Argentina and Russia Sign 3rd Nuclear Power Development Agreement in 18 Months.

[NNadir]

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP-Argentina_agrees_cooperation_with_Russia_again-1504107.html">Argentina agrees again to cooperate with Russia (on nuclear energy).

Russia and Argentina have signed their third nuclear energy cooperation agreement in 18 months, covering the possible construction of Russian-designed nuclear reactors and the development of fuel cycle facilities in Argentina.

Rosatom head Sergei Kiryenko signed the agreement with Argentina's federal planning minister Julio de Vido during an official visit by Russian president Dmitry Medvedev to Argentina...

...Argentina has two operating pressurised heavy water reactors (PHWR), Atucha 1 and Embalse. Construction work was suspended on the 81%-complete Atucha 2, a German-designed PHWR like Atucha 1, in 1994, but was resumed in 2006, and the unit is scheduled for operation in 2011.

However, Russia is not the only country that Argentina is talking to about a possible fourth nuclear unit. De Vido has been holding discussions with companies and officials from countries including Canada, South Korea, and France as well as Russia, and only days before he signed the agreement with Rosatom, held meetings in Washington with Westinghouse executives to discuss the possible construction of a third unit at Atucha. In the wake of that meeting, de Vido's ministry website reported that significant progress had been made towards cooperation with Westinghouse, and that Westinghouse representatives would visit Argentina in June to continue outlining possible collaborations...

Apparently the Argentines are not moved by light weight American bourgeois bloggers with non-existant science educations who live on trust funds.

Note that the terms for power here are different than those used by the wind and solar industry, since nuclear energy worldwide has a capacity utilization (expressed as the ratio between average continuous power times time divided by rated power - which is always, in the wind and solar industry, expressed fraudulently.

To wit: The http://www.ens.dk/en-US/Info/FactsAndFigures/Energy_statistics_and_indicators/Annual%20Statistics/Documents/Figures2008.xls#Renewable!A4">Danish Energy Website Reports that Denmakr Produced just 24.9 Petajoules of energy in 2008, down from 2007 because, um, the wind wasn't blowing that much.

(None of this was reliable energy, by the way, and a lot of it was dumped abroad from the West Denmark wind fields at times no one actually needed the electricity.)

Denmark claims to have http://www.ens.dk/en-US/supply/Renewable-energy/WindPower/Facts-about-Wind-Power/Key-figures-statistics/Sider/Forside.aspx">3163 Mega"watts" of wind turbine capacity.

If you can do math - and wind advocates as whole, can't - one understands that a megawatt is a million joules per second and that a year contains 24 hours/day * 365.25 days/year * 3600 seconds/hour = 31557600 seconds.

Thus the continuous average output of all the wind turbines in Denmark is 22 PJ/(31557600 seconds) = (22 X 10¹⁵J /31557600 seconds = 697,137,931 watts = 697 MW, an amount easily produced in a small gas plant. Thus the capacity utilization of the 3163 Mega"watts" of Danish wind turbines is (100)697/3163 = 22%.

To completely and reliably exceed the energy output of all of Denmark's whirling crashing and burning piles of metals strewn all over the country, the reactor in a single building at Atucha 2, at 750 MW would only need to produce at (100)697/750 = 92% capacity utilization, something it is relatively easy for nuclear reactors, particularly on line fueled heavy water reactors, to do.




Have a nice evening.

[hunter]

1. Dontcha just hate it when that happens...

Unless you're selling natural gas, maybe.

[NNadir]

2. I like the wires hanging out of this one: