Posts
A nuclear power plant is identical to a fossil fuel plant from the steam lines to the generators.
The difference is how the steam is made.
That means that any coal or natural gas plant is already a 2/3 complete nuclear power plant.
I know it will work because the power plant North of here used to be nuclear and the powerhouse was converted to use steam from natural gas when Duke fucked up a refueling and cracked the containment doing maintenance when it was offline.
The turbines don't care what boiled the water.
The big barrier to adding a reactor and such to an existing plant is not technical.
It's political.
It's an embedded bureaucracy that's intended to make the construction so expensive that a profit will likely never be realized.
If I was president, I'd simply declare it a national defense item and start putting the same reactors as the Navy is using in subs and carriers (whichever design is appropriate) and have the damn Navy run them and slip around a couple of EPA regs because the DOD is exempt.
Only through super-human restraint would I not invite protesters to participate in protecting the environment from radiation personally. I guess they could volunteer, I would make sure the seats were VERY comfy.
Another problem is that building almost any new power plant involves years and years of wading through lawsuits filed by every two-bit "environmental" group. Even if the lawsuits are frivolous, they cost money to deal with and take time.
ReplyDeleteBetter than using USN nukes would be using the more modern 4th or 5th generation nuke plants. Especially the pebble-bed variety. But anything newer than 2nd gen would be great.
ReplyDeleteEven without the lawsuits the paperwork, permitting approval process of the government, mostly imposed by Democrats over the years... And then they complain about "crumbling infrastructure" when they were mostly the ones at fault for it not being maintained or upgraded. The biggest problems with it usually tend to be in traditionally Democrat controlled areas. Where it happens in traditionally Republican areas lack of infrastructure is usually due to explosive population growth as people flee there from traditionally Democrat areas and overwhelm the system.
ReplyDeleteThere's a company called NuScale that's making Small Modular Reactors that can be moved into a place like an existing plant and replace the old fuel with a nuclear power plant. They just got their Federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission approvals.
ReplyDeleteIn theory, converting to nuclear ought to be easier. FWIW, I wrote a piece on having the A4W reactors used on aircraft carriers mass produced and put them everywhere. That was 2010. They have a mil spec, national stock numbers and all, not to mention very long records of safe operation. There's a bunch of retired navy guys who know how to operate them, a ton of training materials and more.
And a constant supply of 'new meat' of not-retired but done with x number of years of service from the Navy.
DeleteHeck, you could even make floating units for disaster relief or in places expected to suffer sea level rise (snark...)
The problem is that the bureaucracy is stupid. Just because an element is useless or radioactive virtually forever does not mean that we cannot expose it to radiation inside a reactor and transmute it into something either useful or at least manageable. Look up the information on the CANDU reactor.
ReplyDeleteA few observations: 1) both nuclear and fossil fired plants use the Rankine cycle but steam pressures and temperatures are notably higher in fossil fired plants vs. nuclear plants. So the steam turbines do look different. 2) Navy nuke reactors like the AW4 (carrier size reactors) are notably small than commercial reactors ~300 MW electric as far as I can tell from open sources) vs. ~1000 MW (not SMR or pebble bed) so how economies of scale work out is unclear. 3) The US really needs a plan and infrastructure to reprocess spent fuel instead of leaving it in dry cask storage on site at nuclear plants. No clue on what the Navy does with spent fuel.
ReplyDeleteTango Oscar Delta
Absolutely agree that re-processing spent nuclear fuel in breeder reactors is the best plan. Given abundant supplies of non-fissionable U238, being able to make plenty of P235 would ensure we had nearly an infinite supply of energy for many, many generations.
DeleteWe should be generating the base of all our electric power from nuclear in this country. We should also use waste heat and bulk power from nuclear to run plants using the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert coal to gasoline and diesel fuel and to power distillation plants for biofuels. If we did that we could put the middle east out of the oil business and be a major net exporter of fuel to the world. And we could ship refined fuels, not crude oil, so the profits to the US would be better. Not to say if we started doing it that other coal rich and oil poor countries that are nuclear capable wouldn't follow (like China and Russia). But cutting off the $$$ to Islamic despots and terrorist supporters like Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. would be a good thing.
ReplyDelete