Ok, and for that small fraction of panels, 15 years down the road, where are they going? Landfill. It’s an inescapable destiny at some point.
Solar eating its own lunch in ERCOT
- Thread starter OVERKILL
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Not really. New reactors are better than the old reactors that are currently running and they will get better and less expensive with time. 100 units is nothing in the grand scheme. There are something like 200 coal power plants in the US and thats a 16% of our grid. So only needing 100 nuclear power plants to more than replace those 200 is a selling point not a detractor.
Any way you slice it Nuclear power is by a large margin the safest, cleanest, and most sustainable power generation method we have. It is borderline a crime we haven't gone 100% nuclear by now.
I get the sentiment here but there are very good reasons to have a diverse generation portfolio. Hydro & CT’s offer blackstart capabilities, quicker ramping for Hz control & better “ride through” during Hz excursions.
That said, for nuclear to be such a small portion of our portfolio is a crime
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It doesn't hurt to have a diverse grid as older PWR reactors just want to run at full power at all times, but newer molten salt reactors don't have that issue really. So even that problem has been addressed.
I got a junk panel that was manufactured in 1982, still works, lower output but yeah eventually things break
From the ramp rates I’ve seen, even the new nukes lag pretty far behind hydro stations in ramp rates. Heck, I have stations that can ramp a couple hundred mw/min.
Also, Hz excursions damage the low pressure turbine blades in steam turbines. Large units have very long blades making them much more susceptible to damage. Due to that, their protective relays will trip them offline in situations where CT’s & hydro units can ride through & stay online.
Blackstart is also something I’ve never seen a nuclear unit registered for. NERC even mandates offsite power to a nuclear unit as the primary objective during restoration event.
100 units is huge from a location, cost, NIMBY, and regulatory perspective. Coal and NatGas can be stood up at a fraction of the cost and in less time.
Got to admit that the LP blade issues are about 1 Hz awy from synchronous speeds, and that theres a time/speed element. Oz grid is held to +/- 0.15 Hz....
If we get 1Hz away, grid operators are going to be blacking out towns.
As an aside the big influx of renewables, clouds, wid etc. means that we are having to FCAS down, soemthing quite rare in the old world of governor controls.
It’s not that rare of an event in WECC. I’ve had more than my share of pseudo gen load drop dispatches over the last few years. Have lost a couple generators during excursions as well. Lost as in trip, not damaged.
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Location by a water source, in a geological stable area which is exactly where a natural gas power plant would go. Cost over a lifetime the difference is negligible but nuclear power is disadvantaged in initial cost. Regulation a bit worse for nuclear power but coal and gas have it pretty bad the EPA being the EPA. Time to build that really is the hang up as nuclear power plants take about twice the time to build. Although I would imagine that could be shortened as construction crews got better at building them over time.
But with 5,000,000 million people a year dying from fossil fuel related pollution seems like a very small price to pay. You know so my kids can be healthier as I have an asthmatic son. I'm sure you have an aunt or cousin or someone with a breathing issue that would like to breath better so again small price to pay.
OVERKILL
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PWR's can actually load follow quite well. France does it regularly, and Germany's units used to as well. 100% baseload is the cheapest mode of operation, which is generally why US plants run that way. I know Diablo Canyon is able to load follow, but doesn't.
We have an extremely large amount of operating experience with water cooled and moderated reactors, while we have very little with MSR's. There will be some teething pains for sure with MSR technology. Heck, the first SMR being built in North America (at Darlington) is just a shrunk BWR, lol.
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From what I recall, US plants can't black start because they can't grid island. They are forced to SCRAM on a loss of grid, so they aren't available for black start. We used 7 or 8 of our units to rebuild the grid during the 2003 northeast blackout, as both Darlington and Bruce can grid island. Bruce units can stay on steam bypass indefinitely (Darlington can too, but it's hard on the condensers, so they shut units down after 3 hours), and the Bruce B units were the first things loaded when bringing the grid back up from a black start.
Yes. US nuclear units are baseloaded only. The single nuclear facility that was in my old control area couldn't even be called on for reactive support (similar to the PV & Wind stations). They were able to withstand loss of 230kV offsite power for some time (can't disclose the duration).
Due to their inability to regulate, I've never seen one with a zero droop setting approval. This particular station also only generated onto the 500kV system (230kV was offsite power). The 500kV system is the last to get energized due to the reactive capacity required support it.
OVERKILL
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The note about ramping faster than the hydro units is something else. I've had to standby while Diablo would ramp & that was a painful experience lol. Several of my hydro stations can ramp from bottom to the top of their range in 1-2min.
Several years ago now WECC experienced a large disturbance that knocked offline every large generator in CA. It was the hydro & smaller CT's that were able to ride through & keep portions of the system online (including most of the geothermal at the Geysers).
OVERKILL
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So, Bruce is about 300km from the GTA and has a large swath of 500kV lines running from it into the GTA (and a few more local 230kV lines that run to closer load centres). When Bruce was built, it was on the site of Canada's first "large scale" (220MWe) nuclear reactor, at Douglas Point. The site is a sprawling 2,500 acres and was originally planned for 16 reactors: Bruce A/B/C/D.
The original transmission corridor from the Bruce, given the weather conditions experienced on the shores of Lake Huron, was somewhat fragile and not sized adequately to handle the total generation the site was capable of producing.
The Bruce A units were oversized thermally, with 750MWe electrical sides with process steam being diverted to various operations around the grounds including district heating and running the developing crop of heavy water plants that were being constructed. The Bruce Energy Centre was also privy to this process steam, which was planned to be able to be used to heat greenhouses and other benefits.
The Bruce B units featured the same reactor cores but without the steam drum arrangement present on the A units and no process steam production. These units were originally rated at 860MWe.
Because of its location and expectation of regular transmission interruptions (and inadequacy) the Bruce plant was both designed, and operated around the concept of flexibility. The premise that the plant was going to experience disturbances and load rejections and would need to ride them out, with the ability to island indefinitely if required. The operators of this behemoth, which, at the time, with all 8 units operational was 6,440MWe, were dubbed "Cowboys", since it wasn't uncommon for them to be riding these units through major disturbances and doing so successfully.
So, when we had the grid collapse in 2003, it was just "another day" for the Bruce group. They islanded the units and waited for a call from the IESO as to what the plan was. The IESO called them, as expected, and they said they had 3x units (all B units, one was offline for maintenance and A was not restarted yet at this point) hot and ready to go. These were the building blocks used to bring the grid back up, in conjunction with Niagara, Lennox and other large generators. Darlington was also brought back up and used later on in the restorative process, though it was not used for the initial black start because the units had been shutdown after initially islanding. Pickering units don't have steam bypass like the Bruce and Darlington (based on Bruce) units do, so it had to shutdown.
Every plant that was planned after Bruce was based on the standardized CANDU 9 design (Darlington), which had been developed and refined at Bruce. 8 units were planned for Darlington, another 8 for Wesleyville, the aforementioned 16 at the Bruce site. Hydro's plans were predicated on a steady >3% load growth rate that never materialized after the economic collapse in the 80's. Darlington B was never built and the other sites lay dormant. It isn't until now, decades later, that Darlington B is back on the table, along with Bruce C and Wesleyville.
While down here we officially have hydro units as registered blackstart units and listed as usage for restoration and building cranking paths. Down south, there's a couple CT's that're utilized for the same.
It's unfortunate that we aren't able to utilize our units in the same manner.
It's unfortunate that we aren't able to utilize our units in the same manner.
Haven't had too much time this morning to deep dive but found this right off the bat:
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48364
For commercial nuclear power plants, however, the 2023 NASEM study recommended that "the current U.S. policy of using a once-through fuel cycle with the direct disposal of commercial spent nuclear fuel into a repository should continue for the foreseeable future," but also that "DOE should develop and implement a phased, long-range research and development program that focuses on advanced separations and transmutations technologies."
Going through regs themselves is a more tedious effort even if I "control f" like a madman.
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They do load follow but that's more due to intervention in the form of moving control rods and less so from the inherent design of the reactor. Now PWRs do have a negative temperature coeffcient of reactivity. Which means more heat less reactivity in simple terms. That also means less heat equals more reactivity. So as you draw more heat off the primary loop power goes up. The issue being as you have water always as a solid this effect isn't enormous. So to aid it if more power is needed from the reactor than the current state will allow you either have to pull out rods or get a fast insertion. Although this pulling of rods is generally automatically handled by reactor controls.
Long winded way of saying yes PWRs can load follow but at the cost of efficiency. MSR's load follow while still maintaining good efficiency and if cost is a concern that efficiency is important. Also as MSR's can and are refueled without the need for lengthy shutdowns thats another cost benefit and grid stability benefit. PWRs are great I operated one in the Navy but they are outdated. Still better than wind, solar, gas, and coal, but not the latest and greatest so to speak.
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