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Europe's Heatwave is Forcing Nuclear Power Plants To Shut Down (qz.com)
Europe's heatwave -- which led to wildfires in Greece and Sweden, droughts in central and northern parts, and made the normally green UK look brown from space -- is forcing nuclear plants to shut down or curtail the amount of power they produce, local media reports. From a report: French utility EDF shut four reactors at three power plants on Saturday, Swedish utility Vattenfall shut one of two reactors at a power plant earlier last week, and nuclear plants in Finland, Germany, and Switzerland have cut back the amount of power they produce. Thermal power plants, such as nuclear or coal, use high-temperature steam to turn turbines, which convert heat energy into electricity. In the process, the steam's temperature falls, so it can no longer be used to move the turbine again. [...] Europe's heatwave, however, hasn't just increased air temperatures but also water temperatures.
The problem with climate change isn't so much as our planet breaking but everything we depend on breaking. Somewhat wacky that nuclear reactors aren't designed to handle this heat but then again I would have never imagined the crazy kind of temperatures Europe has skyrocketed up to. So one has to wonder, what other stuff is going to break?
Cooling towers don't cool the water enough. Need more cooling tower surface area, or a larger reservoir to dump the warmed water back into.
On the "bright" side, there's a lot of sun right now for the PV panels!
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Nuke plants mostly perform well in hot weather and carry the system when other sources are struggling. A few reactors have to cut back due to heat limits on cooling water. The total percentage of nuclear reduction across the board is less than 10%. Meanwhile, wind power during the recent heat wave was down over 80%. Nuclear was carrying the load. Particularly it was critical in late afternoon and evening when solar fades. There were times when wind production during these critical times dropped below 1% of demand.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/europes-power-prices-rise-as-heat-wave-saps-wind-from-turbines
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-01/scorching-start-to-august-set-to-test-europe-s-power-system
It's a terrible summary.
The problem is that the water is chilled... but it's chilled by running it through colder water, usually pulled from a lake or a stream. Usually this isn't a problem, because the waste heat doesn't disrupt the ecosystem too much.
Right now, however, the environment is so warm that adding the waste heat would push temperatures above acceptable levels, killing the local ecosystem. Instead, the reactors are shut down to minimize the amount of heat they have to dissipate.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
From TFA, the reason why the reactors were shut down (which wasn't included in the summary) is:
Yeah, I know that reading TFA is no longer cool on Slashdot, but someone has to help out the editors. :P
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Poor design. All over the world there are nuclear plants operating just fine in hot tropical and subtropical climates, including the USA. Never has been a problem. So the Euros are doing something wrong with their designs.
Almost all the European nukes are running just fine, full output. Only a few have cut back due to discharge heat limits.
wrong,
it's just done out of concern for causing too much heating in the water around the plant, limiting environmental damage. the plants could work fine even if temperature were higher.
this isn't even that newsworthy, happens some years.
"No longer cool?" I've been on Slashdot and it sure seems to me that most people I've talked to here never read past the second sentence of the summary, much less the article.
Sometimes it's frustrating, sometimes it's fun when we have this exchange:
MD Solar: Fucking Trump screwing everything up again.
Me: The first sentence of the summary is "In 2015, the TSA stripped searched 4,800 people". Can you read the first two words? I didn't know Trump was running the TSA in 2015.
You should of learned in high school physics
And you should've learned in elementary school how contractions work.
Waste heat from power plants can be a HUGE problem to local ecosystems. There's rivers in the US where power plants have raised the water temperature 20 degrees and essentially displaced the entire habitat.
Steam generation is 19th century technology that's just plain awful in low water or high temperature areas. We've got power plants in the western US that use more water than the entire local population, water that's just pumped into the atmosphere rather than supporting the local ecosystem. Solar and storage are at the point where we can stop using this ancient technology, it's long since time that steam generation should be abandoned in any area where water is at a premium.
There's rivers in the US where power plants have raised the water temperature 20 degrees and essentially displaced the entire habitat.
An exaggeration. But do you know how much habitat Hydro power has displaced by comparison?
Right now, however, the environment is so warm that adding the waste heat would push temperatures above acceptable levels, killing the local ecosystem.
Something that is in fact already happening
" You should of learned in high school "
Have. They also teach that in high school.
Its a German and EU political and environmental problem. eg Thermal pollution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The cooling water drawn from rivers, lakes, or seas will get more warm in hooter weather as more cooling water is needed.
German laws put limits on how hot cooling water can be when returned to such "rivers, lakes, or seas".
Laws limited the exisiting cooling engineering.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Thereby violating the third law of thermodynamics. You should of learned in high school physics perpetual energy machines dont work, Silly child.
It's not a perpetual energy machine, the input energy comes from the radioactive decay of Uranium, not from the water.
I stole this Sig
The cooling water drawn from rivers, lakes, or seas will get more warm in hooter weather as more cooling water is needed.
This is presumably weather so warm that women take off their tops.
When you say "chill the water", what that inevitably means is putting the heat somewhere else. You can't magic it away, it has to go somewhere, and you have to build some kind of heat exchanger that gets it there.
So where would you put the heat? The obvious answer is the atmosphere, but consider that this was an option open to engineers when they designed the plant. They *could* have condensed the turbine working fluid by exchanging the heat with the atmosphere like the air conditioner in your house, which demonstrates that it is physically possible to do. But they rejected this approach for a good reason.
That reason is likely that the quantities of heat involved are considerably greater than those involved with cooling your house. They chose to put the heat into water because (a) water has over 4x the heat capacity of dry air on a mass basis and (b) water is 1000x denser than air. For any given level of efficiency, your air cooling device would have to be thousands of times larger.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
A person does not dissipate 1000 W of energy. Speaking of "W per hour" of heat has no sense, watts are already "energy over time". European population is decreasing.
"Europe's Heatwave is Forcing Coal Power Plants To Shut Down" is just as valid for the title, but nuclear is so much more click-baity...
And the reason they are being shut down is to avoid pumping too much waste heat into the environment, since that would be bad for the ecosystem. It's not some kind of generator failure we should all lose sleep over.
How is a law preventing damage to the ecosystem of the rivers is a "political problem"?
Cooling towers are used in many plants, nuclear and coal, and seem to work.
This is europe, we do that even in the cold weather.
I design HVAC systems (among other things) for a living.
For an average office worker we assume about 250 btuh (75 watts±) of sensible heat and 200 btuh (60 watts±) of latent heat (evaporating sweat) for a total of a little less than 135 watts.
For heavy exercise, about 700 btuh (210 watts±) of sensible heat and 1100 btuh (320 watts±) of latent heat, for a total of about 530 watts per person.