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Hungary nuclear plant cuts output because of warm Danube waters

reuters.com

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Re: Hungary nuclear plant cuts output because of warm Danube waters

#61

Post by badtension »

unglaublich wrote: post #30
taylodl wrote: post #21

Nuclear power plants and coal-fired power plants work off the same principle: Use the heat to boil water to create steam, run the stream through a steam turbine, and condense the steam back to water. This water is continually recycled throughout the system. The river water is used to condense the steam back to water and then the water is discharged back to the river - warmer than it came in. If the water coming in fr…

We don't talk about it, because we want to get _away_ from igniting huge amounts of underground carbon-based material and putting it straight in the atmosphere. We want to move to methods of power generation that do _not_ significantly upset the delicate balance of a livable planet. Continuing adding more carbon to the atmosphere is only worsening the situation.

There are so many people that only think in extremes - we should go all in on nuclear and there's no other way. They are the ones that ignore limitations that parent mentioned. Their fantasy will not work and strong opposition to renewables is detrimental to our future.

Re: Hungary nuclear plant cuts output because of warm Danube waters

#62

Post by throwbadubadu »

xattt wrote: post #47
unglaublich wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus, it's a design parameter in a performance/cost trade-off. It's _designed_ to not work at full power at this heat, because that was thought to be the ideal trade-off. Maybe it still is, maybe they underestimated the occurrence of high water temperature incidents, but in any case it's a consciously designed safe state.

Can future designs have the operating temp shifted in order to accommodate warmer waters?

You mean the design of the ecology around? No, not in a reasonable timespan ;)

Re: Hungary nuclear plant cuts output because of warm Danube waters

#63

Post by Natuerich »

taylodl wrote: post #21

Nuclear power plants and coal-fired power plants work off the same principle: Use the heat to boil water to create steam, run the stream through a steam turbine, and condense the steam back to water. This water is continually recycled throughout the system. The river water is used to condense the steam back to water and then the water is discharged back to the river - warmer than it came in. If the water coming in fr…

[dead]

Re: Hungary nuclear plant cuts output because of warm Danube waters

#64

Post by spywaregorilla »

unglaublich wrote: post #31
spywaregorilla wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost performance tradeoffs aren't some minor thing. If you cannot produce energy at a cost effective level, you might as well not produce it at all. The theoretical capabilities of the thing are not relevant if the economics of them don't work.

It's cost-efficient to operate in profitable scenarios and halt in costly scenarios. Optimizing profitability concerns the full operating range, not same anecdotal outliers. All energy-intensive industry operates only when circumstances are favorable. Sometimes it's more profitable to reduce output temporarily, e.g. during high gas-prices, or during weekends when workers are more expensive.

> It's cost-efficient to operate in profitable scenarios and halt in costly scenarios.

That really depends. You have fixed costs to operating a nuclear plant. You can't suddenly operate for a smaller fraction of the time and expect the economics of operating the plant to be the same.

Also, your comment was about the technical design of the plant and how it used flow to cool things, not the decision to turn lower operational output.

Re: Hungary nuclear plant cuts output because of warm Danube waters

#65

Post by mahkeiro »

cygx wrote: post #43
domenkozar wrote: post #17

Note that warm waters is a typical strawman argument against nuclear power. These are rare anomalies and there's dry-cooling of nuclear power plants (although it's less efficient and costs more).

These are rare anomalies Note that partial shutdowns due to excessive heat happen regularly in France, e.g. in 2018, 2019 and 2022. The problem's been around for a while, see e.g. this article [1] from 2009 that also mentions the heatwave of 2003, where regulators had to grant special exemptions to allow discharging 30°C water into waterways, well past the 24°C limit. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110612153407/ht…

The largest US nuclear plant is Palo Verde just west of Phoenix were temperature can get crazy hot and nowhere near a body of water. It’s running with waste water of the city. So I’m pretty sure in a country way more humid like France you can have a backup plan, like building larger condenser towers.

Re: Hungary nuclear plant cuts output because of warm Danube waters

#66

Post by orwin »

badtension wrote: post #61
unglaublich wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't talk about it, because we want to get _away_ from igniting huge amounts of underground carbon-based material and putting it straight in the atmosphere. We want to move to methods of power generation that do _not_ significantly upset the delicate balance of a livable planet. Continuing adding more carbon to the atmosphere is only worsening the situation.

There are so many people that only think in extremes - we should go all in on nuclear and there's no other way. They are the ones that ignore limitations that parent mentioned. Their fantasy will not work and strong opposition to renewables is detrimental to our future.

I don't think anybody except lobbyists argue for that. In most projections i saw from pro-nuclear anti-carbon think tank (such as the one i was memebr of during Covid), the nuclear part in the energy mix vary from 30 to 50% (Depending on what the nuclear would be present for: i think in the 50% model, 60% of nuclear should be controllable plants, vs 100% for the 30% model).

Re: Hungary nuclear plant cuts output because of warm Danube waters

#67

Post by cygx »

troupo wrote: post #48
cygx wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are rare anomalies Note that partial shutdowns due to excessive heat happen regularly in France, e.g. in 2018, 2019 and 2022. The problem's been around for a while, see e.g. this article [1] from 2009 that also mentions the heatwave of 2003, where regulators had to grant special exemptions to allow discharging 30°C water into waterways, well past the 24°C limit. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110612153407/ht…

> Note that partial shutdowns due to excessive heat happen regularly in France, e.g. in 2018, 2019 and 2022. And they affect a very small number of plants and energy output. The largest disruption so far has been when French government finally got its head out of its butt and stopped a few plants for long overdue maintenance

Even before the most recent maintenance period, there were problems: In 2019, French regulators had to ask industry to cut consumption by 1.5GW to keep the grid stable as utility frequency was dropping significantly [1]. That issue comes up basically every other winter, but so far, we've avoided catastrophic results.

[1] https://www.cre.fr/actualites/RTE-fait-appel-aux-industriels...

Re: Hungary nuclear plant cuts output because of warm Danube waters

#68

Post by cygx »

mahkeiro wrote: post #65
cygx wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are rare anomalies Note that partial shutdowns due to excessive heat happen regularly in France, e.g. in 2018, 2019 and 2022. The problem's been around for a while, see e.g. this article [1] from 2009 that also mentions the heatwave of 2003, where regulators had to grant special exemptions to allow discharging 30°C water into waterways, well past the 24°C limit. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110612153407/ht…

The largest US nuclear plant is Palo Verde just west of Phoenix were temperature can get crazy hot and nowhere near a body of water. It’s running with waste water of the city. So I’m pretty sure in a country way more humid like France you can have a backup plan, like building larger condenser towers.

Sure. It's not so much a physical limitation, but a failure of policy.

Re: Hungary nuclear plant cuts output because of warm Danube waters

#69

Post by taylodl »

stephen_g wrote: post #51
taylodl wrote: post #21

Nuclear power plants and coal-fired power plants work off the same principle: Use the heat to boil water to create steam, run the stream through a steam turbine, and condense the steam back to water. This water is continually recycled throughout the system. The river water is used to condense the steam back to water and then the water is discharged back to the river - warmer than it came in. If the water coming in fr…

We have this problem with coal plants in Australia - in Summer often there are unplanned coal unit outages on hot days (due to this kind of thing, among other reliability issues with the aging plants - I don’t think ours use river water but this kind of cooling issue), and it’s always right when the grid is stressed with all the air conditioners running… And of course the rightwing media starts the chorus of ‘those b…

Look what happened in Texas - major Winter storm hit and it froze the gas generation plants. Of course all the right-wingers could talk about were those "frozen windmills" failing them. Meanwhile in my state, which is considerably further North than Texas, the temperature was even colder yet our windmills were spinning just fine. Of course they "forgot" to mention that. They also "forgot" to mention all the gas generation plants that couldn't operate in subfreezing temperatures. You can better believe when generation is taken offline due to the river water being too warm or the water level being too low they're going to blame solar and wind generation for the outages. It'd be funny if it weren't for the fact that there are idiots who believe what they say.
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