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."
This is the insiduous impact of Climate Change (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, we can adapt to it, but it's an expensive proposition. All the stuff about cities flooding, people dying and malaria becoming the new bane of the US is extreme cases being blown up to make good news stories. It's the accumulation of small things like this that'll hurt.
Re:Reasons right? (Score:4, Interesting)
How efficient is a power generation plant that throws away gigawatts of power as waste heat?
Isn't it about time you find a more efficient way to generate power, turbines and generators that don't waste so much heat that we just went to all that trouble to make in the first place?
I don't expect 100% efficiency, but what we're doing now is crazy.
TVA net metering policy (Score:5, Interesting)
But, the fairly natural solution to the problem, reducing summer demand through net metering of customer generated solar power, a solution being implemented in 41 states and DC, is hampered in the TVA service territory by TVA's net metering policy: http://www.tva.gov/purpa/net_metering.htm [tva.gov] which is a billing period-by-billing period policy rather than an annual carryover policy used in net metering states. Adopting a reasonable net metering policy would allow TVA to become a summer time peak demand power exporter and gain by arbitrage, reducing the risk of higher overall rates it is building for itself by not paying attention to the capacity of the river system to handle the 60% of wasted energy nuclear power generation creates.
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Power when you want it most: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Renewables question.... (Score:5, Interesting)
"TVA gets about 60 percent of its electricity from coal-fired power plants, 30 percent from nuclear plants and 10 percent from its 29 hydroelectric dams. Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar account for less than 1 percent."
Any idea why that might be? Political slant? ignorance?
Umm, I mean the water flows through the dam, it goes out to sea, it evaporates, and it rains back up in the mountains and comes through the dam again. Seems pretty renewable to me.... at least some of it is coming back up through that cycle if not all...
Re:What "waste heat"? (Score:3, Interesting)
A nuclear reaction can produce much higher temperatures than that. Finding a good medium, and a good way to contain/control the reaction is an engineering problem.
Uhm, no, it does not. The equation you are referring to is an engineering one. It applies to a single round heat/work conversion. As the "spent" medium is hotter than fresh (and it always is), its heat could be used again in another cycle. And so on (assuming "endless" supply of fresh medium, which river provides), until the difference in temperatures make another cycle impractical. This is how efficiency can — in theory — be brought all the way up to 1 but not quite.
I don't think, the existing plants do even one more cycle because of all the engineering problems involved. Some use the "spent" hot water to heat up nearby buildings and/or orchards... Making these uses (of heat) more efficient is another problem — a lot of the heat-derived electricity is converted back to heat by, uhm, electric heaters, as well as grills and other cooking machinery. But that's a subject for another flame-war...
Browns Ferry Unit 1 (Score:3, Interesting)
One occurance that also recently occured at Browns Ferry [wate.com]was the automatic shutdown of the reactor due to a coolant leak. TVA reported to the NRC that an unknown amount of reactor cooling water had indeed leaked and they spent last weekend repairing it. After restart the high water temps forced this shutdown. In fact this is nothing new though. We had the Sequoyah reactor [tva.gov]using its cooling towers last year due to elevated water temps.
But yeah its been hot for sure. Also of interest is it looks like we are going to get the newest reactor in the US and that it be at Watts Bar [nrc.gov]. Unit 1 has been online there since 1996, and produces enough juice for 250,000 homes. Unit 2 at Watts Bar was roughly 80% complete when construction stopped. TVA is currently and exploring finishing the construction of Unit 2 giving us yet another clean power source. In September 2000 Watts Bar Unit 1 set a record for continuous operation of TVA reactors of similar design.
Re:Air conditioning ruined the South (Score:5, Interesting)
It sure burned the heck out of wood, Bo! The spelling is "Yankee gluttons", BTW.
"Most of us grew up without air conditioning and were happy that way. We used clothes lines to hang and dry our clothes, not electric driers. Life was good."
HAHAHAHA! When I see local folks volunteering to go back to an AC-free life I'll buy the connection between "no AC" and "happiness".
I still use clothes lines to dry clothes (clothes smell fresher besides the energy savings), but there is good reason AC is popular among non-Yankees. I don't see any nostalgia for doing washing in wooden tubs and ironing it with (aptly named) "sad irons" either. The tubs are planters and the irons are doorstops, the shotgun shacks whose layout helped somewhat with cooling are empty, and (most) of the people don't look the the folks in a James Agee book.
I'm a "Damn Yankee" (the ones that came and stayed) myself, though I'm far more genuinely countrified (and right wing) than most locals.
If you wanted to keep out the sort of Yankees that wouldn't fit, not selling them everything at fire-sale prices would have done it. The Southeast got rich and is getting richer by urban and suburban sprawl, so if ya want things the way they used to be, move into the Deep South and away from the coast.
Re:Some people sell their "waste" heat (Score:3, Interesting)
The reason that power plants throw away lots of heat is because it's not economically feasible to do anything with it. In time, as the cost of energy increases, it might be worthwhile to extract more from it, using more expensive methods. But at the moment, it's not.
Trying to rush things just wastes resources. Every dollar you spend extracting energy uneconomically is a dollar that can't be spent elsewhere.