On Tue, 9 Oct 2007 06:17:32 -0700, "azotic" wrote:

An interesting russian concept. Solves the problem of NIMBY, out of sight
out of mind.
No CO2 emmisions to boot. I wonder if these could be built and stored
unfueled for
use in an emergency, say fuel became unavailable for conventional land based
power
stations we could simpley fuel the reactors and start generating power
fairly quickley
until another fuel supplier could provide fuel for the conventional land
based plants.

http://www.upi.com/Energy/Briefing/2...nuclear_plant/


Best Regards
Tom.

Hey Tom,

I can't say I follow exactly your equation, but here in Ontario we
are in a race (apparently!!) to close the coal-fired power generation
plants we have. This has become a hot political football, what with
the Ontario Provincial election coming tomorrow.
In any event, about your comment....Saturday I was at a fall fair a
few miles from where we live, and near the fair there is one of the
larger of the coal-fired plants that is under "attack". They had an
information booth set up at the fair, mostly handing out literature
about what a large scale employer they are, and the effect of loss of
those jobs on closure of the plant; about how they are not as bad a
polluter as they are ascribed to be, as they have some very late
technology scrubbing equipment in place already and are willing to do
more; and most important of all, the need for rapid and multitudinous
changes of power required over the course of any 24 hour period
(sometimes as high as 1500 change-orders per shift) and which nuclear
plants at present are not able to modulate. This last item is what
I'm writing about.

Nuclear power generation in land-based large plants is set to a "base
level" of possible production. Nominally, this seems to me to be
about 80%. In other words, a nuclear plant is ramped up from 0% to
80% over some period of many hours, if not of days, to this 80% level,
and then continues to produce that much power (80% of its full
capacity) regardless of the power usage requirement it is delivering
to !! The load variation of off-peak to full-peak times is presently
handled by the coal or gas fired plants. These plants are capable of
rapid changes and of short term rapid dissipation of excess (steam)
which the nuclear plants are not. Until the time when a viable method
of either controlling the nuclear output or delivering excesses of it
to either storage or conversion is standardized, the coal-fired plants
are required.

But the day will undoubtedly come when that problem will be
surmounted, and the coal-fired plants will be closed.

So, I asked the gentleman at the booth why not just build a nuclear
steam generation unit alongside the coal fired plant, shut down the
coal fired boilers and use the nuclear produced steam to operate the
turbines? That way, we'd still have the generation capability in
place where it is now.

His answer was that, at the moment, all the nuclear plants in Ontario
produce high volumes of steam at relatively low pressures and they run
turbines at a 1200 RPM (no explanation as to why to either), whereas
coal-fired plants produce steam at high pressure and rotate at 3600
RPM. So there is no compatibility.

Which is why I'm replying about the Russian portables. Who is going
to set a "standard" for compatibility for their use? And will they
require being able to float into position? Both questions are
rhetorical of course!

Take care.

Brian Lawson,
Bothwell, Ontario.