Sabotage probed at Koeberg nuclear station

[struggle4progress]

... The controlled shutdown occurred on Christmas day after a loose bolt somehow got inside the generator of Koeberg nuclear power station's unit 1. The 8cm-long bolt was meant to be attached to the outside of the generator ...

The damage would take at least three months to repair. With only one of Koeberg's reactors working during these three months, the risk of power interruptions in the Cape would increase.

"We will have to look at conserving electricity, like in a drought we conserve water," Gcabashe said ...

Eskom is now shopping around nuclear power stations in Europe and elsewhere to try to buy a second-hand rotor and stator. These parts are not kept in stock by nuclear power plant manufacturers, and it would take at least a year for new parts to be made ...

http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=14&art_id=vn20060120071013263C336169

[Throckmorton]

1. Oh no, a nuclear plant has a damaged generator

its the end of the world.

Someone forgot their FMEA guidelines.

[NNadir]

2. Everyone in South Africa will die.

[Oerdin]

3. You mean they're not dead yet?

Surely, if the rantings of the anti-nuclear nuts were to be believed all of humanity would be dead by now. Don't they realize that if nuclear power plants aren't built then that electricity will be generated by fossil fuels?

[struggle4progress]

4. The South Africans apparently have an unreliable power source

[NNadir]

5. Yes, coal is much more "reliable."

For instance, when this coal ash pit collapsed, damaging a 40 mile stretch of the Delaware River below the Delaware River, most of the anti-progress "progressives" in the world filled cyber space with vast protests, comparable to the protests against this loose turbine bolt and the leaky pipe at Sellafield.

Delaware Riverkeeper Network (DRN) advocated for a Natural Resources Damage Assessment team to be formed, which has been done. However, clean up efforts, overseen by PADEP, are slow and have been riddled with mishaps. For instance, PADEP approved the use of an old unlined basin at the power plant to store the clean up waste, despite protests from the public and DRN, who also called for the shut down of the coal-fired units while the basin was disabled. When PPL put the old basin to use, it sprung a leak on Sept. 9, polluting groundwater monitoring wells with selenium. Finally, PPL shut down the coal plant, which remained closed until December 28, when PADEP granted a permit to reopen Basin #4, which is the basin that originally blew out in August. DRN opposes the use of open basins at the plant and filed a Petition under CERCLA with the EPA in September and again in October to assess the pollution event and cleanup efforts. The EPA granted DRN's request for a “preliminary assessment” of the pollution released by the basin blowout and a review by EPA is underway.

Wind power is especially "reliable" too.

Wind, as we all know, blows only at moments of peak electrical load, which is why phony environmentalists routinely exclude the environmental cost of energy storage (and/or back-up) from any calculation of risk.

Everyone who advocates solar PV power writes lots and lots of pages on the internet noting every cloudy day.

Nuclear power plants typically operate at a loading capacity of 90% or better.

I note that in paying attention to every shutdown of every nuclear facility in every instance - in pretending that turbines never fail on coal plants, never on gas plants, in promoting the weakest and least economic systems of the grand renewable fantasy, anti-environmental anti-nuclear anti-progress "progressives" obviate the case of how intellectually weak the "nuclear exceptional case is."

I note that the majority of the increase of nearly 2000 billion kilowatt-hours in the last 25 years from the nuclear industry is performance based.

http://www.nei.org/documents/Wano_Performance_Indicators_2002.pdf

If the "renewable fantasy" squad was performance based, there would be no global climate change crisis, would there?

But there is a global climate change crisis.

Ignoring risk is not the same as providing safety. That reality makes the following truth strikingly unavoidable:

There is no such thing as risk free energy. There is only risk minimized energy. That energy is nuclear energy.

(Note: I have recently obtained a wonderful copy of Ralph Nader's 1977 book, The Menace of Atomic Energy, and suspending my squeamishness about nausea, have already scanned it. I'll be reproducing some of the juicy tidbits of this remarkable paean to a lack of prescience here.)

[struggle4progress]

6. Since you often assert wind is unreliable and deprecate conservation ..

.. you might consider the illustrative fact that problems at this nuclear facility are requiring the operators to warn users that power cannot be relied upon and to encourage conservation ...

[NNadir]

7. I do not deprecate conservation.

What I deprecate is the notion that conservation, wind, solar PV and the usual blah, blah, blah of the energy illiterate crowd can address the problem at hand, the immediate crisis of global climate change.

I do deprecate people who can only make negative statements about technology without demonstrating reasonable alternatives.

In this class of people, I include the entire set of self described "progressives", a set of people who continually make the perfect the enemy of the good. Indeed, the inclusion of the word "progress" in their self description is about as poor a use of language as one can possibly imagine - and let's face it, language is savaged these days.

While they carp on their largely useless vision of perfection - I certainly wouldn't agree that they have a clue about what perfection might be, because I have such a low opinion of the quality of their minds, regarding them in general as a class of self-serving myopic freaks - the world is dying.

I note that they routinely go chasing bolts that fall down turbines in nuclear plants - as if a loose bolt has never struck a turbine in a gas plant or a coal plant, or seized a diesel engine - or leaky pipes while billions of metric tons of poisonous gas - and yes carbon dioxide is a poison - are dumped into the atmosphere.

I have taken to stating regularly that I will be happy to debate the relative merits of any strategies that have replaced fossil fuels - once fossil fuels have been replaced.

Here's some news: Fossil fuel use has not declined, never mind been eliminated. It is, instead, rising.

However, since I am familiar with how things work, technically and otherwise, I deride all schemes that elevate mere words over action. The output of carbon dioxide is increasing, not decreasing, in spite of a tremendous growth - at least in the western world in carbon intensity - aka "conservation." Thus conservation is not enough.

I note that my detractors, many of whom call themselves "progressives," demonstrate not only an appalling understanding of technology - especially nuclear technology - and an annoying tendency to focus only on issues that involve nuclear technology while immorally ignoring worse events in the area of fossil fuels, but they also have no ability whatsoever to comprehend or understand what I say.

I often speak here of conservation. Not only that, but I practice it as well. Once in my life I went so far as to abandon the automobile completely, spending years traveling exclusively by bicycle. I still drive as infrequently as is possible, conserve power in my home, use passive solar, fluorescent bulbs, blah, blah, blah...

I am unequivocal in my support for wind power. I have taken the wealthy hypocrite Robert F. Kennedy to task for instance for his disgusting opposition to the Cape Wind project. I favor wind fields here in New Jersey, including any along the Jersey shore.

I even speak approvingly of people who are wealthy enough to buy PV systems and do so.

Still none of these bits are sufficient to address the scale of the ongoing disaster.

Irrespective of the bolt, South Africa plans to build 24 nuclear power plants. The anti-environmental anti-nuclear movement has been fully discredited - which is a good thing. It cannot have happened soon enough.

While the internationall rejected anti-environmental anti-nuclear set engages in its rich kid navel gazing, the world is in extreme danger. Because of the nature of this danger, which has some probability of being fatal to all life on earth, I simply need to reiterate the following truth:

There is no such thing as risk free energy. There is only risk minimized energy. That energy is nuclear energy.

[struggle4progress]

8. Riiight. Here's you on wind, recently:

"... back up plants for when .. wind died would be very, very, very, very expensive ..."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=26077&mesg_id=26107

Looks like back up (for nuclear facilities when some clown drops a loose bolt in the machinery) was too expensive for the South Africans to build.

In the same post, you go on about ".. planning .. required to have each Dane take a hot shower when the wind was blowing for instance would be rather large ... If all Danes drove home to take .. the low cost .. shower, there would be an enormous greenhouse gas impact."

Empty rhetoric, based on ludicrous scenarios, doesn't really qualify as "support" ...

[phantom power]

9. I don't think it makes sense to dismiss that problem.

If you design your grid to accomodate (for instance) 5 wind-less days, what happens if you get 6 windless days? It's a problem, and building in excess capacity, plus energy storage, is expensive. Yes?

[struggle4progress]

10. Got Denmark doldrum data? Or are your "five windless days" hot air?

[phantom power]

11. Can we agree that we would have to design for "N" windless days?

I don't know what "N" is. However, I don't think that makes me full of hot air. N > 0, and so that means added cost.

[jpak]

12. The Danes are doing just that....

www.risoe.dk/rispubl/nei/33030-0034.pdf

...and when Eurasian natural gas supplies are depleted, they will be well on the way toward a wind/H2 economy.

[phantom power]

16. That's interesting reading.

They are certainly thinking far ahead of us. Although it seems to me that H2 is more practical as a grid storage medium than as a motor fuel.

[struggle4progress]

14. Can we agree that designing grids for reactors shut down by dropped ..

.. bolts means added cost? In the case I've cited, it looks like those costs exceeded local willingness to pay, because the redundancy isn't built into the system. And it's unlikely that a dropped bolt would shut down an entire windfarm ...

[phantom power]

15. I can agree with that, although I couldn't say which costs more.

Some level of redundancy must be paid for regardless of technology, to account for down-time. In a sense, it doesn't matter what causes that down time. Operator error, equipment maintenance, sabotage, windless days, cloudy days, etc.

I view sabotage as technology-neutral. I might not sabotage 1000 windmills with a dropped bolt, but I could easily enough throw a monkey-wrench into the place where they connect to the grid.

Generic equipment failure isn't much different. Last year Phoenix lost a bunch of power due to a failed transformer. It took weeks to get the replacement, and it was for similar reasons: the required replacement wasn't "in stock." They had to truck it in from out of state, at about 5 miles an hour.

[NNadir]

13. My, we spend a lot of time scrutinizing my posts.

I don't actually read many of yours, and what I do read, I skim, since the day of the anti-environmental anti-nuclear scare religion has past and been swept aside and because the anti-nuclear scare mongering is becoming ineffective. Therefore these posts are increasingly unimportant, since they do not sway events.

No where in the post citing to "demonstrate" my opposition to wind power do I say that "wind capacity" should be dismantled or that it is harmful. I am simply noting the truth: That without back-up, specifically nuclear back up, it's environmental cost will be high, since back up would depend on fossil fuels. I simply note that the Danes can use wind power since they can buy nuclear power from Sweden or elsewhere in the European grid.

If there were no back-up capacity, the Danes would need to consider some other alternative. Or in your foetid imagination is this not true? Would the Danes then get power by magic?

Whatever.

Once again the issue comes down to reading comprehension, something that is not a notable capability of my critics.

Whenever I note the truth that nuclear energy has a low external cost, I always put in the qualifier "on demand." The external cost of wind power is cheaper than any other form of energy, a fact which is freely available on the Externe website that I frequently link and I often note this fact. However, wind power as anyone who has stepped outside his or her door can see wind power is intermittent. Indeed, the 2003 heat wave that killed 30,000 people in Europe was characterized by doldrums. The wind stopped blowing. (Most people have direct experience with hot stagnant days.)

www.externe.info

Wind power that needs fossil fuel back up is not a positive. But wind power that is backed up by nuclear power is a plus.

In fact, I often note, at least until high temperature reactors coupled to thermochemical systems are available - and they are NOT available now - that nuclear power is not suited for meeting peak loads because of the xenon effect. Therefore I very much favor technologies that are available for just such loads. Wind can fill this need, especially where electricity is used for residential heating.

I note that I wrote a rather long thread around Christmas proposing the Salton Sea as a battery for the storage of renewable energy. Maybe you were off at a Greenpeace meeting talking about 2050 when I wrote it: I neither know nor care. In it, I specifically mentioned wind resources and my support for them. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=115&topic_id=37366 I have also bashed the energy hypocrite Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in these pages many times for his opposition to the Cape Wind Project.

I also wrote this in my own thread noting the (pathetic) scale of the renewable energy industry:

I do not prefer cutting down all of the rainforests, and I am not a tremendous fan of biological fuels, which I regard as having limited utility. That said, I believe that some biofuels, in particular biodiesel, have some things to recommend them under certain circumstances.

I do have some hope for some renewable technologies, especially wind power. I also am a fan of solar thermal plants in suitable places. I often malign solar PV power as "rich toys for rich boys" but I also encourage anyone who can afford such technology to use it where appropriate.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=115&topic_id=37086

I have also written many times how I would love to have wind capacity off shore in my neighborhood, and the New Jersey shore. I repeat this fondness for such capacity here and now. I am no fucking Robert F. Kennedy, Junior or Senior.

Where I differ with the Greenpeace stupidity squad is that these things are enough. This, along with my painstaking analysis of nuclear energy, fully explains my passion for nuclear power that I frequently express here. There is no evidence that renewable technologies can address the on going global climate crisis. They have over promised and under delivered for far too many decades. I note that I am not rooting for the renewable energy industry to continue to fail to have any significant capacity to address global climate change. It is regrettable that the industry remains on a scale that is too tiny to be serious, but if that changes, if the solar nirvana arrives before Jesus does, no one will be happier than I. I state too many times to count that whenever fossil fuel use is eliminated I will happy to debate the merits of the technologies that have replaced it.

There is one exception to my unwillingness to oppose renewable energy. I am not particularly fond of the one renewable energy industry that produces significant energy now, the hydroelectric industry, but I have grudgingly learned to live with it, because of the nature of current emergency.

But I remain, and always will be, a free river advocate. I hate dams. All of them. I thirst for a day that all of them can be removed.