Westinghouse AP1000 Nuclear Reactor Starts Generating Power (world-nuclear-news.org)

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Westinghouse AP1000 Nuclear Reactor Starts Generating Power (world-nuclear-news.org)

Posted by BeauHD on Sunday July 1, 2018 @02:44PM from the better-late-than-never dept.

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.

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Not Enough! by R3d+M3rcury · 2018-07-01 14:48 · Score: 5, Funny

[...] has a net output of 1.117 GWe.
Damn. So close. How will I get back to 1984?
1. Re:Not Enough! by zamboni1138 · 2018-07-01 15:24 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  It's 2018 kid, you can buy plutonium at your corner 7-11. Or, you know, the internet.
2. Re:Not Enough! by nojayuk · 2018-07-01 19:59 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  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).
3. Re: Not Enough! by Applehu+Akbar · 2018-07-02 00:29 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  No the US free market is choosing wind
  No, the subsidy farming market is choosing wind.
4. Re:Not Enough! by rally2xs · 2018-07-02 00:54 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  "Nuclear plants release around 100g of CO2/kWh, much better than coal but also much worse than wind and solar."
  Lessee, that's 1 Kg / 10 KwH, 100 Kg per MwH, and 100,000 Kg / GwH. Where is the rail transport to bring enough carbon to the nuclear reactor to release 100,000 Kg of carbon dioxide for every hour of operation of a 1 Gw nuke? I don't normally see rail transport to nuke plants. They trucking it in, or what? Where is it combined with oxygen, what process within nuclear power generation has that happening?
  Perhaps the calculation is for the workers in uranium mining driving to work each day, as if they wouldn't drive to some other work if they weren't mining uranium. Someone inputting tons and tons of carbon into the uranium enrichment process for use in nuclear fuel? Where is this carbon in the nuclear generation cycle?
5. Re:Not Enough! by AmiMoJo · 2018-07-02 01:51 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Yes, it's the total emissions including all the mining and fuel transport and storage and air conditioning for the control room etc. etc.
  Don't take my word for it though, ask the IPCC: https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assess...
  Page 1335. Lifecycle emissions. Depending on who you ask and what measurement you use, Nuclear is at best about the same as Wind, but it depends a lot on where it is and where the fuel comes from and where the waste ends up.
  
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6. Re:Not Enough! by drinkypoo · 2018-07-02 02:09 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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...
  
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7. Re:Not Enough! by drinkypoo · 2018-07-02 03:07 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  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.
  
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8. Re:Not Enough! by Smidge204 · 2018-07-02 04:49 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  OK, but we need very little uranium, in comparison to other ways of generating electricity.
  I'd say nuclear power uses quite a lot more Uranium in comparison to other ways of generating electricity, considering those other ways don't use any Uranium at all...
  According to the World Nuclear Association, nuclear power consumes about 200 tons of Uranium oxide per GWe per year.
  
  I now wonder what is the comparison with mining the raw materials to make all those wind turbine blades and solar panels, as well as the fossil fuel it takes to ship / truck them all over the place for their installation?
  Probably not nearly as much as the environmental impact of uranium mining and enrichment. Mining uranium is an ongoing process that produces thousands of tons of radioactive and hazardous waste in the form of mine tailings before it even gets to the enrichment plant.
  Solar panels are made primarily from silicon, which is refined from sand and quartz rock. While not all sources of quartz are created equal, it's not exactly hard to come by. Right now there is no method of recycling solar PV panels since there is no economic benefit to figuring out how, and there's not a lot of scrapped PV panels piling up causing a problem: Panels installed decades ago are only recently reaching their natural end of life, and panels produced today have output warranties of 30+ years... so in practical terms they will probably outlive the people who bought them.
  For wind turbines, the blades are typically made of carbon and/or glass fiber composites. (Carbon fiber is potentially renewable though AFAIK current industrial scale production relies on petroleum.) The pillars are steel, and the bases are steel and concrete.
  
  Then there is an army of techs necessary to climb those towers and maintain the equipment in the generator room of those wind turbines, and those guys burn gasoline to get to those wind machines.
  Unless they use electric vehicles, which would make a lot of sense since they would literally be surrounded by renewable energy sources. And as far as I know, there is no legal limit on how much exposure to a wind turbine nacelle you're allowed in a year.
  
  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.
  The "baseload power" argument has been bunk for almost a decade now. Turns out that utility companies from all over the world, who are responsible for maintaining the stability and reliability of the electrical grids within and between their jurisdictions, are keenly aware that renewable energy is going to continue to grow. They're planning for it. They're doing studies and analysis. Those studies keep showing that "baseload" power like coal and nuclear are just not necessary even without storage.
  https://www.nrdc.org/experts/k...
  Storage is just extra gravy on the side, and since it will take decades to fully transition there's plenty of time to build that, too.
  =Smidge=
Re:NO NUKES by Rhys · 2018-07-01 15:10 · Score: 3, Insightful

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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China to America by Anonymous Coward · 2018-07-01 16:28 · Score: 3, Informative

China: "Thanks for the nuclear reactor IP, we'll take it from here."
1. Re:China to America by JaredOfEuropa · 2018-07-01 18:52 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  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...
2. Re:China to America by thegarbz · 2018-07-01 22:30 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  The cost of nuclear power was invented by man. The technology itself isn't actually that expensive and the time to build isn't that long either. Most of the nuclear projects spend pathetic little time actually constructing anything.
  My own experience was taking so long to install a safety system at a reactor in Spain that the immediate project following it in a chemical plant in Belgium was to rip out the exact model we just commissioned because it was already nearing end of life.
  The project in the nuclear industry was simple and took many years to complete. Most of the time was spent sending paperwork with the longest signature lists I've ever seen around. The project in belgium comprised of twice the number of systems both about 5 times the size of what went into the nuclear reactor, and was done in 5 months at a small fraction of the cost.
  Same identical hardware. Interestingly in the nuclear industry that hardware came with a mountain of certification which could be measured in 10s of thousands of dollars per page.
3. Re:China to America by dfenstrate · 2018-07-02 01:41 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  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?
  
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4. Re:China to America by jwhyche · 2018-07-02 05:42 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  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.
  
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5. Re:China to America by RevDisk · 2018-07-02 05:42 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Uranium is a sustainable and renewable resource. The world's oceans have about 4.5 billion tons of uranium at any given time, and it's renewed via erosion. You're obviously only going to get a fraction of that, and you hit deminishing returns. But tens of millions of tons per year is practical, as the mining is basically running seawater over acrylic yarn. You can reuse the yarn, as well.
  
  At current growth curve, it gives us hundreds to thousands of years. We also have couple thousand years worth of thorium as well.
6. Re:China to America by jwhyche · 2018-07-02 05:46 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  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.
  
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7. Re:China to America by jwhyche · 2018-07-02 08:51 · Score: 3
  
  I lived in Huntsville Alabama for 10 years. The Browns Ferry nuclear plant was 5 miles from my apartment. Don't hand me that 'not in my back yard' shit. I had one in my back yard.
  
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Re: NO NUKES by Joce640k · 2018-07-01 18:02 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

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Re:Renewable needs baseline + storage to be effect by John+Da'+Baddest · 2018-07-01 18:06 · Score: 5, Insightful

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 is too expensive for anyone but government by InterGuru · 2018-07-01 18:07 · Score: 4, Interesting

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)
Re:NO NUKES by sfcat · 2018-07-01 18:12 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

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Re:NO NUKES by Khyber · 2018-07-01 18:19 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

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Re: NO NUKES by Khyber · 2018-07-01 18:21 · Score: 3, Informative

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.

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Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Re:Renewable needs baseline + storage to be effect by SJ · 2018-07-01 18:30 · Score: 4, Informative

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.
Re: NO NUKES by jimtheowl · 2018-07-01 19:22 · Score: 4, Informative

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...
Re: Renewable needs baseline + storage to be effec by buchanmilne · 2018-07-01 19:27 · Score: 3, Insightful

"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?
Re:Renewable needs baseline + storage to be effect by AmiMoJo · 2018-07-01 19:32 · Score: 4, Interesting

That's one of the reasons why China is pushing hard to be the world leader in battery manufacturing, the other being automotive demand.

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he's wrong but you're dishonest, AC by Uberbah · 2018-07-01 19:35 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.
Baseload Bullshit by Uberbah · 2018-07-01 19:47 · Score: 4, Insightful

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 by jez9999 · 2018-07-01 20:11 · Score: 5, Insightful

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

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OMG! by Hognoxious · 2018-07-01 20:43 · Score: 4, Funny

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.

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Re:Renewable needs baseline + storage to be effect by stomv · 2018-07-01 22:15 · Score: 5, Informative

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)

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Re:NO NUKES by thegarbz · 2018-07-01 22:24 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.
Re:Nuclear is too expensive for anyone but governm by bill_mcgonigle · 2018-07-01 23:12 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

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France France by rbrander · 2018-07-02 05:44 · Score: 3, Informative

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:
https://www.theguardian.com/wo... ...so I really think they would have called their government on the malfeasance if there had been any with nuclear reactors.
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.)