It has been a hot week here in Maryland and throughout the eastern portion of North America. As a guy who enjoys his air conditioned comfort during heat waves, I want to send a thank you note to the people who are operating all of the power plants, but especially to those nuclear plant operators who have put up some rather impressive statistics during the past week.
Rod Adams is Managing Partner of Nucleation Capital, a venture fund that invests in advanced nuclear, which provides affordable access to this clean energy sector to pronuclear and impact investors. Rod, a former submarine Engineer Officer and founder of Adams Atomic Engines, Inc., which was one of the earliest advanced nuclear ventures, is an atomic energy expert with small nuclear plant operating and design experience. He has engaged in technical, strategic, political, historic and financial analysis of the nuclear industry, its technology, regulation, and policies for several decades through Atomic Insights, both as its primary blogger and as host of The Atomic Show Podcast. Please click here to subscribe to the Atomic Show RSS feed. To join Rod's pronuclear network and receive his occasional newsletter, click here.
NASDAQ.com published a Dow Jones news wire story about a recent talk given by John Rowe, CEO of Exelon, to the American Enterprise Institute. The article headline is Exelon CEO: No New US Laws Needed To Shift To Cleaner Energy, and indicates a rather significant course change for a man who has been one of…
Sometimes the web and its infrastructure provide some interesting surprises. As I have mentioned several times in this blog, one of my many news sources is a daily email from Google Alerts that provides links to every article that it has found in the past 24 hours with the word “Unistar”. That unique search term…
A friend who has heard me discuss my theories about the relationships between mainstream Environmental groups and fossil fuel extraction and marketing companies sent me a link to an article titled Polluted by profit: Johann Hari on the real Climategate. He included a rather amusing subject line on the email “Red meat for Rod” and…
Aubrey McClendon, the CEO of Chesapeake Energy, is one of the more open and aggressive natural gas marketers in the United States. He was one of the driving forces behind the establishment of American Clean Skies Foundation (ACSF) in 2007. He has been credited with helping to derail a plan by TXU to build 11…
As the Northeast shivers under its first real cold spell and snowfall of the 2005-06 winter, I thought it might be comforting to see a chart of heating oil prices during the past 17 years or so. What do you mean, you are not comforted? I thought that the heat generated by anger at the…
In the past few days, spot prices for natural gas have increased by more than 20% as temperatures approaching 100 degrees affect high natural gas consumption areas like the upper midwest, Texas and the mid-Atlantic regions. As of the close of trading today, here are the prices at some key locations: NYMEX Henry Hub Future…
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I look forward to seeing and promoting Nuclear (and you in it).
How much work is it to move the fuel from those huge ungainly casks to a central location in US?…
@Rob Brixey The project you mention were not the kind of commercial prototypes I am suggesting. As far as I…
Vallecitos BWR was a prototype in its day. But that was built during the AEC (collaboration) vs NRC (regulation) paradigm.…
That makes sense. I suppose that as long as the storage system allows for relatively easy access to the casks,…
8 Comments
I wonder how wind farm output is doing right now? I guess we won’t know since their don’t post up-to-date readings of power output.
Thanks for the link, I’ve actually been searching for something like that for a long time.
Rod – your readers may also like to know that many (if not all) of the reactors slightly below 100% are in the midst of a ‘coast-down’. This means their performance allowed them to get the maximum use from their fuel. The fissile U-235 that remains is not enough to sustain 100% and they will enter their planned rufuelling outages when demand comes down (with the temperatures) this autumn.
Interesting. Never knew that.
I would have imagined that the end of a cycle would be somewhat dramatic (in that once k < 1, in any state of the core with all rods out, multiplication would cease entirely in every state of the core), but I forgot about the negative temperature coefficient. So, I’m guessing that the coast-down begins once you start being unable to maintain k >= 1 at full operating temperature with all rods out. The reactor operating temperature then slowly drops as the core has less and less reactivity, so as to maintain k >= 1. Since there’s consequently less ?T between the turbine inlet temperature and the condenser, the plant slowly produces less output, until the end of cycle in the fall, when it’s time to refuel, and the plant is entirely shut down.
Is this explanation right?
@Dave – though I have never operated a commercial nuclear plant, I would bet that you are right on the money there.
One thing that is completely different about nuclear reactor cores is that “running out of gas” is a very slow and fuzzy process that does not have a sharp end point like it does for other thermal plants. The full explanations can require numerous credit hours in reactor physics and thermodynamics, but you have done a great summary for a light water reactor with a negative temperature coefficient of reactivity that is feeding a steam plant secondary.
You’re correct Dave, as Rod said. Also remember that some of the reactors are BWRs (with the cardinal sin of sins in PWRs and Navy Subs… boiling in the core). BWR operation is significantly effected by a ‘void coefficient of reactivity’ that is typically an order of magnitude greater than the temperature coefficient. Think if it this way; with k<1, less fission, less energy, less voids, less fast and thermal neutron leakage, positive reactivity, k=1.
I wonder how wind farm output is doing right now? I guess we won’t know since their don’t post up-to-date readings of power output.
Jason – all generators in Ontario Canada are required to post their output numbers. Here is the table for July 9, 2010
http://reports.ieso.ca/public/GenOutputCapability/PUB_GenOutputCapability_20100709_v25.xml
There is a new xml file put up every hour each day. You can find an archive list at
http://reports.ieso.ca/public/GenOutputCapability/
So far, I have not found any similar sites in the US except for the one published by Bonneville Power Authority at http://www.transmission.bpa.gov/Business/Operations/Wind/baltwg.aspx
It looks like a big breeze just blew in last night after about four days of less than 20% output.
Californian wind is here:
http://www.caiso.com/outlook/SystemStatus.html
And Danish power is available here (DK1 and DK2):
http://www.nordpoolspot.com/reports/production/
though it isn’t broken down by type. If you want to work, you can correlate production with price:
http://www.nordpoolspot.com/reports/areaprice/
Best wishes on your new career.
Thanks for the link, I’ve actually been searching for something like that for a long time.
Rod – your readers may also like to know that many (if not all) of the reactors slightly below 100% are in the midst of a ‘coast-down’. This means their performance allowed them to get the maximum use from their fuel. The fissile U-235 that remains is not enough to sustain 100% and they will enter their planned rufuelling outages when demand comes down (with the temperatures) this autumn.
Interesting. Never knew that.
I would have imagined that the end of a cycle would be somewhat dramatic (in that once k < 1, in any state of the core with all rods out, multiplication would cease entirely in every state of the core), but I forgot about the negative temperature coefficient. So, I’m guessing that the coast-down begins once you start being unable to maintain k >= 1 at full operating temperature with all rods out. The reactor operating temperature then slowly drops as the core has less and less reactivity, so as to maintain k >= 1. Since there’s consequently less ?T between the turbine inlet temperature and the condenser, the plant slowly produces less output, until the end of cycle in the fall, when it’s time to refuel, and the plant is entirely shut down.
Is this explanation right?
@Dave – though I have never operated a commercial nuclear plant, I would bet that you are right on the money there.
One thing that is completely different about nuclear reactor cores is that “running out of gas” is a very slow and fuzzy process that does not have a sharp end point like it does for other thermal plants. The full explanations can require numerous credit hours in reactor physics and thermodynamics, but you have done a great summary for a light water reactor with a negative temperature coefficient of reactivity that is feeding a steam plant secondary.
You’re correct Dave, as Rod said. Also remember that some of the reactors are BWRs (with the cardinal sin of sins in PWRs and Navy Subs… boiling in the core). BWR operation is significantly effected by a ‘void coefficient of reactivity’ that is typically an order of magnitude greater than the temperature coefficient. Think if it this way; with k<1, less fission, less energy, less voids, less fast and thermal neutron leakage, positive reactivity, k=1.