All the eggs are never in one basket even if all the power generation is done using nukes, because they aren't all the same design. And France did fine with most of the eggs in the one basket even with more one common design.
The alternative is normally rolling load-shedding and cold nights.
Alberta came close a few days ago, and had to ask the citizens to "immediately shed". And they considered it an "achievement", that the citizens reduced load by 200 megawatts. The citizens dropped 100 megawatts pretty quickly, and it took a few more minutes to free up 200 megawatts.
Alberta has deals with two adjacent provinces for import/export. However, all are suffering the usual cold winter temps at the moment (third week of January), so the other two provinces had their own problems.
And then the Albertans joke around about their AP1000 project which got canned. Well, I guess you can "wear it down to the belt line" and "make friends with the consumers and ask them to play nice". It's one hell of a way to run a grid.
Managing a grid, is organic. You accept *any* power source as a contributor. However, the trick is, to not take too much of any one type (like, too many windmills). The other thing you want, is 2x nominal capacity versus the load, so you have room for maintenance activity. If you receive a lemon for a nuclear reactor, its availability is 50% for a lemon. That is how you know it is a lemon. Low availability. A continuous-fueling reactor might manage 80% availability. Some reactors are out of service for two or three years (depending on damage) for a rebuild. This is why you want redundancy, or you want a second alternative power source (hydro) which is reliable and can take the place of your nuke.
You don't have to build all-nukes (like a Frenchman). You don't have to build all-windmills.
The problem with all-nukes is correlated failure (like a Frenchman). If you build too many of the same reactor model, and there is an issue with the integrity of the device, then many devices may be forced offline for inspections or rework. One of the reasons for the organic approach to running a grid, is avoiding correlations and using things which fail independently of one another.
You never turn down an opportunity offered to you, to make electricity. That is why downtown where I live, had a 1 megawatt hydro station. This seems puny and insignificant, until you're short by 1 megawatt some day. That one has been replaced, functionally, by one less than a mile away which puts out 30 megawatts, and you can't even see that one from the street. It has no profile at all, and is below grade.
In my watershed, there are 30 hydro generators, tiny reservoirs. One of them has a very low head (It's not Hoover dam by any stretch). There might be overshot wheels or something for that one. This means we're not afraid to change styles, if it gives a few more megawatts.
If you have "too much of something else", the organic principle of power generation, welcomes at least one nuke. As something where the failure will not correlate. The nuke does not depend on the wind blowing. It may require cooling water, in which case you want to do the analysis to ensure that too much of your capacity is not wiped out during a drought.
Variety is the spice of life.
Paul
It was actually a lot more than 70% for quite a while, and mostly all just carbon copies of the one design too.
Paul snipped-for-privacy@needed.invalid wrote: .
Here power companies are experimenting with encouraging home owners to reduce consumption or to increase power export (from home battery systems) through a system of bribes during times of grid stress.
How effective this will be isn’t yet known but the rewards for exporting power can be really quite handsome. (£2.25 per kWhr on Wednesday).
Unfortunately our domestic power distribution system can’t generally cope with more than a 5 kW export from each household, and in many cases it’s restricted to 3.6kW. Still, it all adds up.
Tim
A massively expensive and stupid way to try and pretend that renewables actually work...
Even with 6 reactors out, nuclear is producing far more than solar at
7:45pm tonight.We seem to be exporting to France. They haven't got enough reactors for full on winter. Holland Norway and Denmark are fulling their boots probably exporting surplus windpower or hydro power
Works fine with nukes as France proved.
You don't need that sort of margin unless you only have 2 nukes like Singapore.
Doesnt matter if you have more than a couple of them.
Still doesnt matter if you have enough of them.
Yes, but nothing like 2x unless you only have a couple of them.
No hydro can do that, not even in Norway.
But that approach does make sense as France proved.
Trivially avoided by not having them all identical.
Which a mixed design of nukes does.
Makes no sense to be spending vast amounts on stupid stuff like windmills which need the same capacity in something else for when the wind isnt blowing.
Makes more sense to not be short by 1MW some day.
Makes more sense to have enough nukes.
Makes more sense to have enough nukes.
Makes more sense to have enough nukes.
Trivially achieved by not using just one nuke design.
Not with power generation. Worked fine with coal and even better with nukes.
Paul
But there was, a few years ago, when Denmark generated zero opower for a few days round Christmas. Dead Calm.
Canuckistan is thinking of buying AP1000 reactor(s) while trying to sell CANDU reactors, that's funny ...
Texas had 2X nominal capacity, and by making operational errors, the grid dropped. You should look that one up, and marvel at all the mistakes made. That happened during the winter, when the windmills had not been "winterized".
You would think a grid with 2x nominal capacity could not drop, but it did.
The Texas grid is separated from the rest of the United States for political reasons. Maybe the grid would not have dropped, if they were integrated with the rest of the grid. Who knows what might have happened (grid stays up), if a little export power from a neighbour was available on short notice. The neighbours would not have minded providing it either.
Paul
Well, I think the reason is so the fault modes would be different.
What we don't know, is if a politician just looked up Wikipedia and pulled that reactor out and put it on a PowerPoint slide, or whether engineers associated with the local grid selected it.
I don't know the history of the proposal, or how serious it was.
One reason for doing that, might be if a factory that makes parts or assemblies, was due south of the proposed location. Making it easier to get the components. For some reactors, getting the pressure vessel to the site is an issue.
*******I think the Chinese may have purchased a later version of the CANDU, but again, I don't know what stage that is at. Such a selection by them, would be for operational study, rather than buying in bulk. The Chinese have their own reactor design.
*******We're in the process of building at least a couple SMR, and that is brand new for us, and nobody can predict the outcome, as no spade has turned sod yet. It's still all PowerPoint slides, that project. The summary today, does not read the same as the initial funding proposal. Does that project seem real ? Not to me, it doesn't. Too much PowerPoint, not enough shovels.
Paul
We're putting the bison back. Slowly.
"There are two bison subspecies, the plains bison and the wood bison. Today there are roughly 31,000 wild bison in North America (20,000 plains bison and 11,000 wood bison)."
Paul
Paul snipped-for-privacy@needed.invalid wrote
But no one else has ever actually been stupid enough to go that route except a few who have just two power generators.
For reasons other than one power generating system failing.
Don't need to, I know about that.
It makes more sense to ensure that that can't happen than to have 2x capacity which is stupidly expensive unless you only have the two.
And that had nothing to do with just having the one TYPE of power generation.Texas never had that and no one with anything like the size of Texas would ever do that with wind.
Clearly 2x capacity didnt help them any.
And that alone is a completely stupid way to do things in that situation,
We do it too with WA and the NT but that is because its just not feasiible to have the SE Aust grid include WA.
And the WA rural grid has just imploded spectacularly and may not be fully restored for a week with 50C predicted in quite a few areas. That will be fun and it remains to be seen what the political consequences of that will be. Perth and the SW corner of WA still completely dominate WA politics with immense very sparsely populated electorates for the rest of the state with the Libs being virtually a steamibg turd of a party, so Labor likely will survive fine, but will certainly lose the tiny handful of the rural seats it already has in the area affected by the grid implosion.
Really depends on how the links are done.
South Australia did implode very spectacularly indeed when a mega storm took out quite a few towers which were the only link to the SE Aust grid and their stupidity with 'renewable' power generation meant that they couldnt even manage to black start their own now isolated grid for days.
Hard to say with so much stupid wind power gone.
Can't happen with nukes
From an estimated starting figure of 60 million.
Indeed. Uranium has always been a low value commodity, usually extracted as a by product of something else's mining activities.
Almost a waste product. And take up of nuclear power has been so low that there hasn't been a huge demand for it, so prices have been rock bottom.
Additionally the actual price of uranium per MWH generated is massively low.
I did work it out once, and the actual *raw* uranium cost equivalent in a low enrichment PWR was something like 0.1p per unit.
With nuclear electricity being CFD'ed at 9.5p/unit there is a LOT of room for uranium inflation..
So the market is essentially not dictated by shortage of supply, but by extraction cost .
..At the moment.
That's why they have links to IIRC Sweden Germany and Norway. They import hydro from the north and german coal power from the south
All these links are two way - when the wind blows everyone tries to dump the power for anything they can get at rock bottom prices. When its stops those that have typically hydro power or in the case of France surplus nuclear, flog it for as much as they can get. You see that here in the UK when Scottish hydro in wet weather has to generate at low profit, or dump the water over the spillways, but when the wind drops boy can they clean up with emergency power infill at peak times at stupendous profit.
It's a bit of a buggers muddle, and that's why there are high priced reserve units on standby. OCGT diesel and the like. Plus the contracts with certain industrial consumres that can be told to shut down because there's not enough leccy,
Renewables just increase the instability really, if you think of them as not actually producing power, but reducing the demand on the more stable generators, you can see that they add a massive variation in demand to the conventional generators, forcing them to run at lower profit and lower capacity factor and thereby incereasing what they have to charge to stay in business.
Well there are states that want AP1000. Frankly I've always felt te CANDU was a perrty good reactor design, but there are other types in service and its not ideal to have to train staff in one type as well as another.
The cost of NOT having all your eggs in one basket is not insignificant.
I like that!
That's renewables all over. As well.
UK seems to be looking at small *and* large reactors. Which makes sense. I guess whatever looks fats and cheap to build will get a lot of attention, but there is still a place for the 1-5GW big brute power stations
That's bullshit with Australian uranium and Australia has more uranium than anyone else.
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