Westinghouse bankruptcy

[Easy Livin’ 3000]

While I'm sure opinions here are mixed on nuclear energy, it has been floated as one of the most effective options at slowing down carbon release into the atmosphere. Westinghouse was one of the few corporations involved in building new nuclear power plants, and they just filed for bankruptcy last week. Just part of the creative destruction process of capitalism, and undoubtedly one of the remaining players will be able to pick up their important assets at a deep discount. Perhaps even a good thing for the mid-term future of that industry?

http://www.economist.com/news/busin...-beset-problems-westinghouse-files-bankruptcy

 

[peakbagger]

I don't see any corporations that will have the appetite to build a nuclear power plant unless they are backed/owned by a nation like Russia or China. Even if they did I don't think there is an insurance company that would be interested in bonding the projects. China effectively now owns the rights to the AP 1000 reactor design and they will build any plants that get built in third world countries that don't believe in the boiler code. The Russians are building floating nuclear power plants and claim they will sell them to anyone with a check book. China is also planning on building floating Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) which apparently are destined for installation at their artificial islands and then going commercial.

Babcock and Wilcox was working on a SMR but they gave up. They still make reactors for the Navy.

Realistically the make or break for global warming is the developing world and they still need base load power preferably not coal. US power demand is slowing down and what is really needed are fast startup cycling power plants which currently are fueled with natural gas/distillate. If there are breakthroughs in large scale power storage and a country can afford it that too will be in the mix. India unfortunately doesn't have any significant potential for mining their own nuclear fuel but has lots of thorium so they and others are dusting off the old US studies for building thorium reactors.

 

[Easy Livin’ 3000]

I don't see any corporations that will have the appetite to build a nuclear power plant unless they are backed/owned by a nation like Russia or China. Even if they did I don't think there is an insurance company that would be interested in bonding the projects. China effectively now owns the rights to the AP 1000 reactor design and they will build any plants that get built in third world countries that don't believe in the boiler code. The Russians are building floating nuclear power plants and claim they will sell them to anyone with a check book. China is also planning on building floating Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) which apparently are destined for installation at their artificial islands and then going commercial.

Babcock and Wilcox was working on a SMR but they gave up. They still make reactors for the Navy.

Realistically the make or break for global warming is the developing world and they still need base load power preferably not coal. US power demand is slowing down and what is really needed are fast startup cycling power plants which currently are fueled with natural gas/distillate. If there are breakthroughs in large scale power storage and a country can afford it that too will be in the mix. India unfortunately doesn't have any significant potential for mining their own nuclear fuel but has lots of thorium so they and others are dusting off the old US studies for building thorium reactors.

Wow, I'm impressed. I've just been brought up to speed. The wheels keep turning, even if the US isn't the engine, don't they?

 

[jatoxico]

New designs that reportedly will run on existing waste and leave little waste of their own are really promising. Especially since some designs I've heard of do not go into melt down should there be a loss of cooling due to power outage etc.

 

[begreen]

Toshiba took it in the shorts. They are having a firesale so that they may possibly recover and keep lucrative maintenance contracts. Apple is eyeing their semiconductor business. 142 yr old company.

 

[woodgeek]

Plenty of nuclear supporters around here...the problem is cost.

Cost was high when these things were built, but were (1) subsidized by the govt and (2) benefitted from economies of scale due to civilian plants being able to leverage military assets. That is, there were already trained engineers ( and N engineering programs), mining and fuel enrichment facilities, special and expensive machine tools for fabbing large reactor parts, etc, for making military reactors.

Now that most of the military infrastructure is gone or mothballed or has gray hair, civilian operators are finding maintenance and retrofit on existing plants to sometimes be uneconomical. Building new ones from scratch....hopelessly too expensive to be worthwhile. The article talks about difficulty and cost and delays associated with sourcing the primary reactor vessel parts. That's a biggie. The giant machine tools that were used before (and amortized by military contracts) are long gone.

As for new tech....extensively researched a generation ago, and none of those designs look any cheaper. Breeder fuel cycles (including Thorium) involve large scale and complex chemical separations on highly radioactive materials. While the chemistry is not unlike other metal smelting and refining operations...the fact that it has to be done in a completely enclosed environment, by rad-hardened robots or manipulators, and all side products must be recycled or highly purified for disposal is a FORMIDABLE and hard to imagine cheap operation.

Like the Saturn V moon rocket....this was all fantastically expensive tech that benefitted hugely as a spin-off from military project tools and budgets...when the nation was young, growing, in a Cold War and thought it could afford anything.

Briefly: civilian nuclear as we do it (and no one has a better plan) is an expensive malinvestment.

 

[iamlucky13]

New designs that reportedly will run on existing waste and leave little waste of their own are really promising. Especially since some designs I've heard of do not go into melt down should there be a loss of cooling due to power outage etc.

Technically promising, but with a high economic barrier to implementation due to the initial development costs of certification and implementing the fuel processing, developing decommissioning processes, etc.

I'm hopeful we'll see some of them make it to market and revitalize the industry with improved safety and long-term economics, but I'm not crossing my fingers.

 

[peakbagger]

There were a group of MIT grads that announced a new process that was inherently safe (no pumps needed) to cool down in an emergency and could recycle old nuclear fuel. There was a recent review of their claims by an academic committee of MIT and the conclusion was that their initial claims were exaggerated. Unfortunately the old methods of vetting claims just doesn't match with the current speed of the media which is print the hype to get the eyeballs.

 

[jatoxico]

I'm not in a position to support or refute this http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/demand-clean-energy-inspires-new-generation-innovate-nuclear-power/ but what I understood from Nova was there was a materials development obstacle.

Public sentiment is solidly anti-nuclear which it seems to me has stifled support and development.

And of course development is expensive but I can't imagine a big enough wind farm to power NYC.

 

[semipro]

And of course development is expensive but I can't imagine a big enough wind farm to power NYC.

Even offshore?

 

[iamlucky13]

Even offshore?

Offshore has schedulability issues, too, even if they're not quite as bad as onshore usually is.

We need a well-diversified energy portfolio. Wind and solar can and will be a big part of it as they grow, but challenges are still anticipated as they surpass 20% in any given region, and I can barely even guess what it would take to push them past 50% market share.

That said, the leading state in the US for non-hydro renewable energy has enough installed wind capacity to power New York City on average, if you can buffer the variation in both supply and demand.

I'm talking, of course, about Texas, the state renewable energy advocates seem to mostly like to criticize. They're really big on wind, and moderately big on solar.

Interestingly enough, when I went looking for info on NYC electricity usage, one of the first hits I found was about a study of how much wind capacity would be required to replace their supply. The answer is apparently an offshore farm 5 times the size of the city itself:

http://engineering.mit.edu/ask/how-many-wind-turbines-would-it-take-power-all-new-york-city

 

[jatoxico]

Interestingly enough, when I went looking for info on NYC electricity usage, one of the first hits I found was about a study of how much wind capacity would be required to replace their supply.

Saw that too. Interestingly the nations largest offshore wind farm project was approved to be installed off Long Island. Still as you mentioned its only a partial solution even for this suburb of the city and only works when the wind blows.

 

[peakbagger]

The Europeans already have a pretty comprehensive model on how to integrate variable wind and solar. They use Norway's and to far lesser extent Scotland's pumped storage hydroelectric resources to act as a short term storage. Yes they still burn coal as currently its cheaper to buy emission credits than it is to by renewable power production. Although the systems is not fully built out and has its issues the reason the system exists is that the countries have energy policys in place and there is some coordination between countries.

Hydro Quebec is actively angling to be the power supplier for New England as they are currently sitting on 37,000 MW of mostly ponded storage hydroelectric dams with the potential to triple the output if there is a long term demand from the US. These dams are environmentally regarded as less than green due to variety of reasons but they are pretty ideal for offsetting variable renewable power production. Several European countries are deploying offshore wind farms which are a lot higher dispatch factor than on shore wind. There are some pretty conservative assessments that offshore wind along the northeast corridor has the potential for substantially powering New England, add in HQ into the mix and its technically viable. Financially and practically its not as easy even if the New England region decides to clean up their act as its still currently far cheaper to drill or dig a hole in the ground and burn fossil fuels. which is the approach the rest of the US can use to keep their power costs low to attract businesses to their region. The Clean Power Plan was an attempt at equalizing things but given the current administration, that plan is dead so the US will remain stuck in the situation where regions can decide to ignore long term environmental issues and stick with whatever the cheapest power is (which most likely is fossil).

 

[begreen]

Even offshore?

Less than a quarter of NYC's power is renewable. The city's electrical consumption is huge and has to come from a diverse network of sources. This is an interesting article on the complexities of supplying NYC with power. It's not a trivial problem.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...ork-city-gets-its-electricity-power-grid.html

 

[jatoxico]

On the bright side, pun intended, NYC residents consume far less power and FF on a per capita basis than any other US residents.

From my perspective wind and solar are viable options but can only partly fulfill our needs as they require a large foot print.

Interesting the mention of pumped hydro acting as "batteries". Not sure if any are being used in conjunction with either solar or wind to run pumps during peak output.

 

[peakbagger]

Interesting the mention of pumped hydro acting as "batteries". Not sure if any are being used in conjunction with either solar or wind to run pumps during peak output.

Pumped hydro doesn't really care where the power comes from, the operators are just looking for when the prices make sense to run as pump versus running as generator. An extreme example is times when the wind and solar resources along with baseload exceed the demand, in this case the power rate goes negative where anyone generating power has to pay to sell power to the grid (it happens on occasion in Texas and in the summer in New England on weekends on rarer occasions). In this case the pumped storage owner is going to be running his system to pump water up hill, not only are they not paying for power they are getting paid to pump it. So now the owner has a storage pond full of water and Monday morning on a hot summer day, maybe a baseload plant like a nuke has to drop load and the wind stops blowing, there is suddenly a demand for power and the price goes up accordingly. The pumped storage firm then reverses the plant and makes a bundle selling power that they were paid to store the night before. This is very simple concept, the reality is that there financial wizards out there coming up with all sorts of complex schemes to maximize the profit from this capability.

The fundamental problem with pumped hydro is it takes a lot of space and the resultant lakes are not great for wildlife as wildlife needs stable water levels. Due to the "lot of space issue" the impoundments have a lot of shallows and generate a lots of methane from rotting vegetation. There are also some issues with fixed mercury in the soil being converted to a more reactive compound that can get into the food chain. The local tribes in the region of the big dams in Quebec claim that the salmon runs have collapsed due to operation of the dams. The province of Quebec has decided the long term environmental impacts are acceptable while in the US there is a rush to remove dams. The last big ponded storage proposal in the US east was the Dickey Lincoln project in NW maine. It would use up 90,000 acres and be capable of storing 980 MWhr It was actually built to match up with the Maine Yankee Wiscasset nuclear plant and a never built Maine Yankee Richmond plant as a way of storing power at night to sell as peak power during the day. It was shot down by the early environmental movement. Effectively the choice New England has with ponded storage is to let the province of Quebec host the environmental degradation in return for steady flow of cash heading north. Note this and the HQ projects are megaprojects only financially feasible by governments who can issue long term bonds and back them by the government. Mass has couple of smaller pumped hydro projects, one in Greenfield that is just down the river from the former Vt Yankee and one in Western Mass in the Berkshires.

 

[sportbikerider78]

I think people need to be educated on nuclear power. It is not something to be feared, but understood and used mainly near cities that have very large baseloads.

People are so dumb they think the cooling towers are actually outputting something other than steam.

 

[jatoxico]

Pumped hydro doesn't really care where the power comes from, the operators are just looking for when the prices make sense to run as pump versus running as generator.

Thanks for the info. I got the above quoted and that these have been operated for years using existing technology. I didn't know anything about the environmental negatives or if anyone has tied large scale wind or solar to current pumped hydro plants.

The concern with mercury is typically the organic forms which are highly soluble in biological tissue. Inorganic mercury isn't nearly as toxic and is surprisingly "safe" by comparison. Conversion by single cell plants is a known mechanism of conversion of inorganic to organic. If these ponds are full of algae etc. I could see how that could pose a problem since it will be concentrated as it moves up the food chain.

 

[semipro]

People are so dumb they think the cooling towers are actually outputting something other than steam.

Doesn't tower coolant also contain other chemicals to prevent scaling, biological growth, etc?

 

[semipro]

IIRC hydro pumping has been used in the U.S. for a while.
There's an interesting concept that uses electric trains that move up and down slopes for energy storage.
When it comes to energy storage "density" though, while potential energy is good, chemical energy is much better, and nuclear energy rocks.
In the long run though, the only truly sustainable sources are those that harness the daily energy (flux) of the sun. Everything else; fossil, geothermal, nuclear, etc. is based on exploiting stored energy.

 

[iamlucky13]

Doesn't tower coolant also contain other chemicals to prevent scaling, biological growth, etc?

Evaporative cooling towers do. How much of that escapes with the steam and what its effects might be, I've never looked into, but it can't be much. It's also not a matter at all unique to nuclear power.

Dry cooling towers do not. This is less common because it is more expensive to implement. There are also quite a few plants cooled by river or sea water, but I doubt you could get a permit to use river water for any new construction based on possible effects of the warmed discharge water on aquatic life.

 

[peakbagger]

There are dry cooling towers used but they come with an efficiency loss and usually a large upfront cost. A standard evaporative cooling tower can bring the condensate down to close to the wet bulb temperature while a dry tower can only get down near the dry bulb temperature. In the northeast the dry bulb and wet bulb are pretty close in hot weather but out west in the desert there can be big difference in power output by going with a standard tower. There are also hybrids that are dry coolers equipped with sprays, if they really need more output and the relative humidity is low the plant owner can turn on the sprays and drop the condenser temp. Most new power plants use treated wastewater from a nearby treatment plant for makeup water for their towers.

If you have ever heard of a "swamp cooler" you are probably from a hot and dry area but not much demand out east as they don't work very well in hot and humid conditions. All a swamp cooler does is introduce mist into an airstream, the mist evaporates and cools the air while raising the humidity in the air. I actually installed one on a small turbine last year in New England but it was a special case where they really needed every last bit of power in hot weather.

There are a couple of reasons why direct water cooling has fallen out of favor, there are very strict limits on the velocity of the water being sucked into the intakes which inevitably have a filter somewhere on them. Fish and other organisms die when they hit the filters unless the velocities are kept quite low and that means the intake structures need to be huge. There is inevitably biology in the raw water that will plug the plant equipment and since the water is only being used once the plant is seriously restricted on what they use to treat the water as its going right back out. Thermal limits are the other issued mentioned, in most rivers heating up the water is bad as the dissolved oxygen content of the water drops the warmer it gets. Fresh water game fish prefer well oxygenated water.

On an odd note I read that the Florida Manatee is off the endangered species list in Florida but there is a concern that they tend to gather at the warm water discharges of nuclear power plants to stay warm in the winter and if any of the nuke plants close down, it will be bad for the manatees. On an even more bizarre note from a few years back the Seabrook nuke station in NH has ocean water inlets for cooling, apparently lobsters would get sucked in the intakes and eventually would get filtered out upstream of the cooling equipment. The employees were hauling out the lobsters and selling them in large quantities. They got busted eventually and some lost their jobs.

 

[georgepds]

I think people need to be educated on nuclear power. It is not something to be feared, but understood and used mainly near cities that have very large baseloads.

People are so dumb they think the cooling towers are actually outputting something other than steam.

You could start by talking about the waste... how long it lasts..where it's stored ..etc