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

Not Enough!

[R3d M3rcury]

[...] has a net output of 1.117 GWe.

Damn. So close. How will I get back to 1984?

Re:Not Enough!

[Smidge204]

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

[Joce640k]

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.

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.

Re:NO NUKES

[jez9999]

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

Re:Renewable needs baseline + storage to be effect

[stomv]

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)