Friday, March 29, AD 2024 7:51am

And People Don’t Poop on the Streets

News that I missed, courtesy of The Babylon Bee:

 

U.S.—New billboards have been popping up in California with the slogan “Move to Texas: We have electricity!” Many see this as a play to lure jobs away from California, as many jobs rely on electricity, especially in the modern economy. This could especially be attractive to jobs in the tech sector.

Roy Rivera, a tech analyst with decades of experience in cutting edge technology, explained that “a lot of tech uses electricity.” He then pointed to a chart showing that tech businesses can be at least 300% more effective when they have power.

California Governor Gavin Newsom was dismissive of Texas’s claims, though. “They’re making false claims of being able to deliver electricity 24/7,” Newsom said, “but it just can’t be done.” Newsom was also dismissive of the Lone Star State’s other claims, such as affordable housing, plenty of water, cheap gas, plastic straws, and not constantly being on fire. “It sounds made up,” said Newsom. “I don’t even think there is a Texas.”

Go here to read the rest.  The Golden State has become the Fool’s Gold State.

 

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Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Wednesday, October 30, AD 2019 4:50am

California shut down Rancho Seco and San Onofre, and is planning to do the same to Diablo Canyon in a few years. It will have removed thousands of megawatts of carbon free electricity because the liberal progressive Democrats controlling the state oppose nuclear power MORE than they support environmentalism. Fathom that! California deserves everything it’s getting – the wild fires, the land slides, the heat waves, the wind storms, the brownouts and blackouts, the homeless epidemic, the filthy unsanitary conditions in the city streets, the drug addiction problem, the rabid murderous drug lord immigrants, etc. Why? California (like NY Sate and other liberal states) has rejected God, embraced sodomy and supported every evil there is. No, God isn’t punishing them. They’re doing it to themselves by the consequences of their actions. Let them wallow in the 3rd world misery. It is the only way that’ll force them to repent.

PS, Oregon with its LGBT sex pervert Governor Brown and the riots in Portland, and Washington State are not far behind.

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Wednesday, October 30, AD 2019 6:02am

The joke’s on Texas when all that electricity, affordable housing, water, cheap gas, plastic straws, and not constantly being a dumpster fire of a state go away because they imported Californians.

I’d rather have gypsies for neighbors than Californians.

DonL
DonL
Wednesday, October 30, AD 2019 8:45am

Much of Arizona has been corrupted by escaping young California emigrants, and God knows what North East deserters have done to ruin the South, but it’s not the same as it used to be, thanks to importing sophisticated culture rot.

c matt
c matt
Wednesday, October 30, AD 2019 10:38am

All Texas has to do is ban soy lattes and we will never be bothered by Californians.

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Wednesday, October 30, AD 2019 8:15pm

On a serious note, meaningful residency requirements before you’re allowed to vote in state elections. I’m thinking two years minimum.

Five for Californians.

GregB
Thursday, October 31, AD 2019 1:53pm

California is looking more and more like Venezuela. Victor Davis Hanson has a recent article about California:
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https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/victor-davis-hanson-california-premodern

GregB
Thursday, October 31, AD 2019 3:10pm

LQC:
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I read a recent retrospective article in the Sacramento Bee about Rancho Seco where it was claimed that the plant had been plagued with operational problems, and that that is what led to the shutdown. The now mothballed Crystal River nuclear power plant is in my own backyard. From what I have read it was said that it was the victim of a botched maintenance project. The management tried to save money by making it a DIY in-house project instead of hiring an outside contractor. There had been a proposal for building two new nuke reactors in Levy county only to have them cancelled amid ever increasing slippage of building cost and scheduling. The state of Florida gave a sweetheart deal to the power companies allowing the them to charge their customers in advance for the cost of future power plant construction. It is my understanding that power companies only have to intend to build a plant. To me this makes their customers involuntary non shareholding and non bond holding investors in the power companies.
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I’ve read that one of the problems with the current nuke plans is that they are bespoke with each reactor being largely one of a kind units with their own operating characteristics. I keep on reading about all the new jazzy inherently safe nuke plant designs, but I wonder how many nukes under construction or proposed are implementing these new designs. What is your take on all of this?
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One thing that sounds promising about nuclear fusion is that a consortium of nations are building a test fusion tokamak reactor in France called ITER. It is supposed to be energy positive with a Q of 10 or better producing ten times the energy that goes into creating the fusion reaction plasma. It is scheduled for completion in 2025. If successful the first demonstration power generating reactors could be online by 2040-2050. There are also other fusion projects that are being done with private funding. It will be interesting to see what they come up with.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Friday, November 1, AD 2019 8:09am

GregB,

Forgive any typos below. You cite multiple issues in your comment, each of which should be addressed. Therefore, my response is very lengthy. Much knowledge is required to understand the answer. Forgive my arrogance, but this is why people who are just lay persons [e.g., clerics, politicians, lawyers (no offense, Donald), environmentalists, and even scientists who are not nuclear engineers (sorry, Dr. Kurland, but you’re not a nuke)] should not opine on this topic prior to doing the necessary engineering and historical research, and why I get upset when people mouth off about TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima without understanding the engineering details. However, before I begin, I will post a link to an article on mortality rate per terawatt hour of electricity generation. I have posted this link before. There is a table on the web page at the link. This table shows that mortality rate per terawatt hour for nuclear is lower than all other forms of electric generation. Why? Because of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (US NRC), the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO) and the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI). Unless you know the history of what happened post-TMI (too lengthy to describe here), you won’t understand. Here is the link:

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/06/update-of-death-per-terawatt-hour-by.html

Issue 1: Racho Seco shutdown.

Rancho Seco in California was a 913 MWe B&W PWR with one-through steam generators (OTSGs). These steam generators have small secondary volume and during transients can be subject to dry out which occurred in 1978. This plant was poorly run and had a capacity factor of less than 39%. It ranked third on the US NRC’s worst managed plants after Three Mile Island and Browns Ferry. As a result, voters in the SMUD supply area voted to permanently shut the plant down in 1989. With the NRC-mandated creation of INPO, operating conditions at all US nuclear power plants improved so dramatically over time that by the 2000s capacity factor even for the undamaged TMI unit 2 rose to 92%. If time had been allowed, Rancho Seco operating history would have improved. But the voters were unwilling given SMUD’s rate increases to cover its mismanagement.

Issue 2: Crystal River shutdown

Crystal River in Florida was another B&W PWR with OTSGs. FP&L did a normal steam generator replacement in 2009 to extend plant life. This involved in cutting away a major section of the steel reinforced concrete containment wall to allow removal of the old S/G’s and installation of the new. During the concrete removal in creating the opening workers discovered a large gap in the concrete of the containment building wall. The main cause of the gap, which further engineering analysis determined was a large delamination, was attributed to the scope and sequence of the tendon detensioning. Repairs when implemented were successful, but additional delamination began to occur in adjacent bays. After several months of analyzing options, Duke Energy senior executives announced in February 2013 that the Crystal River Nuclear Plant would be permanently shut down. It simply wasn’t cost effective to replace the huge containment structure. It appears that defects may have existed since initial concrete pour when the plant construction was started in 1968.

Issue 3: Levy County Nuclear

FP&L was going to build two Westinghouse AP-1000 advanced PWRs, each to provide 1117 MWe. Originally estimated cost was $5 billion. That grew to between $17 and $22 billion for several reasons. (a) The anti-nuclearism of the Obama Administration with its concomitant regulatory strangulation. (b) FP&L mismanagement. (c) Westinghouse mismanagement (it went bankrupt over the now defunct new build at VC Summer in my home state). Communist China has built many Westinghouse AP-1000 PWRs on schedule and in budget, but the United States doesn’t seem able to do so. I attribute this to the continued decay of our country’s work ethic and management quality inherent in a culture of laziness and decadence.

Issue 4: New Plant Designs

Westinghouse AP-1000 advanced reactor build is proceeding at Vogtle in Georgia, over budget and behind schedule. The stories I hear from my friends working there only confirm my statement above.

NuScale Power has submitted an application to the US NRC for certification of the design of its small modular reactor: 12 integrated PWRs (60 MWe apiece) with pressurizer and natural circulation situated in a 4.5 million gallon pool of boric acid for emergency core cooling (the water) and for insertion of negative reactivity during emergencies (the boron in the boric acid). Research at the US NRC web site indicates that NuScale has been successfully responding to US NRC Requests for Additional Information (RAIs) and there appear to be no show-stoppers in getting this new design licensed. The first customer is planned to be UAMPs out in Idaho. The NuScale design is indeed walk-away safe – no electricity is needed to power pumps to provide emergency cooling: ECCS valves automatically open and douse the core with boric acid from the pool to shut the unit down and keep it cool for 30+ days. Additionally, each NuScale SMR has only 5% the nuclear fuel that a large Westinghouse AP-1000 or GE-Hitachi ESBWR has, so 10-mile emergency planning zones for accommodating accident radiological releases are obviated but no accident can result in such a release. But there are issues. (a) How to pour all that concrete for a 4.5 million-gallon pool and prevent any voids in the concrete (recall Crystal River). (b) Research at the US NRC web site shows that its reactor protection / engineered safeguards system is based on newer Field Programmable Gate Array technology; never been done before for a complete reactor protection system. First-of-a-kind engineering (FOAKE) never suffers the battlefield without injury.

Other designs like molten salt thorium fueled reactors, sodium cooled liquid metal fast burner reactors, high temperature gas cooled reactors, etc., are all in the works by various companies, and all these designs have been built and tried in the 50s and 60s. But there is a reason why we standardized on the light water design: relatively simple using existing technology. Furthermore, the US NRC regulations are written only for the light water design. Yes, we built a gas cooled, graphite moderated reactor – Fort Saint Vrain – in Colorado back in the 70s and 80s. But problems with the graphite moderator and problems with bearing water ingress into the circulating fans proved too much, resulting in low plant capacity factor and eventual shutdown. And though the Canadians use a heavy water natural uranium design (called CANDU), that design cannot be licensed in the US because it has a slight positive void coefficient of reactivity due to the fast fission factor and changes in resonance escape in U-238 (too complicated to explain here). O yes, the negative temperature coefficient of reactivity completely swamps this effect (you never see it in real life), but the CANDU design won’t pass 10 CFR 50 muster (CFR = Code of Federal Regulations). This is the one time Donald McClarey is right about stupid dumb idiot regulations.

Suffice it to say that the US NRC has come out with a Regulatory Guide on Developing Principal Design Criteria for Non-Light Water Reactors: RG-1.232:

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1732/ML17325A611.pdf

But no other vendor except NuScale comes close to licensing a new design, and that includes Terrestrial Power, Terrapower (Bill Gates), General Atomics, Holtec, GE-Hitachi PRISM, etc. All those other companies are at least 10 years away from getting design decertification for the US NRC. Not going to happen.

Issue 5: Fusion

When I was a kind, fusion was 20 years away. I am 61 years old and it still is 20 years away. Look – you must understand something. It’s real easy to shoot a neutrally charged neutron at a heavy metal nucleus like U-233, U-235, or Pu-239 and split it apart to make electricity. It’s real hard to force positively charged nuclei like D-2, T-3, He-3, He-4, etc. together to make electricity. Why? Like charges repel. It takes MORE energy to force them together than you get out of the reaction. Then why can the sun do this? Because of gravity – gravity overcomes the coulomb barrier to the point where the strong nuclear force can take over and fuse the nuclei. And why can nuclear weapons do it? Because those weapons detonate a fission bomb, the force of whose explosion forces the like charge tritium and deuterium together past their mutual repulsion.

Now I got no time to go over the binding energy per nucleon curve or the fission product yield curve or the equations for various fusion reactions. And here in a blog comment field it’s simply too hard and too lengthy to explain magnetic confinement or particle / laser beam implosion. There are lost of new schemes to try to overcome the coulomb barrier, and no one has bene successful to date. Yes ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) costing billions of dollars is an international experiment to do this. Not going to work. Fission is easy – shoot a neutron at uranium and get energy. Controlled fusion will always be difficult. But people are afraid of fission because of 50 years of anti-nuclear environmental activism which resulted in regulatory strangulation and exorbitantly high cost to build new nukes.

Ok, I am done for now.

GregB
Monday, November 4, AD 2019 11:46am

Thanks for all the information. Sorry for the delay in getting back with you.

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