It's this neato little bright spot in a pool of inky ignorance that there are people who look at facts and numbers rather than emotions in order to make decisions.

I tried to read Atlas Shrugged. It was so repetitive in the development of almost all the characters that I had to put it down. It was actually aggravating. And yet, that Rand bitch really had a point about a lot of people.

Point being, I'm glad that there are people who are actually able to form an opinion based on fact, then feel excited when that opinion is vindicated. There may actually be hope for the species.

^^ Ha!

News flash today!! This from a 100% accurate and unbiased source (NBC). Fukushima radiation underreported!!

Run for the hills!!

Bah, someone peed in your wheaties! It's not as if thread drift isn't an mt.net tradition. I can understand annoyance to that in the non BS sections, but in the BS/politics section?

It just gets tiresome when it's the exact same argument (everything bad is the fault of government regulation / anarchy is the only political architecture which can worrk) in every single thread.

There's no challenge in it.

Never said it's the "only" solution. I'd be extremely happy if we moved towards a more constitutional gov't. And less regulation aka corporatism.

But on topic - do you have any idea how political winds changed that made the construction of the plants happen?

I honestly have no idea.

I think that part of it is due to the promises that the Obama administration made early on, vis-a-vis "We need to invest in a diverse portfolio of clean, renewable, energy sources," from whence came the $8.3 billion in federal loan guarantees for the Vogtle expansion, along with other loan guarantees and financial incentives for the other new reactors.

And I think part of it is technology; the fact that we've finally got some standardized designs which can be design-certified and then basically mass produced. That's really what made these specific licenses go through so smoothly.

But is there more to it than that? I assume so. I just don't know what.

I think theres a lot of people like me who dont neccesarily hate any new involvement or reg. We just want to see some more competence in the structure that handles it. Whats really depressing is the crushing incompetence in both the corporate and government spheres. Maybe its nostalgia, but it seems like you used to be able to at least choose between incompetence and evil. Now its just sort of apathy and mischeif. And they eat lunch together. And its not even good food. Just over-salted low grade steaks cooked on a propane grill with really undersized side dishes from a Sysco truck.

We try to get one entity to run something as complex as taxes at the federal level, but have like 31 for regulation of securities, bonds, etc.

This. One million times.

Interesting to see where some big names stand on on nuclear power: Branson, Gates, Bezos: Ultra-Rich Visions for Nuclear Power - IEEE Spectrum

Didn't read the whole thing yet but talks about the aging of our currently operating reactors: Fitness Tests for Old Nuclear Reactors - IEEE Spectrum

The herpaderp in this video about the dangers of nuclear power are....well, both hilarious and :facepalm:.

Lesbians, tits, and nukes. Great stuff.

You know, I have honestly never watched even a snippet of "Bullshit," but that was a really refreshing presentation. And while a tad simplified in places, also completely true.

Because I couldn't think of anywhere else appropriate to put this:

Savers Push $374 Billion U.S. Utility Industry to Shift - Bloomberg

Huh. My whole utility bill is less than $175 a month. About $100 less, in fact.

SDG&E has an interesting thing they've been doing lately, now that everybody has realtime-reporting meters. From time to time, they issue a "Reduce Your Use" day, where they send an email to everyone telling them "If you use less than XX kilowatts of electricity tomorrow between 11am and 6pm, you will earn a $1 credit off your bill."

The only problem is that they compute the target energy consumption as a percentage (usually around half) of your average energy use for that day/time period.

The only three things consuming any measurable quantity of electricity in my home during that time period on a weekday are the refrigerator and two PCs. And since the hard drives in those PCs are spun down, simply turning them off does not reduce my energy consumption enough to qualify for the credit. I would have to unplug the refrigerator in order to achieve that.

Do "normal" people leave their A/C turned on during the day while nobody is home? I have a very simple programmable thermostat (just the kind with a built in clock, no remote access) which turns the A/C off at 8am every day, and then switches it back on at 5pm. It cost me a very trivial amount of money (maybe $20) when I bought it 11 or 12 years ago at Home Depot, and I've been carrying it around with me from house to house ever since. It's basically a 1990s version of this one: 1-Week Programmable Thermostat-RTH221B at The Home Depot

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1349809349


I'm not sure why folks feel they need to wait for the Utility Company to give them a free thermostat. Programmable (non-remote) thermostats been cheaply available for many years, and require about 20 minutes to install and program.

I've had a weekly programmable thermostat for the last 10 years.

my current is pretty baus:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1349809455

I think the idea of the wifi-enabled thermostats is kind of cool, but honestly I can think of only one or two situations in which a regular programmable thermostat wouldn't work just as well.

name those tunes.

Here was my energy use for last Friday (Oct 5):

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1349809731


And for the following day, where the thermostat was programmed to have the A/C turned on most of the day:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1349809731


SDG&E hasn't given me any incentives or provided me with any free hardware, that's just with the $20 thermostat that I bought more than a decade ago when I lived in Ohio.

This is pretty simple stuff.



Sidebar: I am slightly annoyed that my energy-hog neighbor gets a discount for consuming 30 KW/h instead of 60 KW/h on a certain day, whereas I get no discount for consuming 15 KW/h on the same day, simply because I always run the meter as low as I can get it without letting the food spoil, rather than being an energy-hog except on special occasions.




SDG&E's opinion of my total energy consumption for the Aug-Sep billing cycle as compared to my neighbors:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1349810261

And that includes nightly charging of the plug-in EV that I use to commute to work.

My problem with the A/C is that me and my fiance work completely different hours so it is almost always on and there would be no good way to program it because her schedule is revolving. I turn it up to 78 if I leave and no one is home but my fiance general forgets to do this.

to be fair the stat isn't in the kitchen...

Understood.

But in a typical suburban neighborhood, I'd wager that at least 2/3 of the houses are totally empty during the day while the kids are at school and the parents are at work.

How hard would it be to simply have the A/C and water heater switch themselves off during the period of time when nobody is home to enjoy the coolness / warmth which they are competing to provide?

To me, this is as absurd as leaving the oven turned on 24/7, regardless of whether you are cooking food in it or not. Or letting the car idle in the parking lot all day while you're at work, and then again in the driveway all night.

Oh this gave me a good laugh and made work a bit better for the moment. Thanks.

This assumes the "typical suburban" family is a dual income home with school age children. I don't know if that is accurate or not. I do know many of my peers are single-earner households with small children that do not spend the majority of a day outside the house. For them, in Florida, it is not uncommon to run the AC at 76 - 78F all the time.

For my household, we are DINKs but do have dogs that stay at home. In addition, we live in a swamp that has been poured over with concrete (Central Florida) so there's no way I am turning the AC completely off most days. If I did, I'd be walking in to a blast furnace at the end of the day.

However, we do have a programmable thermostat and have it scale up to about 80F around the time we leave the house and scale down to about 78F as we get home, then drop down to about 76F around bedtime. :party:

I could probably let it get a little warmer during the day when we are gone but I am not sure of the best way to measure the cost-effectiveness of a couple of degrees.

Returning home from a vacation (that is, a vacation longer than the maximum programmable interval on the thermostat).

With the wifi-enabled thermostat, you could turn your A/C or heat back on a few hours before your expected arrival.

With only a programmable thermostat, you couldn't.



But yeah, that's about the only relatively common scenario I can imagine. And while it's common in the sense that it's a familiar concept, for most people it's not common in the sense that you take lengthy vacations very frequently.

Yes, I grew up on the gulf coast of FL (charlotte county) so I can sympathize with this.

It's also been my experience that Florida is a state of many extremes, which limit its usefulness in broad generalizations concerning income, employment, energy use, likelihood of being eaten by a carnivorous reptile or carried aloft by flying cockroaches, etc. By the same token, I would not cite California in a generalization involving home values, vehicle aftermarket parts laws, seismic activity, or the consumer retail price of gasoline.


The most recent data I can find here is from 1998, but in that report, 77% of all married women in the US with children aged 6 to 17 worked outside of the home. Of married women with children aged under 6, that number drops to 62%. But that's still pretty huge. Between 62% and 77% of all households with children have a mother who works outside the home.

Obviously this data ignores households containing a married couple in which ONLY the woman works, however I'd posit that number is relatively small.

And of course I am assuming that in dual-earner households, both working members have at least partially-overlapping schedules. I can't find specific data here, however I'd assume that the number of jobs in the US which are 9-5 (or thereabouts) exceeds those jobs in fields such as hospital nursing and law-enforcement patrol wherein the work hours routinely fall outside of the "norm" by a factor of at least 20:1, and probably closer to 100:1.


But these numbers (62% and 77%) represent the baseline, which is to say the lowest percentage of households of any demographic group in which the home is likely to be unoccupied for at least part of the day. For single-parent households, DINK households, and bachelor households, that percentage is probably closer to 100% minus the unemployment rate.





On the morning of Sunday of Week 1, note the reading of your power meter. Do nothing to change your energy usage habits that week.

On the morning of Sunday of Week 2, note the reading of your power meter. Configure your programmable thermostat for optimum efficiency.

Repeat steps 1 and 2 for weeks 3 and 4, to allow for smoothing of the data across fluctuations in average temperature.

At the end of four weeks, multiply total weekly energy consumption by the net effective cost per KWh as reported on your power bill.

This suggests that I should use a 20' moving truck as my daily driver, since I occasionally move.

Yes. This is why I always rent thermostats when I need one.

And I would not cite Sandy Eggo in particular for energy consumption due to it having some of the most desirable (and moderate?) weather in the nation. :)

http://dssni5kiwicxb.cloudfront.net/...Diego/temp.png

I can believe that. I can also believe that many people don't think about it and don't bother with things like programmable thermostats - despite their ease of installation and use and potential money savings.

I may give this a shot for curiosity's sake, but I'm not sure how precise it will be given the "do nothing to change your energy usage habits that week" caveat. :) I'd guess our usage is relatively standardized, but there will doubtless be some variation.

Oh, absolutely. When we get a whole week of highs in the upper 80s and humidity above 60%, the local news starts talking about the impending apocalypse. Same thing happens when more than four consecutive raindrops fall within a 1 sq. KM area in under an hour.

Which is why I'm not comparing my own energy usage to that of the nation. I am comparing it only to that of my neighbors who live in the same area as I do. My implementing a $20 thermostat which I bought over a decade ago, I am clearly saving energy relative to my neighbors, and the data which I posted proves this.

It is fair to generalize that a person who implements a programmable thermostat in Houston or Birmingham will also save money relative to their neighbors. Maybe their electric bill will be $200 instead of $350.

Apples to applesauce.



Bingo.

We're accustomed to things like turning off our car when we park it, or switching off the oven after the food is cooked. We don't even have to think about these things- they just happen.

Ought to be the same for HVAC. But since it ain't, there's an easy solution which works well for most applications.

While looking at installing a whole-house fan in the new house, I wondered why home AC systems in our climate don't have a damper to suck in outside air for when it's cooler outside.

Some do. But this is considered sort of a "high end" option, not typically found on the sort of systems installed by the contractor in new tract homes.

Technically, these units are called "energy recovery ventilators" and are sold as a way to draw in "fresh" air and exhaust "stale" air, without sacrificing all of the cooling/heating work that has been done to the air already inside the home. IOW, it assumes that you are already running the A/C at a high level but that you wish to also exchange air with the outside, on the basis that "Poor ventilation may be harmful to your family's health" (quoted from one of the product brochures.) IOW, if you have a home which is highly air-tight, it's supposed to protect you from radon buildup, scary chemicals released over time from your paint and furniture, and other indoor pollutants.


It's basically just an air/air intercooler, which draws in outside air and passes it through one set of plates on the way into the home, while taking inside air and passing it across the other set of plates on the way out, hoping that there will be some beneficial transfer of energy between the two in the process. The efficiency is pretty low (they typically claim a 20% energy savings vs. just opening a window and letting all the cool / warm air escape that way) but it's better than nothing. Mostly, these are targeted at higher-end "green" mansions as a way of artificially masking the fact that they are consuming massive amounts of energy as compared to a normal home.


https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1349890446


However, if you were to install such a system in a moderate climate, there's no reason at all you couldn't use it simply as an outside air fan (with the main A/C compressor switched off) when all you need is to draw in some cool air from the outside.

Links:

Energy Recovery ventilator | Heatexchange Unit | Air Conditioning and Purification | Eco Solutions | Business | Panasonic Global
http://www.renewaire.com/images/stor...ialcatalog.pdf
Performance Energy Recovery Ventilator - Carrier

Also, on topic!

I am really annoyed with myself. I just found out that there was an NRC public hearing last night up in Dana Point to discuss the re-start plans for San Onofre (refresher: the nuke plant near my home has been offline all year because of a secondary steam leak in what turned out to be some defective boilers that were put in a couple of years ago.)

As one would expect, it was deluged with anti-nuke protesters and other generally hysterical types.

I REALLY would have liked to go up there, stand up at the podium, and say "My name is Joe, and I have no association with the nuclear industry or any energy company. I live 15 miles from San Onofre, and I support the plant's re-start 100%. (Insert relevant facts to the effect that while I support Solar and Wind energy production as secondary energy sources, the fact is that we need reliable electricity even when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.) When I go to bed each night, I like to know that my plug-in Electric Vehicle is being recharged with the clean, sustainable, carbon-free energy that San Onofre produces, and every day that it's off line is just one more day that we're needlessly burning through fossil-fuels and pouring tons of unnecessary pollutants into the environment."

Gotta throw a "Bitches!" in at the end of the speech.

Do it Joe, I too support Nuclear Energy. I also support sending all the waste to Texas.

The point was that this meeting occurred yesterday, I missed it, and I no longer have the opportunity to do it.

ahh, that sucks.

Another link for Señor Peréz as it relates to both San Diego and non-fossil fuel energy sources:

Algae Are a Growing Part of San Diego's Appeal - Businessweek

Hey Joe, here's a link

Help for Small Nuclear Reactors - NYTimes.com

Seems to me that factory-made sort-of-modular reactors would not be a new idea, but.....

When I was in the business, the cost structure involved in building a big nuke was what ultimately killed my project(and job). The idea of serially-made smaller reactors is too sensible to have not been considered before.

Yes please. I mean this gets closer and closer just as our knowledge in materials and such get better/cheaper. Hopefully it's only a matter of time as far as bringing down costs.

It's weirder than that.

Factory-built Small Modular Reactors have been around for a quite a long time, in the form of Naval propulsion reactors. Those aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines couldn't wait around for lengthy on-site reactor construction. They never gained any serious interest within the civilian community, as it was assumed that large reactors would be more cost-effective in the long term, since they require fewer sites, personnel, containment structures, etc., per unit of electricity generated. It was also assumed that the cost of constructing them would tend to decrease over time, which Greenpeace et al made sure would never happen.

Puzzlingly, there has not, until recently, been much in the way of standardization for large reactors. From a licensing perspective, ever reactor presently online in the US has always been considered a custom-job. Specifically, operators have bee required to jump through two separate sets of hoops; first a construction license was required to start the project, and then after the reactor was built, the operator could file for an operating license.

Because of this, the construction of any new reactor was a massive financial risk. An operator might be granted the construction license and spend years and billions of dollars building the site, only to face new opposition when it came time to apply for the operating license. In fact, this very thing has happened several times in the US, which is why we have a number of mothballed reactors. Typically, these were units that were begun prior to 1979, but abandoned after the TMI-II incident made operators fear that they would never be able to receive an operating license once the reactor was completed.

This is kind of crazy, if you ask me.

Pretend that you are Boeing, and you build airplanes. Airplanes are far more dangerous than nuclear reactors in terms of civilian deaths per year. When a customer wants to buy an airplane from you, they don't have to jump through a bunch of regulatory hoops to prove to the FAA that the airplane is safe. You, as the manufacturer, have already done that. You built one airplane, subjected it to thorough and rigorous testing, and the FAA granted you a Type Certification. Once you have that, you can build as many copies of that airplane as you like, and sell them with a minimum of fuss.

Well, the NRC has finally gotten on board.

First, they have started issuing Design Certification on reactor families. So when Westinghouse came up with the new AP1000 reactor, they submitted it for review, and the NRC said "Yes, we agree that this reactor is well designed, and you may build as many of them as you like." Then then segues into the second concept, which is the Combined Construction and Operating License.

As a utility, if you elect to buy a reactor which has received design certification, you may file for a COL prior to construction, and provided that you follow the rules and the reactor is built exactly to spec, you may be confident that you will be allowed to operate it once it is complete.

This process is precisely how Vogtle and V.C. Summer have gotten to the point where they are finally constructing a total of four new AP1000 reactors. (Watts Bar unit 2, which is the fifth reactor presently under construction, was actually started in 1973, but fell into regulator hell after TMI, and was officially mothballed at about 80% completion in 1988.)


I assume that the reactor described in that article you linked to is the B&W "mPower" although it doesn't specifically say. mPower is actually a really interesting design, from a systems point of view. The underlying technology is pretty old school (it's just a plain ole' light-water PWR) but the packaging is pure genius. Rather than having a separate steam generator as an external component, the steam generator is built right into the reactor pressure vessel itself. Thus, there is no need for the large-diameter piping which traditionally carries primary-loop (radioactive) water out to the external steam generator (PWR) or turbine hall (BWR) in a conventional plant. The radioactive coolant never leaves the pressure vessel! And since the only thing leaving the reactor is steam, there are no penetrations at all below the waterline. You can break every single pressurized external pipe, and the primary coolant all stays inside the vessel.

The refueling process is pretty nifty as well. In a conventional reactor, you have to shut it down every 2 years, unbolt the huge lid, use a crane to pick up fuel and move it around, then bolt the lid back on. It's a hugely time-consuming task. With the mPower, the operator has the option to never even touch the fuel. You can run the unit for four years, then pop the whole reactor out as a complete assembly, drop a fresh one in, and send the spent unit back for refurb. It sounds almost comical, but it's the truth.

IIRC, the operating licensing process was concurrent with design and construction, so you had NRC, EPA and everybody else involved with the operator and AE, so that you weren't really betting $5B on a licensing deal dice roll 8 years down the road.

While TMI certainly ignited a flurry of nanny-ism, the financial effects might have been more important. My project (WPPSS 3 & 5 - we didn't call it "Whoops" for nothing) was set back severely. We went from something like 60% complete on unit 3 to 28% overnight due to NUREG changes; unit 5 went from 30% to around 15%. Retrofitting and redesign probably extended completion by 4 years and nearly doubled the final cost. And then, of course, you had Mt St Helens and ashfall issues to worry about......

The foks in Washington, as a group, had no special problem with nukes, even after TMI. The WPPSS nuclear program going from $7 or 8 Billion to $30 Billion and nearly bankrupting the whole region was another matter. That's why they were abandoned.

That's true, but it was still a separate process from the construction license, and one which could not begin until after sizeable financial commitments have been made. That's still a lot of uncertainty.

With the new COL process, operators no longer have to roll the dice and hope that nothing will get in the way of the operating license process after they've already placed their orders and started construction. They can be assured ahead of time, before a single shovelful of dirt has been moved, that they already have a license to operate.

This can only be a good thing.




Indeed- changes in NUREG were certainly a major issue. Another, equally major issue were changes in design which occurred after construction had already begun. In the 1960s and 70s, we were still earning how to design these things, and if you look at a lot of the sites that were completed during that time, many of the cost overruns and delays are directly attributable to the design being revised mid-way through construction. (Obviously some of this is, in turn, re-attributable to regulatory changes- it's a bit of vicious circle.)


Fortunately, the combination of Design Certification and the COL process solves both of these issues. The reactor design is already finalized before construction ever begins, and the commission can't go changing the rules halfway through the construction process.


I'm not intimately familiar with the old Satsop sites (although WPPSS-2, to the best of my knowledge, has a near perfect operational record and is operating at a profit) so I can't speak intelligently to the history of units 3 & 5. I do know that Columbia (WPPSS 1 and 4) was a textbook example of how to mismanage a public-works project. There were too many fingers in the pie, an even though SCL wasn't totally incompetent, most of the managers, directors and contractors were. It wouldn't have mattered if they were building a reactor, paving a road or just digging an especially large hole- that project was doomed by its own management long before Babcock & Wilcox ever received the first purchase order.




The special problems started long before TMI-2.

First, the utility made a stupid decision to build 5 new plants at the same time, with zero experience in construction at that scale. They should have started small, gotten one plant up and generating, and applied the lessons learned from that to the next one. This is how successful nuclear projects are run. Instead, they provided the rope for their own hanging in the form of "You've spent $X (where X is five times what it would have cost to only screw up one plant) and you have nothing to show for it!"

Next, they shot themselves in the foot again by forgetting to read the tax code when issuing bonds. The IRS expressed its displeasure in 1973, and so the net-billing scam which was funding this whole fiasco came to a grinding halt.

Not to be defeated, they ramped up plans for "Phase 2" of the project, which seemed sufficiently not-insane that businesses in the Seattle area successfully convinced the City Council to throw its financial backing at the project, purchasing an option on 10% of the plant. Unfortunately, their accountants has apparently graduated by correspondence-course, because they might as well have produced the revised business plan by eating a bunch of Scrabble tiles and then shitting them out onto a page.

The Washington Environmental Council (a bigger bunch of hippies than greenpeace) then filed a lawsuit that promised to halt the project for at least five years to study whether the endangered spotted tree mold (or some such BS) was going to be harmed. SCL thought they could weasel out of this by opening the matter up to a Citizens Overview Committee (the so-called "Energy 1990" study), which in turn basically said "Nah, we'll pass on the nuclear option. We don't need electricity to be happy, we'll just burn our hemp clothing to stay warm." The City Council could have saved the day, but instead their balls mysteriously fell off and they said "Sorry, we're pulling our support from this project. No more money for you."

But it gets better. A bunch of smart folks who know the difference between good shit and bad shit decided to go to DC to put together the Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning and Conservation Act which would, in part, have enabled funding to actually complete the WPPSS projects. But what the fuck? They let the Northwest Conservation Act Coalition (more hippies) in on the action, and they subsequently turned the whole thing on its head by drafting a set of rules that totally ignored cost and instead gave preferential treatment to the development of "conservation" as an energy source. (Analogy: my car is a "source" of gasoline if I don't drive it. WTF^2?)

When they finally gave up and halted the project, it was a mercy-killing.

It's almost a little scary that you know so much about the project. It was indeed a textbook case in mismanagement. I was in charge of the ECN process for the AE on 3 & 5 for a few years - I think of it as getting an MBA in "How Not to Do Stuff."

To be fair, WPPSS was hamstrung by some state laws that doomed them from the start. E.g. - because there was participation in the consortium by some quasi-government agencies, contracting practices were subject to state open-bidding rules. No vendor pre-qualification - contracts were awarded based on bids. So, 3 years in when it became apparent that Perez Discount Plumbing could not,in fact, deliver and install 10,000 lineal feet of ASME large-bore piping with seismic hanger hardware, the contract bidding process had to be re-opened from the beginning. Even a small percentage of the hundreds of contracts could yield years of delays.

Of course, there was other stuff like awarding safety-related plumbing contracts for individual buildings to different contractors, while neglecting to specify who would actually coonect them to each other. When they realized this, they awarded another contract for the connection, but because there was no coordination originally, the plumbing didn't line up from one building to the other, leading to many more ECN's and DCN's and even further delays and costs.

Alas, shit like this cost me my cushy job, along with thousands of other folks. Unfortunately for us all, this collective world-class ineptitude pretty much finished new nuclear projects in the US. After the client defaulted on a couple billion dollars in bonds, nuclear-power investment became(rim-shot, please) radioactive.

*Paging Mr, Joe Perez, Mr Joe Perez, please pick up the white courtesy phone.*


Anyone happen to read about the joint venture company in San Diego that's making solar panels? They've got a contract to make a "power plant" of solar trackers that will generate 100megawatts. BTW, current total solar power generation is estimated to be just over 100megawatts, so this is big.

The grand opening of the plant in San Diego was this week. Soitec US is officially online. This is the company Orafol (formerly Reflexite, where I work) has partnered with to produce solar panels for power generation.

Those big panels, with the array of lenses? I designed all the tooling and fixturing to produce them. I will be directly responsible for the first large scale (100megawatt) solar power plant in the USA

New Solar Facility Looking to Hire 450 | San Diego 6 | Local News

Watch the video!




P.S. All those "green" Prius driving assholes can kiss my ass.

That's pretty neat. If they can build 30 or 40 more sites exactly like that one, and devise a means to store the energy which they produce and re-release it onto the grid at night, we'll have something roughly equivalent to a single nuclear reactor.

Which brings me to a moment of sadness. As of today, Southern California has been without clean baseline energy for exactly one year, as this marks the anniversary of the first day after San Onofre was taken completely offline following the discovery of a steam generator defect in Unit 3.

Plans for a partial-power restart of Unit 2 are still being hotly debated and contested. What's most depressing is that there is now starting to be serious talk that Unit 3 may be scrapped altogether.

That said, progress continues at Plant Vogtle 3 & 4 and V.C. Summer 2 & 3.

Artists rendition of the completed Vogtle facility:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1359737951

Well, excuse us for making a start. Next time we'll be sure to use eminent domain laws to pave all of Nevada & New Mexico with solar panels just for you.

I got nearly the same statement from my brother. No it's not the last word in energy production, but someone has to get things rolling (as opposed to just blowing money like Solyndra), and we're doing it. Sorry it's not the perfect solution.

Yes, I'd like to see more nuke plants. The way things are, it's not gonna happen soon.

Tax dirty energy, stop subsidizing solar, watch the masses beg for cheap nuclear power.

Didn't mean to attack what you were doing- please don't take it that way.

I recognize the difference between base-load generating capacity and peak-load capacity. Of all of the available "green" technologies, solar arrays are the most ideally suited to peak-load generation in areas with warmer climates, since their output profile tends to perfectly track the load profile of all of the air-conditioners which they are helping to power.

I'm just a tad bitter right now about the situation at San Onofre, and the suggestions from some in our area that technologies such as solar are somehow a suitable replacement for base-load generating capacity.


It's happening, just very slowly. Vogtle and V.C. Summer are both on track for criticality within 3-5 years (total of four new units, all AP-1000s.) It's my hope that they will serve as a model for other utilities.

Sorry, I'm a bit sensitive. Everyone claims to want cheap, clean energy (like solar), but it's never good/efficient enough. Like it's my fault I haven't revolutionized the entire industry. We are at least making progress.

As you said, it's not meant to replace anything, but just add to peak generation. Maybe someday it'll all be looked upon as a quaint novelty from the old days.

I wouldn't say that at all. Right now, we have a lot of fossil-fuel peakers (mostly NatGas) which vary their output to match the demand curve throughout the day. A lot of 'em are small turbine plants which shut down entirely at night.

Even though NatGas may be the "best" of the fossil fuel options, it still costs money, generates emissions, and depletes an energy source which could be re-directed to meet other needs (transportation, heating and cooking, etc.) Solar generation, be it photovoltaic or thermal, is an ideal replacement for this type of power plant in areas which receive full sun for a large percentage of the year. Such as right here in SoCal and the other, less important states to the right of us.

Where my jimmies start to rustle is when folks start claiming that energy sources such as wind and solar are somehow magically able to meet 100% of demand (if only the government / evil corporations would stop suppressing them), and are thus a viable alternative to nuclear and coal plants. Beyond the obvious problems of scale, these folks seem to forget that we still have electricity when the wind is calm and the sun is not shining. That power is generated by large plants which run at full capacity 24 hours a day, and plants in that category simply aren't going to be obsoleted any time in the foreseeable future. If anything, base-load energy demand (relative to peak demand) is only likely to increase over time, as the number of automobiles powered in whole or part by electric batteries (which tend, for the most part, to be recharged over-night in the garage at home) increases.

Until Mr. Fusion is available in stores or the process for harvesting dilithium crystals and producing antimatter on a commercial scale is perfected, the best that we can do is to select the baseload generating technology which has the lowest environmental impact and causes the least amount of depletion to available fossil-fuel reserves.

It's simple, Joe. You just put all the extra electrons you don't use in a tank to hold them for a rainy day. :jerkit:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1359747111


Why can't you be more forward thinking?

Actually, that's not too far off. Solar concentrators use liguid sodium and heat it to some very high temp (I can't be bothered to look it up). The sodium is then used to make steam, which turns the turbine. The sodium is at such a high temp, that it takes quite a while to cool, meaning you can still generate after the sun is down, at least for a while.

Arent those things near silent?

People need to be sent to Iraq to gather their own oil. Err i mean save their country.

no. they make tons of noise and kill tons of birds.

The local one by my house is silent (yes when running) :confused:

Yes even while turning. Sorry ninja edited that into my post.

Damn you and your ninja-edits forcing me to ninja-delete what would otherwise have been an amusing (if pointless and stupid) quip.

I'll take 'em. They can put them on my hill. I've got wind out the wazoo!