Heat Wave Shuts Down Alabama Reactor 401
mdsolar writes "In a first for the US, one of three nuclear reactors at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama has been shut down because the Tennessee River is too hot to provide adequate cooling for the waste heat produced by the reactor. This is happening as the TVA faces its highest demand for power ever, reports the Houston Chronicle. This effect has been seen in Europe in the past, forcing reduced generation, but the US has until now been immune to the problem. The TVA will buy power elsewhere and impose higher rates, blaming reduced river flow as a result of drought."
not immune (Score:4, Insightful)
no, not immune. it just hasn't happend until now.
It is about boiling rivers (Score:5, Insightful)
It ain't about problems with the cooling itself, for that the rivers would need to be far hotter. The problem is enviromental, if you add extra heat to an already warm river you risk that it rises to the point were you destroy the eco-system. Simply put, the fishes get cooked and the algea grow out of control.
This is considered to be a bad thing.
Waste heat? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Waste heat? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's just what the TVA is having problems with. After all, nuclear plants essentially use the heat produced by degrading high quality nuclear energy to lower quality steam or the equivalent. This is allowed to degrade to even lower quality by taking a steam jet with well-defined momentum, and impacting it on a turbine. After the turbine (producing electricity, etc.), the steam has almost no quality, and perhaps can be used for secondary heating purposes. At this stage, you have to get rid of the still-high-temperature but low quality steam, and they do that by rejecting the heat into the river.
Re:What to do with all that waste heat... (Score:3, Insightful)
To give you an example. Someone starts screaming in public that they are going to kill you. They show up at your house with a large handgun and force the door. A couple minutes later, several shots are heard. The man runs out of your house without the handgun. You are found dead and the coroner determines the hour of your death to be around the time the man with the handgun showed up at your door. Noone else has shown up that day other than the man with the handgun. The bullets which have blasted what little brains you have out the back of your head are determined to come from the gun lying on the floor, which is the same one brought in by the man who forced his way into your house.
Now, given all this, you would apparently parrot the rule saying "Correlation is not causation".
Re:Waste heat? (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine one of those old-style water wheels. Your question is akin to asking, "Why not figure out a way to use the energy of that flowing water without wasting it by allowing it to flow away?"
Re:This is actually really good news (Score:5, Insightful)
If the beer's Bud, don't bother - there's no difference.
The overly-simplified solution (Score:5, Insightful)
The bicycle as a commuter vehicle works only under ideal conditions and only for the young and fit. You won't be taking a bicycle into Buffalo, NY in mid-winter. You won't be taking a bicycle into Houston, TX in mid-summer.
Re:This is actually really good news (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What to do with all that waste heat... (Score:3, Insightful)
How this applies to climate change though isn't all that clear. We are sure that temperatures are rising, we are fairly sure that they will continue to rise, and we are inclined to believe that the changes are brought about by our own actions. In that scenario we need to tackle what is apparent whilst also making sure that there are no other explanations.
Much like you would arrest the potential murderer in your first example immediately and then discount any other possibilities, we should be looking to tackle climate change (by addressing the issues we believe cause it) until we know more one way or the other, what we should not do is close down any other avenues of investigation until we are sure that we have all the information we need, after all if something else turns out to be the culprit (regardless of how unlikely that is) we may need to take some other action, something we couldn't do if we stopped looking.
Re:What "waste heat"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Some people sell their "waste" heat (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What "waste heat"? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want to continue to beat this dead horse, I think your best bet would be to educate yourself about thermodynamics, the Carnot cycle, and what it means to have inifinite temperature reservoirs.
Just as real world efficiencies can only approach the Carnot cycle, your answers can only approach the previous postings as you learn more about what you are talking about.
Re:paddle wheels in the heat stream (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Meanwhile Back In Alabama (Score:5, Insightful)
Germany has wisely seen fit to invest one-seventh of its power money in wind energy. And it has legislated, and many Germnans have benefited for years already, from a solar-energy subsidy.
Too bad we don't have uncorrupted, uncronyed leadership in the US with the courage and vision to diversify the energy portfolio. Pay now or pay MUCH MUCH more later.
Nuke-lovers are always griping that wind-energy is too unreliable. Huh, guess what?
Re:Some people sell their "waste" heat (Score:5, Insightful)
Now if you presented to the American public with the word "free" heat, then we might get something going.
Re:Meanwhile Back In Alabama (Score:3, Insightful)
What do you call the energy futures market?
using this to impeach nukes is profoundly wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm in favor of alternative, renewable energy sources, but each source has varying degrees to which it is useful in particular situations for technology and production cost reasons. (For example, many places just don't make a good wind farm - and some places make an extremely mediocre and very expensive one.) I think we're going to have a bloom of much better solar at some point, but there's definitely still some room for improvement there.
I'm also certainly not supporting the current federal administration's energy policy, and I certainly do agree that a greater mix of power would be better.
However - despite repeatedly building coal fired plants that release literal tons of radioactive (definitively cancer causing) uranium into our air to be sucked up into our lungs - we're so afraid of anything called nuclear that to my knowledge we haven't issued a license to create a new nuclear plant in many years. I think we should wipe that kind of pollution from the map with large and increasing taxes that are specifically based on the pollution released. The only way we're going to do that in the short term would be to use more nuclear, not less, in combination with many other technologies.
So a lack of capacity is certainly not nuclear technology's fault. A reasonable answer to the GPs fears would be to have nuclear capacity spread out a little more so it wasn't so easily susceptible to drought, ANOTHER reasonable defense would be to have simply more average capacity, and a third defense would be to make plants which are more efficient - which would undoubtedly happen if we compared one we might build now to one decades old. Just look at the efficiency of cars from a similarly long time ago.