Can Nuclear and Wind Work Together?

At NEI, we've always said yes. Here's another source that agrees.

Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, Electricity, Environment, Energy, Politics, Technology, Economics, Wind Power

Comments

Stewart Peterson said…

Nothing in that article addressed the fact that every wind turbine must be backed up with a generator that can load-follow--and nuclear power plants can't load-follow. That means gas.

Sorry, but I still don't see how nuclear power--or any baseload energy source--can work with soft energy (wind, solar, waterwheels, tidal power, etc., as opposed to baseload biomass and baseload-capable big hydro). Soft energy is a completely different system; it renders reliability irrelevant as long as it is possible to respond to other sources' unreliability.

September 12, 2006 at 6:48 PM

Anonymous said…

Nuclear power and hydropower work very well together in Sweden - where they, in effect, share the load equally between them

September 16, 2006 at 9:03 AM

Stewart Peterson said…

1. Wind and hydro can work together because hydro can load-follow. That's my point. But if we don't have many suitable locations for dams (and we don't) we have to look somewhere else. In practice, that means gas.

2. "Three times the investment for the same production" assumes that windmills can back each other up. In practice, that doesn't work very well, and you still need backup generators--in most places, gas. Soft energy is a different way to produce power, not something that can work with the current system.

September 21, 2006 at 1:18 AM

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

Below is from our rapid response team . Yesterday, regional anti-nuclear organizations asked federal nuclear energy regulators to launch an investigation into what it claims are “newly identified flaws” in Westinghouse’s advanced reactor design, the AP1000. During a teleconference releasing a report on the subject, participants urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend license reviews of proposed AP1000 reactors. In its news release, even the groups making these allegations provide conflicting information on its findings. In one instance, the groups cite “dozens of corrosion holes” at reactor vessels and in another says that eight holes have been documented. In all cases, there is another containment mechanism that would provide a barrier to radiation release. Below, we examine why these claims are unwarranted and why the AP1000 design certification process should continue as designated by the NRC. Myth: In the AP1000 reactor design, the gap between the shield bu...

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

Several weeks ago Joshua Pearce at Clarion University in Pennsylvania released a study titled “ Thermodynamic limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology .” In the study he stated... nuclear energy production would have to increase by 10.5% per year from 2010 to 2050 to both replace fossil-fuel-energy use and meet the future energy demands. This line, of course, made the headlines and has been picked up by several outlets and blogs . When looking into his calculations for this statement, he made one assumption error that overstated the above sentence by nearly a factor of three. Page 121, Section 4.1 of the study states: Richard Smalley pointed out that in 2004, the global economy consumed the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil per day, which converted into electricity terms is the equivalent of 14.5 TeraWatts (TW), or 14,500,000 MegaWatts (MW) (2005). … With a nuclear plant having about 1000 MW (1 GW) of capacity, we would need 14,500...

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

You may have noticed over the past few weeks that a number of nuclear plants are shut down for refueling outages or are resuming operations after just returning from one. This type of routine outage usually occurs in the spring or fall when electricity demand is low so that nuclear reactors can replace about one-third of the spent fuel rods with new fuel and conduct other routine maintenance and repairs at the plant. To get a better sense of how refueling works at a nuclear energy facility, I spoke with Marcus Nichol, NEI’s senior project manager for used fuel storage and transportation, and asked him to explain the basics. Why does a nuclear plant need to replace one-third of its fuel? Nichol: The main purpose of a refueling outage is to replace older fuel that is depleted—meaning it can no longer efficiently produce energy from nuclear fission reactions—with new fuel. This “used fuel” has typically been used in the reactor for four-and-a-half to six years before it is pe...

NEI Nuclear Notes

Search This Blog