Major Parts for New Virginia Nuclear Reactor Ordered From Japan.

[NNadir]

In advance of its expected submission of a license this year to build a boiling water reactor (BWR) at North Anna, Dominion has signed contracts with General Electric (GE) to purchase heavy forgings for the future plant.

The contract concerns plant components which require a long time and require special manufacturing facilities to make - parts of the reactor pressure vessel, steam turbine and generator. Industry observers informed World Nuclear News that around ten forgings of up to 500 t would be required for GE's Economic Simplified BWR (ESBWR) or its Advanced BWR (ABWR).

In August 2006, GE made reservations for such long lead items with Japanese forging companies in advance of commitments to build from potential customers. At that time, the number of potential new nuclear plant orders was growing rapidly, while it was becoming clear that the capability of heavy industry to manufacture so many components would not develop at the same speed. GE confirmed that Dominion's components would be sourced outside the USA.

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/newNuclear/Plant_components_for_Dominion.shtml

Each ESBWR built will produce about 0.14 exajoules of primary energy per year. The thermal efficiency is 35%, and thus each ESBWR will produce 0.05 exajoules of pure electricity. The United States currently consumes just over 100 exajoules of all forms of energy, including oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear energy, hydroelectric and non-hydro renewables.

[phantom power]

1. How much of the remaining energy could be used to drive chemical reactions?

[TheWraith]

3. Like what, converting lithium into tritium or something? NT

[phantom power]

6. That would be a nuclear reaction, not in the realm of waste heat.

I'm thinking in terms of manufacturing synthetic motor fuels, or scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere, etc.

[NNadir]

5. Well, it depends a lot on the reaction and the reactor.

I would suspect strongly that there is no plan to use the waste heat from this reactor, except maybe to heat the facility itself in winter.

I recently made a friend at Dominion's nuclear operations. I believe she will be returning from vacation soon. I'll see if I can find out.

[TheWraith]

2. So that's about 1.7 gigawatts per reactor, then?

I'm no good at joules, but dividing the US's total power power consumption by 0.05% achieves a figure which sounds about right.

[NNadir]

4. A watt is a joule per second. It is a unit of power not energy.

Units of power and energy are frequently confused in common parlance, particularly when one is discussing renewable energy. For instance, you will often hear about a 10 MW solar facility someplace. However such a system is only producing that power on average about 20%
of the time, meaning that it produces as much energy as a continuous plant rated at 2 MW operating at 100% of the time.

The average capacity loading for a nuclear plant is typically better than 90%. Usually reactors operate below full power only around the time they need to refuel, which takes place every year and a half or so.

The power ratings of an ESBWR is about 4500 MW (thermal) and about 1560 MW (electrical).

An exajoule is 10¹⁸ joules.

To convert between exajoules and watts for a year, one multiplies or divides by 31,557,600 seconds, the number of seconds in a year.

This reactor will be expected to run for 60 years or more. If so, in its lifetime it will produce more than 8 exajoules of energy, equivalent to about 8% of the energy now used in the United States in a single year.