Search Results for: "load following"

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Ontario’s CANDUs can be more flexible than natural gas and hydro

ByGuest Author

…..it appears France is building 2, and perhaps only 2 more…has very good load following capabilities. All of France’s nuclear plants need to be replaced over the next 30 years or so. Likely newer, even better load following ones will have to be built. Gen IV reactors of most varieties (and yes, the French are leaders in this area too) are quite good at load following and should follow load as well as a CCGT or even hydro. David Walters I have to…

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If you really care about carbon…

ByGuest Author

…Gas works because capital costs are low and it is a suitable resource for load following and intermittent operations. The contrasting cost profiles are shown below. (Source: http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf) There are, however, some issues here that don’t get the attention they deserve. First, as gas runs at lower capacity factors (CF) its economics deteriorate (see above). Once the CF reaches levels near 30%, its e…

Reader question – How can nuclear power help reduce gas prices?

ByRod Adams

…place diesel engines and oil fired steam plants and certainly operate in a load following mode for their entire operational lives. Since leaving the nuclear Navy in 1990, I have been working on the Adams Engine (www.atomicengines.com), a completely different kind of nuclear power system – one that uses gas instead of water as the coolant and working fluid. That design (there are not yet any being produced), is called an engine for a very specific…

Wind Generation Does Not Reduce Fossil Fuel Use and Emissions Enough To Make it Worth The Public Investment

ByRod Adams

…ated capability to play better in a grid with varying demand – France uses load following nuclear, and the submarines that I used to operate could change power even quicker than most diesel engines or gas turbines. Rod Adams Publisher, Atomic Insights It is quite amusing for me to watch others in the energy industry duke it out over market share and public reputation. I would bet that if the topic was using nuclear energy to reduce CO2 emissions,…

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Does “highly” enriched uranium make it easier to build more compact reactors?

ByRod Adams

…ping what could be a powerful game changer – the ability to build smaller, load following nuclear power plants. From an economic power point of view, it is very difficult to embargo a country that has plenty of indigenous energy. It is very difficult to stop a nation from finding someone who is willing to engage in trade if it has ships that almost never need to be refueled or resupplied. From a military point of view, compact nuclear reactors are…

Land Area Requirement for Concentrating Solar Plant (CSP) in Promising Areas

ByRod Adams

…ty factor, that means it would be rated at about 16 MWe. If it is run as a load following plant with an average annual capacity factor of 30%, it would have a rating of about 50 MWe. If the CF is much lower than that, one would have to question the value of having any storage at all; a typical solar system without storage can achieve a CF of 20% in a decent solar area. The peak solar insolation for a 1 square kilometer piece of land near the equat…

Confidently building foundations for successful nuclear energy growth

Confidently building foundations for successful nuclear energy growth

ByRod Adams

…rce Plan (IRP) for several years under the alias of ZELFR – Zero Emissions Load Following Resources After the October 2021 enactment of legislation in North Carolina that requires a 70% reduction in emissions from 2005 levels by 2030 and 100% by 2050, Duke began openly including new nuclear in its IRP. Under all of the scenarios in that IRP, all 11 existing plants are retained and between 7,500 and 8,000 MWe of new capacity in the form of small mo…

Reactions to Bob Metcalfe's Editorial Suggesting A New Look At Licensing And Manufacturing Small Nuclear Reactors

ByRod Adams

…ctor closer to 100% due to the 20 year refueling cycle) to account for the load following. At that CF, the license fee would be about 9-10 cents per kilowatt hour. That is why small power plant developers need to get this issue on the table now, otherwise there will not be a small reactor industry developed in the United States. I cannot tell you how many times in the past 15 years I have been told that I needed to go somewhere else to develop my…

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