Here's another followup to yesterday's AP story on drought and nuclear energy that we referred to earlier today. Steve Kerekes, a colleague of mine who runs the media relations department for NEI, dealt directly with Mitch Weiss, the AP reporter who wrote the story. He dropped me the following note that he asked me to share with everyone:
Call me old-fashioned. When I studied journalism in college, and in my subsequent career as a reporter many moons ago, the goals to strive for in covering the news, beyond accuracy, were balance and context. Thus my disbelief at the refusal of the Associated Press over the past 24 hours to provide context for a story it moved on the wire yesterday with a Lake Norman, N.C., dateline. It’s running in newspapers across the country under headlines such as “Drought Could Force Nuke-Plant Shutdowns,” and the story opens, “Nuclear reactors across the Southeast could be forced to throttle back or temporarily shut down later this year because drought is drying up the rivers and lakes that supply power plants with the awesome amounts of cooling water they need to operate.”Just another day at the office. As you can imagine, we'll be hunting down strings from this story for quite a while thanks to the AP. But hey, when you can buy a line from an anti-nuclear activist like the one that was served up yesterday, who cares about truth or context?
In full, the nuclear-centric story runs more than 20 paragraphs and 1,000-plus words, yet the AP remarkably couldn’t find room to include four or five words of context explaining that ANY power plant that generates electricity by moving steam through a turbine and then uses cooling water to condense the steam can face a similar circumstance under drought conditions. No, AP insists, it wanted to focus strictly on nuclear power plants.
So what, in AP’s view, that readers may receive an incomplete view of this dynamic, given that an anti-nuclear critic is quoted in the article’s FOURTH paragraph saying, “Water is the nuclear industry’s Achilles’ heel.”
So what, in AP’s view, that the percentage of electricity produced by coal-fired power plants – exceeds the percentage of electricity produced by nuclear power plants in the following Southeast states: Alabama (55 percent coal, 23 percent nuclear), Arkansas (47 percent coal, 29 percent nuclear), Florida (32 percent coal, 14 percent nuclear), Georgia (63 percent coal, 23 percent nuclear), Kentucky (95 percent coal, 0 percent nuclear), Maryland (60 percent coal, 28 percent nuclear), Mississippi (39 percent coal, 22 percent nuclear), North Carolina (60 percent coal, 32 percent nuclear), Tennessee (65 percent coal, 26 percent nuclear) Texas (37 percent coal, 10 percent nuclear) and Virginia (47 percent coal, 38 percent nuclear).
In its conversations with AP while it was researching the story, NEI pressed the point that all steam-cycle power plants can be affected by drought conditions. When the story first hit the wire, NEI tried again to have a four- or five-word update included to provide the appropriate context.
No, says AP, “We wanted to focus on nuclear.”
Readers around the country can be forgiven today if they’ve come away with a misguided view of the nation’s energy alternatives going forward. The Associated Press isn’t inclined to clear it up for them.
Comments
You would do well to forward you story to every major newspaper, and see if there are editors that still care about the truth.
If we were to replace nuclear with wind or solar, we'd need a land area the size of West Virginia for wind farms or a land area the size of New Jersey for solar arrays. And that's only to replace 20% of our electricity. Doesn't make sense to me.
NRC sets minimum water levels for NPPs in their licenses. Is the same true for coal, oil and NG plants? I don't know the answer, but that's the right question, not whether or not all steam plants need water. Of course they do.
There's this amazing new invention called the ROOFTOP out there. Look into it.
Right now every watt of power generated by solar and wind have to be backed up by spinning reserve from some convectional source, which is mostly coal. Until this is eliminated, solar and wind cannot make a difference.
I think you are confusing NRC conditions for minimum water for safety systems that are intended to ensure sufficient cooling is available to remove decay heat from the reactor after shutdown. Nuclear power plants have designated auxiliary cooling sources; by license, a plant is required to shut down if the water falls below that minimum.
Also, how much energy is used to manufacture solar panels, and do they generate more than that over their useful life?
Without cooling water, the steam turbine can't operate. If the plant has a boiler bypass damper, the gas turbine may continue to operate, but the ~40% share of the output that the steam turbine produced is lost. If the plant does not have a gas bypass damper, the gas turbine can't operate, because the boiler would overheat without cooling water.
- Matthew B
If you have a thermal power plant, with the same heat source temperature, and the same thermal power output, and the same environmental regulations regarding water discharge temperature, then you need exactly the same flow rate of cooling water - irrespective of whether your heat source is coal, solar thermal, nuclear fission, geothermal or whatever.
Carnot's theorem applies equally to all thermal engines.
When they say that cooling water is the Achilles heel of nuclear power, what they really mean to say is that the Laws of Thermodynamics are the Achilles heel of life, the universe, the energy industry and everything.
By compensation, however, because the fuel transportation costs are negligible, you can build them wherever there is water conveniently available (for instance, on the coast, where you can use all the seawater you want), whereas coal-fired power is much cheaper if you build it right on top of the mine.
Does anybody know if there's been a detailed engineering study of using dry cooling towers for nuclear plants?
The medical profession was aghast today as environmentalists appeared to approve the use of lethal rooftop options for power generation. These deadly surfaces, well-known for causing injuries and death, are the basis for a distributed solar power proposal that will involve high-risk activities on a regular basis by millions of unqualified amateurs.
The body count from this irresponsible scheme will be truly staggering. The call for massive government funding to artificially support this option makes it even less palatable.
Just say no to dangerous rooftop options!
;-P
And it also got me thinking: in an era of rapid climate change how do you site a wind or solar plant and have any assurance that the prevailing weather will hold?
Why would they need to? What home, or even apartment complex, needs a full megawatt of generating capacity?
You're either being disingenuous or are irrevocably stuck in the centralized generation mindset. Building one huge central plant and T&D grid is not the only way to do it. Maybe it's the only way most utilities can make huge profits, but it's not the only way our energy needs can be met.
Once again, true perhaps for large-scale centralized capacity; not true for decentralized generation with negative metering, battery or heat pump storage, etc.
proof, please? or is it just national "Libel AP Day"?
1) they do not make sense on industrial scale, because these are chaotic sources and we do not know about any technology that allows energy storage at that scale
2) cooling towers can be made slightly bigger if you want 100% power output at hot summer days. Or put a little fan at the bottom of the towers. No show stopper for steam cycle plants.
3) solar PV panels efficiency drops with temperature, guess you didnt know that :)
That implies it's not necessarily a liberal left-wing thing. Left-libs who aren't on any kind of government, i.e. gas-funded, payroll will have no more difficulty than anyone in allowing you to have a reactor near your back fence. And like anyone, even a gas interest, they won't mind one back of their back fence. Witness the behaviour of Greenpeace contractors in getting on board -- getting quietly on board -- the nuclear icebreaker Yamal.
G.R.L. Cowan, former H2 fan
How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?
You're right. And if we only had to worry about powering our homes, life would be easy. But what about all the materials needed to build a house, apartment complex or even a building. It takes large amounts of energy to manufacture steel, concrete, wood etc. Are you saying this could also be met with solar and wind? If so, could you please provide links to studies showing this could happen?
"Building one huge central plant and T&D grid is not the only way to do it. Maybe it's the only way most utilities can make huge profits, but it's not the only way our energy needs can be met."
Of course it's not the only way. Are you telling me, though, that every single house, apartment complex, building and factory are going to each build their own energy source when they can more easily hook into the grid?
Decentralization works in many places where access to a grid is limited. However, it doesn't make sense to build 1,000s of small generators when you only need to build a few large ones.
What's so bad about centralization? All you do is hook up to the grid and have access to power about any time you want. And so far centralization is cheaper because it's generated by cheap coal and nuclear.
Adding to the complexity of this sort of system is that it would require storage technologies that can store significant amounts of power and reliably discharge it over and over again. Most of the candidates suffer from poor power density, as in standard batteries and flywheels; high complexity, in the case of molten salt and regenerative fuel cells, or are limited by location such as subterranean compressed air and hydraulic storage.
Seems like this story stung?
Nukes are only 33% thermally efficient. That's a lot of waste heat that needs dumping somewhere as long as the plants are operational... and a lot of residual thermal load to cool following an emergency shutdown.
We're not trying to hide anything. On our website we have a two-pager showing the numbers. Here's what we show:
● Nuclear energy consumes 400 gal/mWh with once-through cooling, 400 to 720 gal/mWh with pond cooling and about 720 gal/mWh with cooling towers.
● Coal consumes somewhat less, ranging from 300 to 480 gal/mWh for wet cooling systems.
● Natural gas consumes even less, at 100 gal/mWh for once-through, 180 gal/mWh for cooling towers and none for dry cooling.
● Hydroelectricity’s typical water consumption is 1,430 gal/mWh, due in large part to evaporation from reservoirs.
● Solar thermal consumes 1,060 gal/mWh, and geothermal ranges from 1,800 to 4,000 gal/mWh.
● Biomass is similar to coal, ranging from 300 to 480 gal/mWh for wet cooling systems.
● Solar photovoltaic is lower at 30 gal/mWh. Wind is lowest at 1 gal/mWh.
Have you taken a thermo class? 33% efficiency is about the most you can get out of a real rankine cycle. It's the same for any type of steam plant, not just nuclear.
Point is, at 33% thermal efficiency the fission process generates the highest percentage of waste heat that is not converted to useful work.
Coal plants are only slighly better at 40% thermally efficient.
Combined Cycle Gas Turbines covert about 50% fo the chemical energy into electricity.
In the case of combined heat and power generation, the overall efficiency can increase to 85%.
With all of the thermoelectric generators, water consumption for power plant condenser cooling appears to be an issue of increasing significance given availability and climate change including drought.
Still with a radioactive waste stream that threatens to contaminate water resources, nuclear power is the most risky, most expensive, most dangerous, most insecure way to boil water and the most inefficient way to make steam.
Coal plants are only slighly better at 40% thermally efficient.
Combined Cycle Gas Turbines covert about 50% fo the chemical energy into electricity.
Only the most efficient coal or combined cycle technologies achieve those efficiencies. The average heat rate in 2006 for all fossil fuel plants in the U.S. was only 1% higher than nuclear plants - 34% versus 33%.
You seem to forget that nuclear plants can be designed to use their waste heat for something productive as well. Several Generation IV reactors will be built specifically to provide heat for industrial purposes and electricity for hydrogen production. Areva is already marketing this type of design.
By what measure of efficiency would that be?
Mass of fuel per Mass of steam? I don't think so.
Mass of fuel per watt, perhaps? No, that can't be it.
Mass of waste per watt then? Sorry, that can't be it ether.
So just what are your parameters for efficiency that allow you to make that statement?
All forms of energy conversion have efficiency limitations. Gunter's favorites are hopelessly inefficient. Wind power has the Betz limit: even under perfect, steady conditions, most of the wind flow passing through a wind farm is never converted converted to electricity. Photovoltaic panel efficiencies are almost comical. In fact, The Onion satirizes them. Every month or so, there's a new laboratory breakthrough in solar panel efficiency that never amounts to anything out in the field, largely because very few of us live in a climate anything like laboratory conditions.
I'd don't see Gunter arguing with the absolute levels of electricity produced by nuclear power. That's one argument he knows he can't win. He knows piddle power production is a tiny fraction of nuclear power production. He also knows that piddle power dates back centuries; it's the old way of doing things, fit only for an agrarian society. He knows nuclear power is the only real energy technology breakthrough of the last 100 years, and that the photovoltaic effect has been known for almost two centuries now. Yet he still predicts the decline of nuclear power and the rise of "renewables" (I put this term in quotes because it means nothing). That's a bet Gunter is going to lose.
This could just as easily be turned around: what's so bad about decentralization, except that huge power plant vendors and utility monopolies don't make as much money? You just get power any time you want from your own generation.
I'm not sure why previous posters think industrial facilities can't also take advantage of decentralized generation to make all that concrete and steel.
There's an entire, well-developed literature on problems with centralized electricity generation which I'm not going to re-hash here. I'm sure it's not required reading in current engineering programs, let alone utility or vendor training, but it's available.
Just for one, centralized systems are vulnerable to widespread catastrophic failure resulting from one glitch somewhere in the system. Like the August 2003 blackout traceable to one bad transformer in Ohio, or something like that.
And I just love the post that casually talks about Gen IV reactors like they're off-the-shelf current technology. Why not throw fusion in there too, as long as we're tossing around paper projects?
as for "overwhelming physical advantages nuclear power affords, as evidenced by thousands of reactor-years of operation" dont forget the millions of years from the nuclear waste threat...
I'm also aware that the nuclear industry in Canada is planning to inject that waste steam into the tar sands of northern Alberta.
Hence the "same as it ever was" collaboration of nuclear and fossil.
I know that there's a broad body of literature on power grid management, but I'd like to see the engineering analysis that actually supports the idea that lots of intermittent generation connected together will somehow have real advantages over a system made of up of a smaller number of larger, more reliable units. The peer-reviewed papers I've seen came to the exact opposite conclusion.
Also, I'm still struck by the profound backwardness of the terminology here. Weren't the standalone power plants of the late-19th and early 20th century the real "centralized" plants? In those days, minor failures could derive customers of all power for weeks, and nary a thing could be done about it- other plants couldn't take up the slack. It seems to me that our current power grid is the very antithesis of the old arrangement.
So please, refer me to the literature you speak of. I'll believe it when I see it.
Think practical and real life, people. There's lawywers out there, ya know?
Me? I'm just a dumb ole PE/PMP....
Smelt steel with windmills, roast concrete with solar? I don't know what literature you are reading, but to the best of my knowledge even the most rabid of the wind and solar crowd hasn't had the audacity to suggest that they could do that.
Industrial power needs are far, far beyond domestic. Do some reading
Gunter, the plan for nuclear power to get oil from the tar sands doesn't involve waste heat. The whole point of the reactor is to supply heat for the process,
In grid stability analysis, there is a parameter we track called LOLP, the loss-of-load probability. For grid systems using large, centralized, very reliable generating sources, the LOLP for a major outage is something in the range of a few hours every 10 years, or a day or two every 20 years. That's about what we've seen in recent history of regional grid outages.
Now, what gets interesting is if you start substituting intermittent, low intensity, inherently chaotic (i.e., more sensitive the the variabilities of natural phenomena) generating capacity in place of the more intense, higher-capacity, high reliability, high capacity factor assets like nuclear plants. The analyses then show that basically the wheels come off of your power system. Instead of large-scale LOLP that reflect outages every decade, you're now looking at regional outages that occur on a monthly basis. You simply can't sustain a technologically-based industrial society on such an unreliable energy supply source. You might be able to run a third-world agrarian economy with it, but my guess is that most present-day American citizens are going to object to such a reduction in their standard of living.
Do you have links to information about LOLP and grid stability? Your comment was very insightful and I would like to read more.
I hope the above close-minded poster doesn't represent the majority on this board. I, for one, greatly appreciate NEI keeping this forum open for pro-, anti-, and everything in between.
The nuclear industry wouldn't gain credibility on this very controversial topic if it closed its blog to those who don't toe the party line. That's just preaching to the choir, and doesn't gain us anything.
On to other issues:
Most of the recent responses on decentralized generation are attacking a straw man, i.e., thousands of decentralized small generating plants that would feed all their power back into a main grid. I can see how that scenario might create grid management issues, but that's not what I (and many decentralized power advocates) are talking about.
I'm talking about people generating their own power, not putting up lots of small plants primarily to get juice into the main grid for utilities. Negative metering might result in some sell-back, which would be good, but it would be largely predictable, based on time of day, and not large-enough scale to be disruptive of grid stability.
What I want to know is what the difference is. Thousands of rooftop windmills that are tied into a main grid do not seem functionally different than a smaller number of larger units run by a utility. Barring on-site energy storage, or the unlikely scenario that generation matches demand near-perfectly, I don't see why the math is any different. I'm willing to be convinced, but I really want to see some actual analysis explaining why the same problems won't occur in both scenarios.
"Why do you give Gunter or any anti-nuke any voice? Muzzle them all. They got there own message forums and blog sites on which they actively exercise censorship against pro-nukes. The best anti-nuke is the muzzled, emasculated anti-nuke. This is also true for Dems (invariably anti-nukes ARE Dems)."
I would be willing to bet this was written by one of the "anti" crowd trying to whip up sympathy by making the "pro" crowd appear fanatic...