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Pacific Northwest Relying On Nuclear Energy During Cold Snap (forbes.com)
Slashdot reader Lije Baley writes: As the unusually long cold snap in the Pacific Northwest has both increased electric demand while decreasing snow melt and stream flows needed for hydroelectric generation, local power companies are asking their customers to conserve energy. Meanwhile, the region's last remaining nuclear plant has been a critical low-carbon resource for keeping the lights and heat on, as Forbes reports. "As reported by Annette Cary of the Tri-City Herald, the Bonneville Power Administration, which markets the electricity produced at the nuclear plant near Richland, asked Energy Northwest, the operator of the power plant, not to do anything that would prevent the plant from producing 100% power at all times during an unusually cold February across the state that increased the demand for electricity â" no maintenance activities, even on its turbine generator and in the transformer yard," reports Forbes. "Don't do anything that would stop the reliable and constant power output of nuclear."
"'No Touch' is requested by BPA when unusually hot or cold weather increases the demand for electricity, notes Mike Paoli, spokesman for Energy Northwest," the report adds. "Many regional transmission and system operators across the United States ask nuclear plants to keep running during extreme weather because nuclear plants are the least affected by bad weather. Columbia Generating Station has the capability to produce 1,207 MW, which is enough energy to power Seattle. And it is usually putting out all of this power at all times. Energy Northwest already has a diverse mix of non-fossil fuel generating systems that, in aggregate, produce over 10 billion kWhs of electricity each year while emitting less than 20 gCO2/kWh. The No Touch order at the Columbia Generating Station is expected to be lifted soon, although continued cold weather could require it to keep producing max power."
"'No Touch' is requested by BPA when unusually hot or cold weather increases the demand for electricity, notes Mike Paoli, spokesman for Energy Northwest," the report adds. "Many regional transmission and system operators across the United States ask nuclear plants to keep running during extreme weather because nuclear plants are the least affected by bad weather. Columbia Generating Station has the capability to produce 1,207 MW, which is enough energy to power Seattle. And it is usually putting out all of this power at all times. Energy Northwest already has a diverse mix of non-fossil fuel generating systems that, in aggregate, produce over 10 billion kWhs of electricity each year while emitting less than 20 gCO2/kWh. The No Touch order at the Columbia Generating Station is expected to be lifted soon, although continued cold weather could require it to keep producing max power."
Here in Seattle we have our own hydroelectric dam, and I get 100 percent green energy from wind turbines (near the Gorge) and from solar panels here in the city (I own six of them, at the Aquarium, the Zoo, and at Capitol Hill Low Income Housing).
It's the rest of the PNW that might be using nuclear. We export energy. Heck, our Governor just had his launch for President at a solar power manufacturing plant that I can see from my window. This county literally builds a lot of US solar and wind infrastructure.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Well, when you can edit the past to erase warming trends - yeah, claim what you want... In the mean time, I know the reservoirs in California are all pretty much at or above historical averages, we have MORE rain coming, record cold for a few months now (including a rare snow in Los Angeles - its been 57 years since the previous snow), and I'm sure Governor Newsom will NOT lift the drought - even though we also have a Sierra Nevada snowpack that is at 141% of normal. Time to brace for Spring and early-summer floods!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Seattle owns outright hydroelectric generating plants equivalent to about 75% of its peak demand. Here and here are two of their major hydroelectric projects. So, yeah. They do have, in a meaningful sense, their own hydroelectric dams.
Have gnu, will travel.
... a 256 sq mile desert solar facility, for single example. You lose.
Actually you lose. Try to build that and you will get tied up in lawsuits just like the nuke industry when they want to build. That desert terrain will be habitat to some endangered tortoise, squirrel, rat, etc.
William Nordhaus won the 2018 Nobel in Economics for his model that includes the effects of externalities for CO2. His paper says that doing much more than a small increase in taxes is actually a net loss and we'd be better of putting the money elsewhere (which is also something Bjorn Lomborg also espouses. Pushing for the 1.5 deg C, or Gore's 90% cut goals nearly double the cost of doing nothing - and that's factoring in all those supposed externalities from fossil fuels.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
http://www.startribune.com/dee...
The brutal cold gripping Minnesota made itself felt in tens of thousands of living rooms Wednesday as Xcel Energy resorted to asking customers to turn their thermostats down to 63 degrees to conserve natural gas.
https://www.americanexperiment...
The screenshot below is from Electricity Map. It’s a fun app that tells you how your electricity is being generated at any given moment in time. Turns out wind is producing only four percent of electricity in the MISO region, of which Minnesota is a part.
While that’s not good, what’s worse is wind is only utilizing 24 percent of it’s installed capacity, and who knows how this will fluctuate throughout the course of
It's a real shame that turning on the lights doesn't make the wind blow.
Nuclear power plants now-a-days are built with a positive coefficient. The nuclear power plants you have to worry about at night are the plants built with 50+ year old designs with negative coefficient properties.
One quibble...you mean newer plants have negative void coefficients. The older ones (like CANDU reactors in Canada and the RBMKs in Russia) have positive void coefficients and that's what you have to worry about. Also, licensing isn't really that hard and there is no real reason it should cost billions to license a plant, you just have to actually do it and its the politics that fucks that up. Otherwise I completely agree...
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Nuclear power is great! Right up until it goes Fukushima on you. Then it sucks ass. Unwipable ass at that.
Electric cars have the potential to solve problems. They are just giant batteries, you know. If they were allowed to back feed into the grid during high demand periods like right now, it would smooth out demand quite nicely. Wind and solar can become much more useful when there is sufficient energy storage capacity available.
The reactors the GP refers to can't meltdown (like Chernobyl) and don't use water as a coolants so they don't make Hydrogen gas like Fukushima or 3 mi Island. Also, the entire world's output of Li-ion batteries couldn't backup even the CA grid for 4 hours, so the world's entire supply for 20 years is enough to backups CA's grid but Li-ion batteries don't last 20 years so you couldn't even make just CA 100% renewable. Also CA's grid is about 1% of the size of global energy usage. I like EVs and have 2 of them but please don't get confused. We haven't even dented CO2 production and continuing to ignore nuclear is only making the problem worse while we wait for folks like you to figure out solar and wind aren't a real solution.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
William Nordhaus won the 2018 Nobel in Economics for his model that includes the effects of externalities for CO2. His paper says that doing much more than a small increase in taxes is actually a net loss and we'd be better of putting the money elsewhere (which is also something Bjorn Lomborg also espouses. Pushing for the 1.5 deg C, or Gore's 90% cut goals nearly double the cost of doing nothing - and that's factoring in all those supposed externalities from fossil fuels.
"supposed externalities from fossil fuels" ??? Nordhaus isn't saying that fossil fuels have no environmental effects and that the byproducts created by burning them disappear into an alternate dimension or something and thus burning fossil fuels has no effect. He's basically saying that a 2 degree increase in global temperatures is more or less guaranteed because idiot politicians hooked on money from the fossil fuel industry have been sitting with their finger up their butt for far too long. Nordhaus acknowledges the potentially catastrophic impacts of this climate change so it is not as if he is in full agreement with the Trumpian/Kochian/Conservative point of view that climate change is a Chines hoax, not even close.
Thanks for the info. I like when people have a good grasp of the big picture and put things in perspective. A huge problem in today's society is partial information, including (maybe especially) by the news media. I think wind and solar are helping, but I trust you that they won't solve all energy needs. I've put in a few PV systems and I know a reasonably sized system makes as much power as a typical house uses, so in my mind if we put PV on houses and shopping centers, we can cover a lot of the need, but big industries will use more than PV can reasonably generate, and skyscrapers might be difficult to achieve anything close to net zero.
I've been a huge proponent of nuclear power for a very long time, but with the provision that 1) it's done well with true safety thought out, and 2) much better design and efficiency. I'm not a nuclear engineer but I've been working on a project that deals with system safety and monitoring and that's all I'll say for now, and that it's cool and I'm proud to help / contribute to better and safer nuclear power.
Crap you are right, I totally switch-arooo'd that. Brain fart. My bad. Yes, negative = x; positive = negative, b = positive. Thanks for the correction.
I think the licensure is mis-guided today. I'll elaborate.
Making sure the plants are safe is obviously a goal. But licensing them at the costs of billions, and making the licenses hard to get only increases the price, and stunts growth.
The right solution in my opinion is for power companies with loads of assets to be the direct owner of the power station. That way, you can't spin up a corporation and use a liability shield to protect the Fortune 1000 entity from liability.
So a simple law that says "To build a NPS, the owners of a majority in interest and control must have assets > $10 billion". Now every power station opens up all those companies to risk. Companies hate risk. They will avoid it, and build the plants safely. If a disaster occurs, the operators will have to prove it was unavoidable or be subject to severe restitution.