Tag Archives: baseload

Energy Policy Act of 2005 considered harmful

The same Energy Policy Act of 2005 that subsidized dirty oil and fracked methane including LNG exports also funded that oxymoron “clean” coal such as Southern Company’s Plant Ratcliffe in Mississippi, ethanol production lining the pockets of Monsanto, and the $8.3 billion loan guarantee to Georgia Power for the new nukes at Plant Vogtle.

2005 was a very long time ago in solar PV years: prices are halved, and installed solar power production is up more than ten times and growing exponentially like compound interest. We need to stop throwing money at dirty, water-sucking, centralized baseload 20th century non-solutions and get on with clean 21st century distributed solar and wind power for jobs, for energy independence, and for clean air and water, not to mention less climate change.

-jsq

ALEC solar tax

Arizona, Virginia, and now they’re trying in Georgia: ALEC wants to tax your solar panels. ALEC is trying to legislate buggy whip requirements in an age of affordable electric cars.

Suzanne Goldenberg and Ed Pilkington wrote for the Guardian 4 December 2013, ALEC calls for penalties on ‘freerider’ homeowners in assault on clean energy,

Documents obtained by the Guardian show the core elements of its strategy began to take shape at the previous board meeting in Chicago in August, with meetings of its energy, environment and agriculture subcommittees.

Further details of Alec’s strategy were provided by John Eick, the legislative analyst for Alec’s energy, environment and agriculture program.

Eick told the Guardian the group would be Continue reading →

Salem 1 nuke back up in NJ

No, that can’t be: NRC hasn’t said it’s up after Salem 1 was scrammed down last week.. Of course, NRC never posts events or status on weekends, no matter what’s down, up, or on fire.

Bill Gallo Jr. wrote for the South Jersey Times yesterday, Salem 1 nuclear reactor returns to service after faulty valve is repaired,

The Salem 1 nuclear reactor was returned to service today, less than 48 hours after a leaking valve caused the plant to be shut down.

The plant began sending electricity out over the regional power grid at 4:47 p.m. today, according to Joe Delmar, spokesman for the reactor’s operator, PSEG Nuclear….

On Thursday, operators became aware Continue reading →

Pilgrim and Salem nukes scrammed down

Two nukes down Friday: “lowering reactor water level was due to the trip of all three Feedwater Pumps” (Pilgrim 1 in Massachusetts) and “unidentified leakage” (Salem 1 in New Jersey). That’s the fifth downtime for Entergy’s Pilgrim 1 this year: cold, heat, leak, and now feedwater pumps. Remind me about the reliability and safety of big baseload nuclear?

Event Number: 49296 Facility: PILGRIM,

REACTOR PROTECTION ACTUATION (SCRAM)

“On Thursday, August 22, 2013 at 0755 hours [EDT], with the reactor critical at approximately 98% core thermal power, and the mode switch in RUN, a manual reactor scram was inserted due to lowering reactor water level. The cause of the lowering reactor water level was due to the trip of all three Feedwater Pumps. The cause of the Feedwater Pump trip event is currently under investigation.

“Following the reactor scram, Continue reading →

Arkansas Nuclear 1 still down since fatal accident in March

Apparently we still don’t know why this happened:

At approximately 7:50am on Sunday, March 31, 2013, a 600-ton generator stator fell onto the turbine deck and then about 30 feet to the train bay floor as was being lifted out of the Unit 1 turbine building at the Arkansas Nuclear One plant. One worker was killed and four others injured when the load fell.

Dave Lochbaum wrote for Union of Concerned Scientists 18 June 2013, Fission Stories #139: Arkansas Nuclear One Fatal Event,

The NRC reviewed U.S. nuclear plant experience with lifting loads with cranes between 1968 and 2002. The NRC reported that about two load drops per year happened during this period with ten incidents causing deaths. The NRC’s review concluded that there had been only three very heavy load drops (defined as a load weighing more than 30 tons). ANO-1 makes four.

While accidents can also happen with wind turbines or even installing solar panels on rooftops, a single solar or wind accident doesn’t Continue reading →

SO’s plan to make the Southeast a net exporter of the energy from solar and wind? –John S. Quarterman @ SO 2013-05-22

SO CEO Tom Fanning didn’t budge from nuclear and coal, but he did announce a tiger team to get on top of distributed solar and wind through a smart grid, headed by SO’s COO, at the 22 May 2013 Southern Company Stockholder Meeting.

Mr. John S. Quarterman from Lowndes County, Georgia, and he holds 220 shares of Southern Company.

TF: Hello, John. Good to see you again this year.

jsq: Hi. I’ve come to compliment Tom Fanning and Paul Bowers. Last year, Tom Fanning was so persuasive I ran out and bought $10,000 worth of stock.

TF: Bless you. [Applause]

However, apparently because of SO’s admission a few minutes before in that same meeting that it was going to have to eat Kemper Coal cost overruns, SO stock tanked that same day, causing my stock to stop out, and Standard & Poor’s downgraded SO the following day because of Kemper Coal, noting that if the same thing happened with SO’s nuclear project at Plant Vogtle, S&P’s would probably Continue reading →

Interactive charts: U.S. nuclear power reactors (NRC data)

Why are all these “dependable” baseload capacity nukes down so much? See for yourself in these interactive graphs of NRC Power Reactor Status. They’re in Google annotated timeline format, with all the zoom and pan features used by Google finance for stock charts. But these Reactor Status charts show seven years of daily NRC power percentage data. Want to see last month, six months, any 7 days, or some other period? Now you can, for all 104 reactors, including the ones recently removed by NRC from status because they’ve closed permanently.

You can view your own local reactors in any of 20 charts. Why so many graphs? Google annotated timeline charts apparently were meant for comparing a few stock prices, and don’t handle more than about seven curves well. But you can see things in these graphs that are hard to spot in NRC’s daily tables.

Example: Southern Nuclear Operating Co., Inc. (Alabama, Georgia)

Continue reading →

The cloudy day doesn’t last for an entire month –John S. Quarterman @ GA PSC 2013-06-18

The disruptive challenge electric utilities face is like telephone companies faced years ago, as Edison Electric Institute recently pointed out. Circuit switching 20 years ago is like distributed solar power and the smart grid it needs now; this is what I described at the Georgia Public Service Commission meeting Tuesday 18 June 2013.

Hi, I’m John Quarterman, I’m from Lowndes County, down near the Florida line. These videos I’ve been taking are with Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange and you’ll find them on YouTube later.
Now I’d like to commend Georgia Power for helping fund our Industrial Authority down in Lowndes County to do a strategic plan. And in the focus groups they did with that, they discovered there’s at least two things everybody wants: business, education, health care, the people in general: Continue reading →

Ask Georgia Power to conserve our water –Garry Gentry for WWALS @ GA PSC 2013-06-18

Garry Gentry read the WWALS Watershed Coalition letter at the Georgia Public Service Commission meeting Tuesday 18 June 2013.

The recent rains have swollen our blackwater rivers, Withlacoochee, Willacoochee, Alapaha, and Little, under our longleaf pines and Spanish-moss-covered oaks, and filled up the tea-colored tannin waters in our frog-singing pocosin cypress swamps here in central South Georgia. But that was only a dent in our protracted drought that ranges from mild to extreme, with projections not much better….
There is no need to use our Floridan Aquifer water to build more baseload power plants while Georgia lags behind Michigan, Massachusetts, and even tiny New Jersey and Maryland in solar power.

WWALS calls on the PSC to ask Georgia Power to conserve our water and to bring jobs to south Georgia through solar power and wind off the Georgia coast.

You can read the complete letter. Here’s the video:

Ask Georgia Power to conserve our water –Garry Gentry for WWALS
Georgia Power proposed closing of coal plants,
Administrative Session, GA Public Service Commission (GA PSC),
Doug Everrett (1: south Georgia), Tim Echols (2: east Georgia), Chairman Chuck Eaton (3: metro Atlanta), Stan Wise (5 north Georgia), Bubba McDonald (4: west Georgia),
Video by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE),
244 Washington Street SW, Atlanta, GA, 30334-9052, 18 June 2013.

-jsq

Harris nuke flaw “fixed” that wasn’t found for a year

Less than 500 miles from here in NC, what else haven’t they found if ‘Duke Energy’s examination a year ago “was supposed to have found that problem then and fixed it”‘? This was a ‘a quarter-inch spot the NRC and the company describe as a “flaw” in the reactor vessel head, which contains heat and pressure produced by the nuclear core’s energy.’ When a solar panel has a quarter-inch flaw, you get a tiny percentage less electricity, not the risk of radiation leak or worse. Would you rather have two more nukes at the same site, run by the same company that can’t run the one it’s got safely, or solar power instead?

Plus where is the advantage of baseload capacity when Harris 1 has only been up 27.41% for the past month (NRC data), which is hardly better than the approximately 20% sun hours per day for solar power in North Carolina this time of year. Given the low and continually-dropping cost of solar panels, Duke could simply over-provision distributed solar panels and get way more than 20% or 27.41% effective power, and get that on budget and on time.

Emery P. Dalesio wrote for AP yesterday, Harris nuclear plant in U.S. is safe to restart after reactor problem found, Continue reading →

On the LAKE front

Citizen dialog for transparent process by the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange