Accident tolerant fuel completes first lifecycle at the Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant.

[NNadir]

Accident tolerant fuel completes first lifecycle at Vogtle

Framatome’s enhanced accident tolerant fuel assemblies recently completed a third 18-month fuel cycle at Southern Nuclear’s Vogtle-2 plant—the first of this type of fuel to reach this milestone in the U.S., the company said.

Framatome’s GAIA fuel assemblies with Protect enhanced accident tolerant fuel (EATF) technology have operated over four and a half years since being inserted in 2019 at Vogtle, which concludes the full timeline assessment of the lead fuel assemblies concept and supports licensing activities to achieve market readiness.

“This is a significant milestone for our program, and through our collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy and Southern Nuclear we bring this new and innovative technology one step closer to commercial operations,” said Lionel Gaiffe, senior executive vice president for the Fuel Business Unit at Framatome. “The success of this project demonstrates accident tolerant fuel readiness for the safe and reliable generation of our clean energy future...

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The reactors at the big bogeyman at Fukushima failed because of a hydrogen explosion resulting from the steam oxidation of the zirconium cladding in the fuels when the heat removal was interrupted because of the inundation of the back up diesel generators. (A similar occurrence took place at Three Mile Island, but the hydrogen was vented, preventing a hydrogen explosion.) The new fuels are an approach to engineering away this risk in the future.

The trick in this accident tolerant fuel as I understand it, if I recall correctly is to place a think layer of a chromium alloy on the surface of the fuel to prevent the formation of hydrogen according to the high temperature reaction with steam:

Zr + 2H₂O_(g) -> ZrO₂ + 2H_2(g)

[OKIsItJustMe]

1. AP: Georgia nuclear rebirth arrives 7 years late, $17B over cost

Georgia nuclear rebirth arrives 7 years late, $17B over cost
BY JEFF AMY
Published 1:11 PM EDT, May 25, 2023

WAYNESBORO, Ga. (AP) — Two nuclear reactors in Georgia were supposed to herald a nuclear power revival in the United States. But the project is seven years late and $17 billion over budget as Georgia Power Co. announced the first new reactor at its Plant Vogtle could reach full electrical output by Saturday.

They’re the first U.S. reactors built from scratch in decades — and maybe the most expensive power plant ever. Georgia electric customers have already paid billions, and state regulators will ultimately decide if they’re on the hook for billions more.

Some of the key promises of Vogtle — like building modules offsite and shipping them for cheaper on-site assembly — did not pan out. Construction delays drove Westinghouse Electric Co., a titan of American industrial history, into bankruptcy when the company couldn’t absorb overruns.

And the lessons could be important because government officials and some utilities are again looking to nuclear power to alleviate climate change by generating electricity without burning natural gas, coal and oil.

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[NNadir]

2. In other news...

Solar and wind have soaked up trillions since 2015, for stuff that will need to be replaced every 20-25 years or so, albeit with lots of cheering, destruction of vast tracts of wilderness, unreliability, doing nothing other than to entrench the dumping of dangerous fossil fuel waste:

The amount of money spent on so called "renewable energy" since 2015 is 4.12 trillion dollars, compared to 377 billion dollars spent on nuclear energy, mostly to keep vapid cultists spouting fear and ignorance from destroying the valuable nuclear infrastructure.



IEA overview, Energy Investments.

The graphic is interactive at the link; one can calculate overall expenditures on what the IEA dubiously calls "clean energy."

The result of this vast penny pinching exercise in selective attention was reported, in units of energy in the 2024 IEA World Energy Outlook:



World Energy Outlook 2024

Table A.1a: World energy supply Page 296.

Note that combined, the multitrillion dollar solar and wind industry, so popular with antinukes for decade upon decade while the world burns, can't even keep up with the rise in the use of fossil fuels, never mind bulk energy:

The 2024 IEA World Energy Outlook has been released; World Energy Demand Grew by 13 Exajoules, Solar and Wind by 2 EJ.

It would appear that with all that cheering, and those trillions of dollars squandered on wind and solar junk that will be landfill in 25 years, spread over pristine wilderness, that solar and wind has failed to produce just slightly above half of the energy that nuclear produced in an atmosphere of dishonest catcalls.

The United States once built more than 100 nuclear reactors in about 25 years while providing the lowest cost electricity in the world, in the process saving millions of human lives that otherwise would have been lost to air pollution and climate change.

The Vogtle reactors were not symmetric in cost. The first came in at $17.6 Billion, the second, based on learning from constructing the first was about $12.4B.

We might drive this trend were we to build, say, 100 new reactors, or at least work to build the infrastructure to do so.

One of the fun things about people who complain about the cost of nuclear reactors is that they often function, to use my favorite metaphor, like arsonists complaining about forest fires. They have worked for decades to demonize nuclear energy, and succeeded at it, having managed to destroy the nuclear manufacturing infrastructure that might have saved tens of millions of lives that were otherwise lost to air pollution, not to mention saving ecosystems destroyed by the extreme global heating now being observed.

The asymmetry in the cost of the two Vogtle reactors is a result that the first required FOAKE costs, "first of a kind engineering" because the US, unlike China, which has built more than 50 nuclear reactors in the last 20 years, a work force needed to be trained, materials needed to be designed and fabricated, in most cases, long after experience and infrastructure was available to do so. Everything had to be built from scratch. When the second reactor began, the problems with the first had been partially solved, and costs fell.

These reactors will be saving human lives and be preventing carbon releases at the dawn of the 22nd century, fifty or sixty years after every wind turbine blade now in operation will be landfill, fifty or sixty years after every solar cell now working on the planet will be electronic waste.

As for whining about penny pinching, I have never, not once, encountered someone whining about the cost of Vogtle who has expressed a wit of concern about the cost of extreme global heating, extreme weather including extreme hurricanes, extreme droughts, and extreme glacial disappearances, which I personally regard as the outcome of the success of those arsonists complaining about forest fires. The costs surely dwarf the cost of the failed and useless trillions squandered on solar and wind.

The heating of the planetary atmosphere is accelerating, not decelerating:

2024's Disastrous CO2 Increased Readings Continue at the Mauna Loa Observatory.

Note that in 2013, the famous climate scientist Jim Hansen and his colleague, calculated that nuclear power prevented the release of about 64 billion tons of carbon dioxide, close to about two years of emissions while we live in the "Renewables will save us" so "we don't need nuclear" paradise in which we live, with the planet in flames.

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

The current rate that I obtain in 2024 from the data at Mauna Loa, using a 52 week running comparator between weeks in 2024 as compared with the same week in 2014 (ten year trend), shows that the annual rate of increase in the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere, shows we have reached the highest value ever observed, 25.52 ppm/10 years or 2.55 ppm per year. This year's peak was 427.94 ppm. It follows that without nuclear, we would have easily seen 433 ppm this year. If one integrates the second derivative, obtained by subtracting 2.55 ppm/year from 2.09 ppm/year that was observed in 2014, twice with high school level calculus, one can derive a crude quadratic using the current readings as boundary conditions.

This crude modeling equation predicts that we will break 500 ppm somewhere around 2046, undoubtedly with antinukes whining about "costs" day and night.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

Have a wonderful day.

[OKIsItJustMe]

3. EIA: Renewable generation surpassed coal and nuclear in the U.S. electric power sector in 2022

Last edited Tue Oct 29, 2024, 08:54 PM - Edit history (1)

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55960

MARCH 27, 2023
Renewable generation surpassed coal and nuclear in the U.S. electric power sector in 2022

Data source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Electricity Data Browser

Last year, the U.S. electric power sector produced 4,090 million megawatthours (MWh) of electric power. In 2022, generation from renewable sources—wind, solar, hydro, biomass, and geothermal—surpassed coal-fired generation in the electric power sector for the first time. Renewable generation surpassed nuclear generation for the first time in 2021 and continued to provide more electricity than nuclear generation last year.

Natural gas remained the largest source of U.S. electricity generation, increasing from a 37% share of U.S. generation in 2021 to 39% in 2022. The share of coal-fired generation decreased from 23% in 2021 to 20% in 2022 as a number of coal-fired power plants retired and the remaining plants were used less. The share of nuclear generation decreased from 20% in 2021 to 19% in 2022, following the Palisades nuclear power plant’s retirement in May 2022. The combined wind and solar share of total generation increased from 12% in 2021 to 14% in 2022. Hydropower generation remained unchanged, at 6%, in 2022. The shares for biomass and geothermal sources remained unchanged, at less than 1%.

Growth in wind and solar generating capacity drove the increase in wind and solar generation. Utility-scale solar capacity in the U.S. electric power sector increased from 61 gigawatts (GW) in 2021 to 71 GW in 2022, according to data from our Electricity Power Monthly. Wind capacity grew from 133 GW in 2021 to 141 GW in 2022.

More wind-generated power was produced in Texas than in any other state last year. Texas accounted for 26% of total U.S. wind generation last year, followed by Iowa (10%) and Oklahoma (9%). One of the largest wind farms in the United States (nearly 1,000 megawatt capacity [MW]) came online in Oklahoma in 2022.

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[OKIsItJustMe]

4. The Electricity Mix in the United States Shifts from Fossil Fuels to Renewables

Last edited Tue Oct 29, 2024, 08:52 PM - Edit history (1)

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/narrative/index.php#TheElectricityMixinth

The Electricity Mix in the United States Shifts from Fossil Fuels to Renewables
In this section, we discuss renewables displacing fossil fuels in the electric power sector.

Renewables displace fossil fuels in the electric power sector due to declining renewable technology costs and rising subsidies for renewable power
Economic growth paired with increasing electrification in end-use sectors results in stable growth in U.S. electric power demand through 2050 in all cases. Declining capital costs for solar panels, wind turbines, and battery storage, as well as government subsidies such as those included in the IRA, result in renewables becoming increasingly cost effective compared with the alternatives when building new power capacity.

Renewables are increasingly meeting power demand throughout the projection period (Figure 2). Natural gas, coal, and nuclear generation shares decline. Renewable power outcompetes nuclear power, even in the Low Zero-Carbon Technology Cost (ZTC) case, which evaluates the impact of more aggressive cost declines for nuclear and renewables than the Reference case. Most natural gas-fired generation comes from combined-cycled power plants as opposed to simple-cycle combustion turbines. Uncertainty in natural gas prices across cases leads to various projections for combined-cycle units in the short term, but in the long term, natural gas demand from the electric power sector stabilizes across all cases.


Data source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Outlook 2023 (AE02023)
Note: Shaded regions represent maximum and minimum values for each projection year across the AEO2023 Reference case and side cases. Ref=Reference case.

In order to meet increasing demand for electric power throughout the projection, total installed power capacity close to doubles across most cases, even in the Low Economic Growth case (Figure 3). Cases with a higher share of renewables in the generation mix have higher total grid capacity due to the inherently lower capacity factors of solar and wind compared with coal, nuclear, and combined-cycle plants.


Data source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Outlook 2023 (AE02023)
Note: ZTC=Zero-Carbon Technology Cost; other-geothermal, biomass, municipal waste, fuel cells, hydroelectric, pumped hydro storage.

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