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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."
Is 1,207 megawatts sufficiently close to 1.21 to say
1.21 JIGGAWATTS!
?
We should be building more nuclear power plants, not cowarding out and shutting older ones down without replacement.
We should send all the solar power we've been generating here in Southern California during the last few weeks of rain and clouds... Oh wait...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Uh, just use the "waste" in lower-yield reactors.
It's "dangerous" because it's still active. It's "waste" because it's not fully utilized.
The concept of "nuclear waste" simply is not a problem for modern reactor designs.
By the way, there's no long-term waste storage yet.
Still better that the long-term waste storage for fossil fuels, our atmosphere.
No - a mixture of socialism and capitalism works best.
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.
All of those countries tend to be mixtures of capitalism and socialism, not pure capitalism.
" Ever seen how desparate people can become when the power goes out? " - Nope. I have solar panels and a backup propane system should shit blow up. Next?
And that means something to an entire grid how? Although your tiny little grid is a good microcosm of the CA grid. Solar for hope and natural gas for the actual power. Which is why in both CA and Germany, from 2010 till now despite a record amount of wind and solar deployed we have more CO2 emissions than before we deployed all those solar panels and wind turbines. That's because of all the natural gas plants kept fired up to provide power should a cloud or still period occur. So this wind and solar only policy has been tried, in very favorable conditions and it resulted in increased CO2, higher energy prices and a less reliable grid. This is only good for energy traders but bad for everyone else including PG&E. But do go on and tell us how since you hooked up an inverter and a backup propane system at your home, that means that somehow the entire grid will be powered by unicorns and fairies instead of natural gas. So you ever feel back being such a huge hypocrite or does wallowing in your own ignorance feel that good?
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
CFCs reduce Ozone, not cloud cover. Nor do they fix the tilt of the earth to reduce that pesky little thing called "winter".
Nuclear power is fantastic. We're just too obsessed with spent fuel and fear-mongoring to do it right. 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.
The bigger challenge is the overly difficult task of licensing them. It costs billions to license a plant, and the licenses expire. If you can't guarantee you can operate your plant in year 21, it's not worth the investment. SONGS was shut down and dismantled because the repair costs of a mal/formed component exceeded the potential profit on the remaining license (energy prices are regulated), and the state wouldn't grant a license extension if the repairs were made.
We need to build better, newer plants. We need to make them more cost-effective to operate, and we need to do it now. What electric cars will do to the grid in the next decade will exasperate the problem. Imagine all the energy in petroleum to cars having to be shifted onto our grid. There isn't enough power.
Here in California, hydro is not considered renewable.
That's just hippy-dippy politics. Hydro power IS solar power, collected by the hydrological cycle.
Have gnu, will travel.
And with snow on your panels, I'm sure they produced a LOT of solar power for you ...
Seattle is at latitude 47.6. That means solar panels are normally mounted more steeply than 45 degrees, and those that are adjusted from time to time to track the seasons or skewed in favor of winter generation are even steeper in the winter.
The angle of repose of (dry) snow is about 38 degrees. So when the panels are really cold (like on a bitter night) it will just fall off, no wind necessary.
When they're hot it will either melt off or consolidate into a silverthaw (ice layer) which is transparent enough to pass substantial light. Once it's passing light, the inefficiency of the essentially black panel will turn maybe 3/4 or more of the incident solar energy into heat in the panel, encouraging a thick ayer of snow to melt on the bottom and slide off.
Yes, wet snow may stick and build up. But unless it builds up enough to block nearly all light, you'll get heating. See above. Or thaw a garden hose and spray water on it, to turn the snow transparent.
So you may find that soar panels in the Seattle region aren't as useless due to snowy weather as you think.
The real enemies of solar are heavy clouds and high enough latitude to shorten the hours of daylight and lengthen the atmospheric path of what light DOES make it to the panel, sucking out part of the energy. THERE Seattle has issues.
(I'm not a Seattle resident myself, so if anyone with actual experience with winter weather on Seattle solar panels is reading, PLEASE chime in.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
How is it "not true"? It says "Pacific Northwest", not "Seattle". I don't know what you mean by "literally builds" a lot of US solar and wind infrastructure. That certainly isn't true. Most wind turbines not made in the US and none are from Seattle. You are really full of yourself.
... 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.
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.
Hey neighbor, plug in your Leaf so I can charge my Tesla. Thanks.
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."
hydro is not considered renewable
Where does the water go? Just disappears, eh?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Point of order: Nuclear reactors are actually notably very bad at "spooling up." They don't ramp more than a few percent per hour because it disrupts the balance of transient neutron poisons (esp Xe-135) in the reactor core which is bad for reactivity control authority (i.e. knowing exactly how much control you have to speed up or slow down the reactor).
Coal is pretty bad too, but nat gas turbines and hydro can both start/stop much, much faster. And Tesla's giant ass battery in Australia can do it close to instantly (within some msec), which makes it extremely valuable for grid levelling.
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."
Unfortunately, yes. Here if it's not a solar panel or windmill, it's not "green". Even though the State runs on natural gas and nuclear.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
If you like Big picture stuff, think about how much coal power the six reactors of fukushima displaced. Gigawatts over your, for about fifty years... 8,000+ hours per year...
That's 400,000 GWH each. Now consider how much toxic filth, heavy metals and radioactive material goes into the coal ash ponds, or even up the smokestack.
Coal caused more cancer over the last seventy odd years, _just from radiation related sources_ than every man made nuclear accident plus the two atomic bombs (including instakills) put together.
Coal ash is just nasty, nasty stuff, and it leaks into our drinking water and food chain whenever it rains a half inch more than expected.
I suppose you would have called for an end to all airplanes when Thomas Selfridge died in the first fatal airline crash in 1908. Or, perhaps you would have called for an end to all heavier than air transport back in 1896 when Otto Lilienthal died piloting a glider?
And I assume you would have eliminated all software or hardware control of medical treatment devices after the Therac-25 radiation therapy device killed three patients back in the mid 80's?
I assume you also, personally, eschew all forms of motorized transport as they are not yet perfect and kill tens of thousands of people in the US alone every year?
Fukushima was a very expensive accident. However, it was not a very dangerous one in terms of human life.
Nothing is completely safe, but we learn from each failure and improve, rather than abandon, technology.
Nuclear power is almost essential if we are going to provide reliable power without spewing CO2 into the air that our ancestors will curse us for.
Norway. A country completely subsidized by the rest of the world, particularly the US, since it's industry mix is oil/gas, shipping, fishing, and various military supplies. They use all this money to fund immense social programs(they flirt with the line of nanny state), keep themselves fairly closed off to immigration, are rampant consumers(their labor is mostly Baltic imported), then put on an incredible air of superiority, even though they are essentially white Saudi Arabia.
They are a funny people.
-This signature is strictly to prevent comments ending with questions or propositions.-
Those countries have mixed economies. In practice no country with pure socialism or pure free market capitalism has a decent economy.
There is a decent argument that natural monopolies are better off being owned by the state than being made private. Roads are one example.
China. Still today, the banking system (that is the "capital" of capitalism) is firmly under the control of the state, that is the Communist Party.
As for having success, modern India and modern China at their birth, at the beginning of the '50s were pretty equal (well, India was actually in a better position, with a somewhat greater gdp) and similar (very large pre-industrial, agricultural societies etc.). Nowadays it is clear that Communist China surpassed in every conceivable way Capitalist India.
That's a pretty big success story to me.
Sweden also has huge income taxes and value added tax. With regards to wages, while there is no global minimum wage, wages are decided sector by sector between the trade unions and the corporate organizations. You know trade unions, that thing the US thinks is evil. Also, the employer has to pay nationally agreed upon wages between the unions and the corporations regardless if the worker is actually a union member of not.
Education is mandatory between ages 6 and 16. With regards to private, for profit, schools those only became a thing in 1992 and are controversial in Sweden. Like 10% of students attend these for profit schools and they are generally considered to offer poor quality education. Higher education (i.e. college) is tuition free of charge in Sweden since 2011.
Similar deal with Denmark.
But sure, continue eating what reason.com spouts out without criticism.
You forgot Deep Freeze Spawns Rare Frazil Ice That Hobbles Nuclear Reactor - and that happened just a month ago (and not in regulated Europe).
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Norway. A country completely subsidized by the rest of the world, particularly the US, since it's industry mix is oil/gas, shipping, fishing, and various military supplies. They use all this money to fund immense social programs(they flirt with the line of nanny state), keep themselves fairly closed off to immigration, are rampant consumers(their labor is mostly Baltic imported), then put on an incredible air of superiority, even though they are essentially white Saudi Arabia.
They are a funny people.
For one thing, I don't think Norway is in the Pacific North West. For another, there are plenty of countries operating on a mixture of democratic socialist and centre right principles in the world that are doing just fine, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, The Baltic Republics, Germany, France, ... the list goes on and none of them are floating on an ocean of oil even if a few of them have some kind of fossil fuel mining industry. Germany and Denmark have swapped significant portions of their energy generation over to wind and solar and they haven't financed it with petro-dollars. But what the hell does any of this have to do with the Pacific North West? Seems to me somebody pulled one hell of a Conway by pivoting off the original topic to practically equating any country with a social Democratic Party with Norway to try and make the case that Social Democracy cannot work without petro-dollars which is quite frankly a stupid and demonstrably false point to try and make.
When there are a group of 10 smaller nuke plants with 4 reactors each, one doesn't need to worry when one takes "MONTHS" (omgchickenlittlebutt!!) to get back online.
And, with an interconnected grid with (OMGFREAKYOUT) nice robust long distance transmission lines to other areas exist, you can help one another out.
Don't you want to help one another out?
You are right, NIMBYs aren't the problem, YOU are the problem.