The Nuclear Power Thread

Greg Bernhardt

Here are some articles on coal pollution:
http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications...ombustors.html
http://www.fossil.energy.gov/program...utioncontrols/
http://www.ceednet.org/cct_brochure/page03.asp
http://www.careenergy.com/news/artic...sp?iArticle=75

enigma

I'm angry with theroyprocess not because of his beliefs, but because instead of stating his points, he's cutting and pasting pages and pages from all over the web to make his points for him without addressing any points made by the alternate viewpoint.

Yes. I'm furious with Bush, and the Clean Air Act is one of the many reasons why.

I didn't know about that issue, but there are major issues with the health of coal miners as well.

However, anecdotal evidence does not prove a case. No data, no case. My mother had breast cancer as well, and she's never been anywhere near a Uranium mine.

theroyprocess

If this isn't premeditated murder...I don't know what is !

More to my point that the "invisibility" of radiation makes
the control and strict regulation of radiation a priority
above all else.

http://www.nirs.org/radrecycle/recycleupdate31303.htm

enigma

OH NO!!!!!!

You mean they're putting radioactive material into our consumer products!?!?!?!?!

You mean radioactive materials like CARBON-14!?!?!?!?!?!

Damn, that stuff is present in EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!!

Better get started on the regulation of that stuff.

Ignorant knee-jerk reactionary babble is what your links are. Each and every one of them.

enigma

OHMIGOD, I forgot about that awful radiating sunlight!!!!!!

Sunlight causes more cancer each year than all the pollution ever caused by man. We need to get started with the regulation of that EVIL, EVIL, premeditated-murdering Sun.

If you are exposed to X (plus or minus 1%) amount of background radiation every single day of your life, then increasing that amount by X*10^-6 is not going to make one lick of difference. The definition of 'statistically insignificant'. You should learn some statistics. Seriously.

enigma

We need to ban Dihydrogen Monoxide!

That stuff is in everything... even our FOOD SUPPLY.

It causes frequent urination. It is a major component in acid rain. It is present in septic systems and they have no problem putting it in baby food.
It's possible to die from it if you are given too much of it.
Massive amounts have even been known to destroy the infrastructure of houses!
Certain isotopes of it are radioactive as well...

Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide!

*sheesh*

theroyprocess

Back on topic....is nuclear power more dependable...
not in Japan.

http://www.economist.com/business/di...ory_id=1928646

russ_watters

Thats only the trigger. The root cause is that our power grid is very near maximum capacity. Windstorms and breaking tree branches happen all the time. The cascade failure is a result of one failure leaving the next piece of the grid underpowered. That piece goes offline to keep from damaging the equipment. Then the next piece has to carry the extra load and it goes offline to keep from damaging its equipment. Et cetera, et cetera. What you probably didn't read about unless you live near Philly is that the cascade was stopped by PECO - a control center in Southeastern PA saw the cascade coming and disconnected the umbilicals connecting PECO's section to the rest of the grid. Otherwise the cascade would have continued down the eastern seaboard.

Anyway, an overloaded grid is what keeps a cascade going. Heck, read it in the link theroyprocess just provided about Japan. Think its bad now? Its only going to get worse unless we do something about it.

I'll find you the stats, but the demand for electricity virtually everywhere in the western world is growing faster than the generating capacity and has been for some time. The primary cause is the lack of new nuclear power plants. Rui, "so small its not detectable above background radiation" - times 2.5 - is still "so small its not detectable above background radiation."

Nereid

Hey enigma (and theroyprocess, if she's listening),

You should also recommend that folk abandon Denver, ski resorts, and other high places and move into the New York subway (people in England, Paris, Shanghai, etc ... please choose your favourite underground rail system). There will be a reduction in the exposure of humans to ionising radiation - from cosmic rays - many million (billion?) times greater than that which would result from closing all nuclear power plants.

HAVOC451

Quite right. This leads directly to why I brought up the Clean Air Act in the first place. The law was changed specifically to exempt those coal burning powerplants from having to install the systems that would make them operate cleanly. Many of the monied interests that lobbied the government for changes in the Clean Air Act are the the very same interests "helping" Dick Cheny write the nations energy policy. Those interests would love to resurect their nuclear power divisions.

Kudos, I'm encouraged.

I didn't link that anecdote to prove the case, I only note that the case is there.
Coal miners have been taking it in the teeth for a long time. In many ways the only group more marginalised and ignored than coal miners are native americans living down wind/stream from a uranium mine.

Nereid

While not exactly a group in the sense of coal miners and native Americans, have you considered those with particularly vulnerable respiratory systems? IIRC, there are a really nasty class of diesel emissions (very fine particulates) that Big Oil is trying to have everyone ignore. It'd be no surprise to learn there is legislation in many countries (not only the US) which exempts Big Oil (and Big Auto) from accepting responsibility for these emissions.

theroyprocess

If the Russians were dumping their nuclear waste into commercial
products like industry wants to here in the USA...we would smirk
at them and say "it could never happen here!". BUT IT IS!

Activists Make Nuclear Waste a Russian Election Issue

MOSCOW, Russia, November 18, 2003 (ENS)

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/nov2...19.asp#anchor3

[flood deleted]

See also http://nucnews.net - NucNews Links and Archives

HAVOC451

Nereid,
I have.
I agree with you on this.
Diesel emissions have been exempted far too long. This is slowly beginning to changs.

RuiMonteiro

Exactly because there was a cascade failure it shows that the energetic network supply isn´t very good. When, for some reason, a power plant stops instantanly it should be enough (that is with the proper systems) that there wouldn´t happen a cascade failure. This is possible if a great number of power plants are interconnected in a way to prevent this, there are modern systems that can do this.

And by the way, what you probably didn´t read is that i don´t live near Philly or any other place in the US, i live in Portugal, you probably didn´t even read the entirity of my post...



Rui.

Nereid

IMHO, the root cause is bad regulation and wilful ignorance of economics. Behind that there is, without a doubt, the hand of Big Oil.

A good infrastructure should be able to isolate local failures, irrespective of how heavily loaded it is; it's surely not a very challenging technical problem.

A competitive market should be able to meet demand, unless the regulatory barriers are inefficient.

russ_watters

The power grid actually presents an enormously complicated technical problem. There are a hundred or so suppliers, a thousand or so power plants, and around a billion services (est). And the resilience of the grid is directly related to the excess capacity.

Think about it - if you have a 96% load factor and 10 power plants of equal size, what happens if you lose a plant? Now you are 6% over capacity. The grid is designed so in this situation, you pull the extra power for the adjacent sections of the grid. But what happens if THEY are at 96% capacity? Now they don't have enough power either.

Thats a very conservative illustration of how our power grid works. The load factor is roughly correct, but the power plants - well, there are more of them, but the few nuclear power plants are what produce the vast majority of the power (in the northeast anyway). Trip a single line coming off of one plant and you're screwed. The grid will try to adjust and fail because it can't adjust fast enough. The laws of physics are against it - once you have detected the spike, its too late.

That said, there is a design issue there: when there is enough spare capacity, a grid system is a good thing - you CAN get power from elsewhere to cover your failure. Thats what its designed for. And thats the reason why major blackouts are so rare in the US. But load the grid to its limits and the grid works against itself - it causes the cascade failures we have seen recently and makes the rare power failure epic in scale.

Nereid

Been thinking about this a bit. A telecoms network is considerably more complex than a power grid, and subject to all kinds of nasty shocks. Yet a great deal has been done to make them very resilient. Of course, the analogy is quite imperfect at the direct-comparison level (there's no equivalent to IP in power grids, for example), but perhaps at a meta-level some lessons could be learned?

For example, to what extent are the key generators and main parts of the grid under constant surveillance by AI/neural network-based systems looking for incipient failure? IIRC, some US airline maintenance department built such a system for detecting failures in jet engines. After some time, they not only substantially reduced the amount of maintenance that needed to be done, but were able to turn the service into a profit centre, by offering it to other airlines.

Presumably planned shutdowns would cause considerably less disruption than unplanned ones; a good grid-wide fault management system may result in more planned shutdowns, but that'd be a small price to pay for avoidance of the kind of east coast disruption earlier this year. Indeed windstorms and tree branches are somewhat unpredictable, but if they constitute the majority of root causes, then remedial action (and proactive reduction of future likelihood) is pretty easy to characterise. After all, it's not as if we don't know where trees grow, or the seasonal distribution of wind strength (including variance), or the short-term (hours, minutes) likelihood of windstorms.

and If PECO (a.k.a. 'the white knight'?) saw it coming, why couldn't the same sort of control systems be installed elsewhere? How about building a more distributed type of control system, better able to make local disconnections?

If there's one thing engineers are good at it's solving problems, often very creatively. Russ, do you know if a tiger team of top engineers has been tasked to look at solving the 'grid failure' problem, with broad terms of reference?