Science
Related: About this forumEven in Sacremento, Sacramento of all places, they're waking up.
While Nuclear Energy has proved to be, beginning in the 1990's, the cleanest reliable form of energy, and is the only one that can be scaled to eliminate dangerous fossil fuel use, there were a number of nuclear power plants that were operated poorly. Probably the worst operated nuclear reactor in the United States outside of Three Mile Island - which has long served as an inspiration for people to ignore the routine and massive death toll associated with fossil fuels - was the Rancho Seco Nuclear Reactor, operated by SMUD (Sacramento Municipal Utility District.) The performance of this reactor was so bad, that its reliability was only slightly better than the very best wind parks in the world. In the period which it operated, from April 1975 to June 1989, when it was shut by public referendum, it's capacity utilization was less than 40%.
A former head of SMUD, David Freeman referred to nuclear energy as the "most expensive and dangerous source of energy on Earth."
This may be an indication of why Rancho Seco was so poorly run. Apparently SMUD was incapable of hiring senior engineering staff that could do math. It's rather absurd to call nuclear power the "most dangerous source of energy on Earth" when between six and seven million people die each year from air pollution, caused by combustion of dangerous fossil fuels. It appears that SMUD engineering supervisors can't count.
Freeman "replaced" the 913 MWe nuclear reactor with an 11 MWe solar farm that probably at best, meets recent solar capacity utilization in California, about 24%, meaning it's really, in terms of average continuous power, 3 MW at best. Then quietly, SMUD built a 600 MWe dangerous natural gas plant Cosumnes Power Plant, which has now operated for 17 years, spewing, without restriction the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide into the planetary atmosphere, where it causes droughts, fires, heat deaths, extreme weather, what have you and so on...
Given the hostility to nuclear power in California, and Sacramento in particular, it was somewhat surprising to read this editorial in the Sacremento Bee:
To fulfill promises of Diablo Canyon closure, California ignores fossil fuel emissions
Excerpts:
The twin-reactor facility along the San Luis Obispo coast powers millions of homes, and the lost output is supposed to be substituted with sources that do not emit greenhouse gases. That was a highlight of the agreement with labor and environmental groups when PG&E announced in 2016 that it would not renew the plants license and decommission it by 2025. It was also a key selling point for Californians outside the SLO community.
Five years later, that promise has become obsolete. As California absorbs the constant gut punches from global warmings quickening pace, the added stress on the power grid has increased the states reliance on fossil fuels even with Diablo Canyons 2,200 megawatts of energy still online. California is facing unnerving realities with its power supply that are undermining the transition to a 100% green energy grid by 2045. Recurring heat waves have hiked electricity demand statewide to the point where we experienced rolling blackouts last summer for the first time in almost two decades. Thats forced California to burn cheaper carbon-emitting sources to keep the lights on. Natural gas accounted for over 48% of in-state power generation last year, up from 43% in 2019, according to the California Energy Commission...
...The extreme weather this summer has only deepened our dependence on it...
...In a cruel twist, California needed to burn excess fossil fuels to meet the electricity demand caused by extreme heat that experts say would have been impossible without climate change. Thats right we need fossil fuels to protect us from the environmental dangers that grew more severe because of our over-reliance on them...
Don't worry, be happy, batteries, batteries, batteries.
Screw those cobalt digging slave children in the "Democratic" "Republic" of Congo, and don't pay attention to the source of all those ketones, or all those lithium mines. Screw the laws of thermodynamics.
It's a shame that the people at SMUD never hired competent engineers, since they helped give nuclear energy a largely undeserved bad name, giving anti-nukes, masters not of engineering, but masters of selective attention, all the more power to dig more dangerous natural gas, more wires to connect unreliable so called "renewable energy" facilities in order to cause more fires, more heat deaths, and faster climate change, all the time, in Trumpian scale mendacity, declaring themselves "green."
Bobstandard
(1,279 posts)Right?
NNadir
(33,368 posts)I've spent a lot of time covering it in my journal here, over many years: NNadir's Journal
To me, and it's a long standing opinion based on intensive study, anti-nukes are the exact moral and intellectual equivalents of anti-vaxxers.
Am I clear?
hunter
(38,264 posts)... as was DavisBesse.
B&W was a reasonable choice for a contractor at the time. They'd built components of the the Nautilus, the Savannah, and the Indian Point Unit One nuclear power plant, all cutting edge technology, problems to be expected.
Three Mile Island, Rancho Seco, and DavisBesse, later projects supposedly based on on experience, were beset by problems.
I sometimes wonder if this was part of engineering hubris of the time that afflicted everything from the Space Shuttle to the Chevrolet Vega, whether it was the engineers themselves or the corporate culture.
In any case, these unfortunate events weren't anything so horrible as the ordinary use of fossil fuels.
You could still buy leaded gasoline in California at the time.
That lead shit has a half life of forever...
NNadir
(33,368 posts)You have to keep in mind that the engineers were building large structures using tools like slide rules and computers at a power level a high school student today would find laughable.
There is a huge difference in scale between a reactor powering a submarine, and one powering an electrical grid.
There was (pretty much) no such thing as "materials science engineering" and - this was certainly true at Shoreham on Long Island, where I grew up - engineers who were used to building and operating coal plants were making decisions about nuclear plant design.
It was a "too many cooks" scenario.
Overall, given the technology of the time, US nuclear engineers did an outstanding job over all. They built more than 100 nuclear reactors in a period of approximately 25 years, this while maintaining the lowest electricity prices in the world.
Regrettably, we now face a "FOAKE" situation all over again, because fear and ignorance have prevented nuclear power from coming even remotely close to meeting its potential.
There is an upside to this regrettable fact to my mind, and that is that the used nuclear fuel was never dumped in a nuclear dump, and it wasn't reprocessed.
We now know a great deal more about lanthanide, actinide and other fission product chemistry, and we have both fresh and aged fuel with which to work.
We also have lots of plutonium with a very complex isotopic vector; we have neptunium, we have americium. These are tremendously valuable resources should future generations be smart enough to save what is left to be saved, and to restore what can be restored.
Let's face it; my generation had a landfill mentality; we were abysmally short sighted people. Future generations will have, must have, closed cycle mentalities. The supply of uranium, as I have convinced myself, is essentially infinite.
Particularly valuable used nuclear fuel resources are readily available in California, notably at Diablo Canyon and at San Onofre.
Much can be done with these resources; and I expect that the smarter generation rising will do it. I had some good ideas in my life time. I have advised my son, now 22, to steal them all.
hunter
(38,264 posts)Last edited Tue Jul 27, 2021, 09:47 PM - Edit history (1)
I had four brilliant very, very broken religiously insane World War II Nazi and Imperial Japan crushing grandparents.
I wouldn't wish that glory on my own children. Their children, my parents, suffered.
I don't ever want to be that deeply twisted sporadic hero to my own children.
Alas my wife, especially my wife, and sometimes me, push those limits at times.
I'll be damned lucky if I get a song.