Nuclear power is unreliable [View all]

[kristopher]

Watts Bar 2 Off Until Summer; Concerns over Safety Culture Persist
May 4, 2017
By Wayne Barber

The Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar 2 nuclear unit, which went offline in March because of an equipment problem, is expected to remain down until sometime this summer, according to CEO Bill Johnson.

The 1,100-MW reactor, the nation’s newest, had begun operation in October 2016. It has been out of service since March 23 following a structural failure in the unit’s condenser, a three-story-high heat exchanger.

Because of the tight space inside the condenser, “the logistics of doing this work are quite tricky,” Johnson said during a May 2 conference call on the federally owned utility’s financial results. He said he could not be more specific about the return-to-service date.

...

In response to a question, Johnson said that TVA has been working for more than a year to address concerns raised by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the corporation’s inspector general about the safety culture at Watts Bar. The commission cited a “chilled work environment” in a March 2016 report.

Inspector General Richard Moore said last month that he remained unconvinced that “TVA corrective actions will bring about sustainable change.” ...

https://www.rtoinsider.com/watts-bar-tva-clean-line-42514/

Intermittent or variable?
by Craig Morris
23 Jan 2014
Wind and solar power are often considered unreliable, especially by their detractors. But Craig Morris recently realized he needed to change his terminology – after learning how intermittent conventional power plants are....

...while production of wind and solar power fluctuate (to use the German term), giant amounts of renewable generation capacity do not simultaneously go off-line.

Conventional plants can fail quickly. In a recent storm that hit Europe, the social media world was concerned about wind turbines being blown away, but I could not find any news of such a thing happening. We do know that the Ringhals nuclear plant, with a capacity of 878 MW, failed completely, however, as one of its blocks did again just a few weeks later.

In North America, the recent Arctic cold knocked out power plants across the country, with 39,500 MW going off-line in a single day within the PJM grid, 21 percent of PJM’s total generation capacity. Roughly 19,000 MW was coal plants, followed by 9,000 MW of natural gas turbines, 1,600 MW of nuclear (probably a single plant), and “nearly 1,500 MW of wind.” (One wonders whether it was the wind turbines themselves that failed or grid connections to the turbines.)

The PJM area was not alone, either....

https://energytransition.org/2014/01/intermittent-or-variable/