the work and turns the turbines.
3. Shedding energy via radiation is the least efficient way to do so.
4. For comparison, the Space Shuttle radiators were about 40m^2 and rejected about 70kW.
A quick back of the envelope calculation suggests that you would need a radiator 1.4km on a side to radiate enough heat.
( 3.3 GW / 70 kW ) * 40m^2 = 1,885,714m^2
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Don't even need to play the sound - just driving a couple strategically placed T-posts into the stream bed can do wonders for creating the sound cheaply and reliably. There's a team in... Oregon(?) that's had great luck preventing beavers from damning culverts and flooding out mountain roads simply by driving posts just downstream from the culvert.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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/...
Sorry mate but that is utter horseshit. The fundamentals to keeping nuclear reactors under control are ludicrously simple, the safety scenario even simpler. A nuclear reactor is not a complex system. A dangerous one, a large one, but far from complex.
But since you pointed out three specific things:
Chernobyl: there was no fundamental misunderstanding of the risks when designing the Chernobyl reactor. It had a working safety system. Someone purposely disabled it and it got listed as operator error. This is also something that since the 90s operators are no longer capable of doing.
Sellafield: I don't know why you would list this one with the others. It was a reactor poorly designed, with engineering problems ignored, operating in a way never intended with a design that wouldn't be considered for power. So quite irrelevant in discussions of nuclear safety. It belongs more in a list of nuclear accidents for weapons research.
Fukushima: The fundamentals of the safety here were also well understood and considering the disaster which preceded it things went exceptionally well.
Now as bad as that sounds you just listed 3 incidents that predated fundamental movements of process safety. In the rest of the industry you can find thousands more such incidents with some common trends that the nuclear industry shares: The accidents decreased over the years as plants were built and the processes governing our fundamental understanding of safety improved. Key words such as management of change, abnormal operating risk assessment, and inherently safer designs are common place across all process and energy sectors these days, concepts which didn't actually exist when these plants were built.
Now with the benefit of 50 years of development in the process safety area we have reactor designs such as the AP1000 where you're simply not able to recreate incidents of Fukushima and Chernobyl with a focus on inherently safer processes and passive cooling. Designs in the nuclear industry as well as the entire process sector have over the years changed from relying on expert operation, to assuming everyone out there is an idiot and to not rely on any kind of expert knowledge.
The key thing there: The process industry without it's paperwork has developed faster and safety than the nuclear industry did. Bureaucracy doesn't just add cost and complexity, it is literally able to hold back progress in an industry.
Oceans.
Currently there are 4.5 billion tons of uranium in the world's seawater at any given time. This is renewed via erosion. Obviously it's an economics issue for recovering metal from seawater, but folks are already working on it. U.S. Energy Department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory already is using acrylic fiber (basically yarn) to harvest. They estimate it'll be similar in costs to land mining, and you can reuse the fibers for other purposes. There's also other less efficient stuff, mostly developed from seawater gold harvesting. So, yes, hilariously, nuclear power is sustainable and renewable. Go figure.
We could outpace seawater uranium mining, but it'd take about a thousand years. This ignores the world's thorium reserves. There's 2 or 3 billion tons of that around too. If we can't figure out fusion within a couple thousand years, we have other issues.
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.)
>> Whistle, "I'm a little tea pot..."?
It actually IS a giant teapot.
aaaaaaa
What about artificial gravity?
Let us just cut to the chase and say this, it's a stupid idea. Any fuel you are using for the reactor you would be using as fuel for the space craft and your cooling problems would go away and you could still draw electrical power from an atomic engine in space.
Actually this is the one use of nuclear power I support, in space. Using the spent fuel from our reactor stock in space as engines for space craft that never return to the surface of the earth is probably the best use of these materials.
None of that is going to involve wasting time taking a AP1000 into space because why would you need the mass of thousands of tons of concrete shielding in space? You could simply have the core shielded from impacts and not worry about the radiation because space is already full of that. Why would you use water as a coolant when you have lead. Why would you use a one through configuration when space *IS* the place you would use a breeder reactor.
This is what you would do. You 'reactor' would be the core power component of your engine, you may have smaller reactors on board as auxiliary power or even auxiliary engines. The 'rEngine' for reactor-engine would be the same base elements used in a breeder because if you have the materials it would be handy to create your next batch of fuel in the engine to zip around the solar system in. Now all the energy you were trying to dissipate in space becomes energy to push you along. I even have a rough design for this engine.
So, all up, an AP1000 in space is a waste of fuel - there are much better ways to do the same thing and solve other problems along the way.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.