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...
Comments
This design modification, which was done a few decades back, has been communicated at our website and in other places, sometimes folks miss it.
Thanks.
It is nothing but fluff. All it does is instruct plants to review their procedures and check readiness of equipment.
Something they should be doing on a regular, routine basis.
Why INPO should be writing a SER four days after the incident, not knowing the scope of the problems is mystifying to me.
I spent two years with INPO in the mid 1980 and participated in writing these documents.
We had an hydrogen gas excursion 10 hours following turbine trip at TMI. This was caused by the oxidation of approximately 30% of the zirconium fuel cladding.
The gases escaping through a pressurizer relief valve into the containment building.
Ignition of the gas most likely occurred during the remote cycling of one of these valves.
The maximum pressure to which the building experienced was 28 psig.
These containment buildings were designed for a pressure of about 60 psig, but structurally, should remain intact at twice that pressure.
It was about four days after the accident when our Industry Advisory Group received the Reactor Building pressure strip chart at breakfast and we became aware of it. Although, this information was available on the main control room console, it was not generally known to others.