THIS is Texas? 6º F

121917_5073_303.webp
 
In much of the country they no-longer need to come to your house to cut-off your power. With the new smart meters they can cut you off from a computer terminal.
 
Jetronic said:
depends on the outside temperature. If it's freezing, you can put frozen foods outside, but not the stuff in your fridge of course
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But why can't someone just pile some snow in a box or bowl and put it inside the fridge? You can also put a plastic jug of water outside to freeze then bring it inside to put in the fridge. When it is freezing like this there's free cooling, food should not rot when there's free cooling.
 
PandaBear said:
You can also put a plastic jug of water outside to freeze then bring it inside to put in the fridge.
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This is exactly what some of my friends were doing, turning their refrigerator into an ice box. For this to work effectively one must resist the urge to open the refrigerator door.
 
wag123 said:
This is exactly what some of my friends were doing, turning their refrigerator into an ice box. For this to work effectively one must resist the urge to open the refrigerator door.
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That's regardless of ice box or real refrigerator mode when you are freezing cold and electricity is $9 / kwh.
 
In hearings being held by the Texas legislature today it came out that one of the reasons for the natural gas shortage was that after ERCOT figured-out there was a major problem and instituted "rolling blackouts", electricity was shut off to infrastructure that was critical to the natural gas distribution network, causing natural gas power plants that were running to shut down, and also preventing additional power plants from firing up. What a cluster ****!
 
Most nuclear plants in the US and Canada are well over 40 years old and have timed out at least once on their initial license. Even the “ modern” South Texas plant didn’t get commercial until 1994 making it 27 years old. The Three Mile Island incident was in 78, I believe, and the Chernobyl incident was in 86. To make matters worse it seems seems every plant built was massively over budget. At the South Texas plant the contractor, Brown and Root, was skidded off the job. The Hollywood movies did not help the cause.

So what’s it going to be? Carbon free or nuclear free? Hard to get by without one or the other.
 
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PandaBear said:
I was always told that you can leave your food outside when you run into cold weather and power out condition. Would that have worked? or it is really urban legend?
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A snow bank ... the ultimate no cost refrigerator/freezer. :D
 
Snagglefoot said:
Most nuclear plants in the US and Canada are well over 40 years old and have timed out at least once on their initial license. Even the “ modern” South Texas plant didn’t get commercial until 1994 making it 27 years old. The Three Mile Island incident was in 78, I believe, and the Chernobyl incident was in 86. To make matters worse it seems seems every plant built was massively over budget. At the South Texas plant the contractor, Brown and Root, was skidded off the job. The Hollywood movies did not help the cause.

So what’s it going to be? Carbon free or nuclear free? Hard to get by without one or the other.
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These days it is impossible to build a nuke without a government backed guarantee. All the foreign plants don't break ground until a government backs the budget overrun, and you know they all overrun.
 
Snagglefoot said:
Most nuclear plants in the US and Canada are well over 40 years old and have timed out at least once on their initial license. Even the “ modern” South Texas plant didn’t get commercial until 1994 making it 27 years old. The Three Mile Island incident was in 78, I believe, and the Chernobyl incident was in 86. To make matters worse it seems seems every plant built was massively over budget. At the South Texas plant the contractor, Brown and Root, was skidded off the job. The Hollywood movies did not help the cause.

So what’s it going to be? Carbon free or nuclear free? Hard to get by without one or the other.
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Pickering just turned 50 BTW :)

Current operating timeline for Darlington is 2055 (it will have produced electricity for 65 years)
Current operating timeline for Bruce is 2064 "and beyond" according to their most recent release (it will have produced electricity for 87 years)

Pickering is the only nuke in Ontario that didn't go over budget. All the others did, by varying degrees, the worst being Darlington due to the Chernobyl build freeze. Bruce A cost $1.8 billion, was supposed to be ~$1 billion, Bruce B cost $6 billion, was supposed to be $3.9 billion. The projected cost for Darlington was based on Bruce B, as they are extremely similar, but Bruce B had a much shorter shovel-to-breaker period (6 years) than Darlington (10 years) because of the aforementioned build freeze, where interest rates were insane and we had an asset with tons of money already dumped into it producing zero electricity.
 
doitmyself said:
OVERKILL, what's your opinion of Bill Gate's nuclear power plant initiative? He claims they are developing a much simpler and safer power plant.

https://www.terrapower.com/people/bill-gates/
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That's the whole SMR philosophy, try to offset the lower productivity of the plant by greatly increasing simplicity and driving down CAPEX and OPEX. It's kind of the opposite philosophy of what got us to massive 1,200MW+ nuke units, where economy of scale drove up output.

I'm very excited about it, but I don't think it will go as well as planned. We've already seen major design changes on designs working their way through the various VDR processes, which is par for the course for paper designs, and we'll see more issues during initial construction and operation, as is the case for anything FOAK. That doesn't mean they won't work, but it will make them more expensive (initially) and presents obstacles and delays.

Compared to building a cookie-cutter design like the C6, there are going to be all kinds of surprises, this will draw-out construction, time, and increase cost. So I still feel that for replacing big existing sources of power we should go with mature designs that can be built quickly. For markets where large units don't work, that will be where SMR's absolutely shine.
 
OVERKILL said:
That's the whole SMR philosophy, try to offset the lower productivity of the plant by greatly increasing simplicity and driving down CAPEX and OPEX. It's kind of the opposite philosophy of what got us to massive 1,200MW+ nuke units, where economy of scale drove up output.

I'm very excited about it, but I don't think it will go as well as planned. We've already seen major design changes on designs working their way through the various VDR processes, which is par for the course for paper designs, and we'll see more issues during initial construction and operation, as is the case for anything FOAK. That doesn't mean they won't work, but it will make them more expensive (initially) and presents obstacles and delays.

Compared to building a cookie-cutter design like the C6, there are going to be all kinds of surprises, this will draw-out construction, time, and increase cost. So I still feel that for replacing big existing sources of power we should go with mature designs that can be built quickly. For markets where large units don't work, that will be where SMR's absolutely shine.
Click to expand...

In computer initiated industry there is a direction where everyone is going modular approach. You design and test 1 module, then you replicate them to 2,4,8,16,32,64,etc. You can improve time to market and economy of scale, reduce risk even if it means the design is not as optimal as a bigger optimal design that you have to test all over again for each size.

This is how Tesla end up using a lot of small cylinder cells that are standard size, and drive down the cost despite it in theory uses more material and is more wasteful. This in theory will work for nuke plants.

Except there are people who don't want nuke and will derail the process no matter big custom reactor or small modular portable reactor. This part will not change unless you either have war time effort or a dictator to silence these protests. I don't think SMR solve this problem. NIMBY is still NIMBY no matter the size of the reactor.
 
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