Holy crap. It’s down again?
I don’t follow OL3 closely, but I worked for a branch of Areva while OL3 was being built (I didn’t work for the nuke division), and OL3 was very interesting to everyone whose email address ended in areva.com. It seemed like the thing that was sent to test the “too big to fail” theory. So the bumps along the way have been … intriguing.
OL3 has not been operational since October after cracks were found in all of OL3’s feedwater pumps.
All? That sounds … not great?
It is very much not great. The pumps were supplied by Siemens, though.
“Does it actually have to work, or will someting by Siemens do?”
(Old joke in civil engineering.)
That’s funny, because South West Trains turned to Siemens to get trains that would actually work.
By March 2002 twenty-four of the thirty units had been delivered, but on an average day only nine to ten units were actually available for service.[17] The last six units eventually arrived by October 2002, but it was another seven months—May 2003—before the entire fleet had entered service.[4] The protracted and difficult introduction of the Juniper fleet is credited with influencing SWT’s decision in April 2001 to replace the rest of its slam-door units with an order of 785 vehicles from the competing Siemens Desiro family.[16][18]
hypersonic is the new blockchain
I’m surprised that they feel the need to protect it from themselves. I suspect they’ve caused some damage and are trying to protect themselves from the radiation.
The debut of Bill Gates’ advanced nuclear power plant will be delayed for at least two years because the only company that makes its fuel in sufficient quantities to make it work is located in Russia.
The 345MWe Gates-backed TerraPower Natrium plant, planned for construction at a soon-to-be decommissioned coal plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming, can still be built. But its planned 2028 commissioning has now slipped to 2030 at the earliest, a spokesperson told the Casper Star-Tribune on Tuesday.
[…]
Interesting molten salt idea. Same thing that’s used for a few solar thermal projects. I believe the solar version has gone into service commercially somewhere. But I couldn’t point where on a map.
It’s a simple idea - the energy source (sun, fuel rods, whatever) makes heat. Heat melts salt. Molten salt is stored in a big insulated tank. Molten salt is released into a heat exchanger as needed, then re-heated and put back in the hot tank.
So if you have any spare heat, you have a plant that can swing (change production) as fast as the metal will allow, which has been a big issue with both nukes and solar. Solar, in raw form, always swings and rarely where you want it to swing. Nukes don’t like to swing at all, even when you need them to. Adding a molten salt loop gives you flexibility, but drives up capex and opex.
In both cases, adding the molten salt infrastructure drives up the cost a lot. In solar, that means very few developers want to engage in the added risk when they already know they’ll make their profit just putting up a field of panels. I’m not sure what it means to already-expensive nukes.
In a major turnaround since the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant incident of March 2011, the Japanese government today announced a new policy on nuclear power. As part of the government’s overall efforts to achieve carbon neutrality by the year 2050, they are going pro-nuclear with a policy that would extend the service life of existing plants while promoting the construction of so-called “next-generation nuclear power plants.”
This new policy will be put to a vote by the Diet early next year, but I would be surprised if it does not pass unless there is significant public backlash.
At the time of my posting this, OL3 is running at 1531.3 MW.
I Thought would they talk about how timing it just right would ensure that the fallout rains down on Atlanticist countries,
