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Sunday, July 27, 2014

Nuclear Plant Shut Down by Hot Weather

The knock against solar and wind is that you can't depend on them when you need them: the sun doesn't shine at night, and solar cells are less efficient when it's cloudy. And the wind doesn't always blow. That's why conservatives always tout nuclear power as the always-reliable panacea that will always be there.

We've seen time and again that this is false, with the accidents in Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Nuclear plants are frequently shut down for maintenance, sometimes for months, a problem which will only get worse over time. And nuclear plants will have to shut down when they run out of storage space for their waste.

Now we have news that Scandinavian nuclear plants are being forced to shut down because of rising ocean temperatures:
OSLO (Reuters) - Sweden's top nuclear power generators have been forced to cut output because of exceptionally warm weather in Scandinavia, and their output could be reduced for over a week, their operators said on Wednesday.

Oskarshamn, part of Germany's E.ON and Forsmark, operated by Swedish utility Vattenfall have both cut output because warm sea water temperatures are limiting their ability to cool down.

"For each degree above 23 decrees Celsius in the cooling water, each unit has to decrease power by 3 percent," Forsmark said in a market message. "It is uncertain how long this will last, but according to meteorologists, the warm weather will last for at least 11 more days."

So, just when they need these nuclear power plants the most, they have to shut down. Not all that reliable. The same thing is true for coal plants, which use hundreds of billions of water annually for cooling.

As ocean temperatures rise due to global warming this problem will only recur, necessitating design changes to get cooling water from greater distances and depths.

2 comments:

juris imprudent said...

Here's is the progressive energy policy.

Or is it electricity from unicorn farts and rainbows?

Larry said...

Nikto, you ignorant slut. You can't even read correctly because of your blind hatred for certain things. No nuclear power plants have been shut down, you dolt. I quote, "The Forsmark nuclear power generator has three units with over 3,000 megawatts of built in capacity and data from the plant showed it was operating at about 92 percent of its built in capacity," and, "Oskarshamn, which currently operates two blocks with around 1,950 megawatt of built in capacity, has had to reduce output by about 90 megawatts because of warm cooling water temperatures, a spokesman said. Data from the plant showed it was operating at 93 percent of its built in capacity," and finally, "Vattenfall's Ringhals plant is not yet affected." No plants have been shut down, and they're a long ways from having to shut any down. Do you have any IDEA how much more 30° weather they'd need to have to raise Baltic Sea temps high enough to necessitate a shutdown? I hope that as a software developer you read the fucking requirements and specifications better than you read news articles, and that none of it required any knowledge of physics. Not for your sake, but for whoever depended on your work.

Larger quantities of warmer sea water will do the job. The original designers decided to use smaller cooling systems to minimize cost, accepting the trade-off. They may've been mistaken in their assumptions, but that can be fixed. When the wind doesn't blow for a few days, you can't fix that shit with more windmills, much as windbag politicians and screaming Luddites may try to make them turn with their mindless blasts of hot air.

Meanwhile, in Germany, fossil-fueled utilities are making money hand over fist suppying backing power to keep the endlessly fluctuating "green" power system afloat. Even the German version of The Daily Show, Oliver Welke's Heute Show, is actively mocking Germany's green power program as essentially religiously faith-based idiocy. They're not so much "wind farms" as they are "subsidy-collecting farms".