From the University of Washington press office, another modeled scenario suggesting that small 0.8C climate change signal will find its way into the rivers, overheat the water, and thus overheat the power plants, causing shutdown, darkness, and rioting in the streets. Well, maybe not that last part, but you get the idea. Part of the shutdown issue at Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant was due to the severe weather in Alabama and heavy spring rains (part of the La Nina pattern) delaying construction of a needed cooling tower. And the shutdown problem isn’t new. For example in cooler Canada in 2007:
An unexpected build up of algae on a lake-water intake system used for cooling has forced Ontario Power Generation to temporarily shut down one of its Pickering nuclear reactors until the fast-growing green muck is cleaned up.
Experts say bad-smelling blooms of Cladophora algae are linked to warmer water temperatures and are likely to get worse as a result of global warming and high phosphorous levels caused by lawn fertilizers, agricultural runoff and detergents entering the lake.
So I wonder, in the case of the Tennessee River, just how much of the problem is silt/fertilizers and algal blooms etc. Clear water doesn’t absorb nearly as much sunlight as turbid water, and from the photo above, the water looks turbid.
Nuclear and coal-fired electrical plants vulnerable to climate change
Warmer water and reduced river flows in the United States and Europe in recent years have led to reduced production, or temporary shutdown, of several thermoelectric power plants. For instance, the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant in Alabama had to shut down more than once last summer because the Tennessee River’s water was too warm to use it for cooling.
A study by European and University of Washington scientists published today in Nature Climate Change projects that in the next 50 years warmer water and lower flows will lead to more such power disruptions. The authors predict that thermoelectric power generating capacity from 2031 to 2060 will decrease by between 4 and 16 percent in the U.S. and 6 to 19 percent in Europe due to lack of cooling water. The likelihood of extreme drops in power generation—complete or almost-total shutdowns—is projected to almost triple.
“This study suggests that our reliance on thermal cooling is something that we’re going to have to revisit,” said co-author Dennis Lettenmaier, a UW professor of civil and environmental engineering.
Thermoelectric plants, which use nuclear or fossil fuels to heat water into steam that turns a turbine, supply more than 90 percent of U.S. electricity and account for 40 percent of the nation’s freshwater usage. In Europe, these plants supply three-quarters of the electricity and account for about half of the freshwater use.
While much of this water is “recycled,” the power plants rely on consistent volumes of water, at a particular temperature, to prevent the turbines from overheating.
Reduced water availability and warmer water, caused by increasing air temperatures associated with climate change, mean higher electricity costs and less reliability.
While plants with cooling towers will be affected, results show older plants that rely on “once-through cooling” are the most vulnerable. These plants pump water directly from rivers or lakes to cool the turbines before returning the water to its source, and require high flow volumes.
The study projects the most significant U.S. effects at power plants situated inland on major rivers in the Southeast that use once-through cooling, such as the Browns Ferry plant in Alabama and the New Madrid coal-fired plant in southeastern Missouri.
“The worst-case scenarios in the Southeast come from heat waves where you need the power for air conditioning,” Lettenmaier said. “If you have really high power demand and the river temperature’s too high so you need to shut your power plant down, you have a problem.”
The study used hydrological and water temperature models developed by Lettenmaier and co-author John Yearsley, a UW affiliate professor of civil and environmental engineering. The European authors combined these with an electricity production model and considered two climate-change scenarios: one with modest technological change and one that assumed a rapid transition to renewable energy. The range of projected impacts to power systems covers both scenarios.
The U.S. and Europe both have strict environmental standards for the volume of water withdrawn by plants and the temperature of the water discharged. Warm periods coupled with low river flows could thus lead to more conflicts between environmental objectives and energy production.
Discharging water at elevated temperatures causes yet another problem: downstream thermal pollution.
“Higher electricity prices and disruption to supply are significant concerns for the energy sector and consumers, but another growing concern is the environmental impact of increasing water temperatures on river ecosystems, affecting, for example, life cycles of aquatic organisms,” said first author Michelle van Vliet, a doctoral student at the Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands.
Given the high costs and the long lifetime of power plants, the authors say, such long-range projections are important to let the electricity sector adapt to changes in the availability of cooling water and plan infrastructure investments accordingly.
One adaptation strategy would be to reduce reliance on freshwater sources and place the plants near saltwater, according to corresponding author Pavel Kabat, director of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria and van Vliet’s doctoral adviser.
“However, given the life expectancy of power plants and the inability to relocate them to an alternative water source, this is not an immediate solution, but should be factored into infrastructure planning,” he said. “Another option is to switch to new gas-fired power plants that are both more efficient than nuclear- or fossil-fuel-power plants and that also use less water.”
The study was supported by the European Commission.
Other co-authors are Fulco Ludwig at Wageningen University and Stefan Vögele at the Institute of Energy and Climate Research in Germany.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Yeah, Ted Kennedy killed a girl because of a lethal combination of global warming and ethanol. I’ll bet, though, that it was mostly global warming, right?
Sometimes nuclear plants technical specifications require shutdown for nuclear safety reasons not turbine performance reasons.
There is a maximum water temperature limit set for ‘environmental reasons’. Generally in the neighborhood of 90F. So if the water temperature in the river is already 90F the power plant isn’t allowed to add any heat to the river and has to shut down. Safety comes in only because it’s not safe to run thermal power plants without cooling water.
1) I only found one day with warm water problems. Drought had lowered the water level.
2) Alabama is not that warm ….
2011 in Alabama was ranked 77 out of 117. 40 years were warmer.
85 years were warmer than 2010.
83 years were warmer than 2009.
73 years were warmer than 2008.
1998 was the last year to make the top 10.
The warmest years in Alabama are: 1927,1921,1933,1925,1922,1911,1938,1949 and 1998.
Jarrett Jones says:
June 4, 2012 at 6:39 am
================
And your point is?
Global warming related expenditures is over budget on the order of 70 billion dollars in the US alone over just the past few years. When complete at least TVA will have a useful product.
As noted several times in the above comments, cooling water is not used to cool the turbines. It is used to condense steam that has already passed thru the turbine blades.
As far as I know every engineer that has studied mechanical engineering should understand the primary process involved here. We are all laughing at these claims.
So please give us more of these type of studies / claims to revael just how much ignorance there is in the world by the claimed ”enlightened ones’. Anthony can set em up while we melt em down.
@ur momisugly davidgmills; Thank you for posting that video on LFTR. Of the two nuclear paths we could have taken, we took the less desirable one due to the fact that it had no usefulness in creating weaponry. Assuming Russia developed the same technology (and why wouldn’t they), there would have been no Chernobyl, and certainly no Three-Mile-Island incident to quash nuclear power. I see that a second, much better video is due to be released in August. It seems we have a choice: either re-develop LFTR, which was in fact invented here in the 60’s and sidelined by Nixon, or buy the technology from China in ten years, who seem very interested in it. I prefer to buy American myself.
R2Dtoo says The post just before this one is critical. Surely, given the long history of power generation and regulation, there must be an equally long record of actual “real world data” to assess the projected impact of a 0.8C temperature increase on the frequency of breaches of the temperature limits. Or even a 3C increase. This would clearly define any impact without the need for another model.
@ur momisugly g garst:
I really do believe that I am right on this one. I looked at the video again and I see nowhere in the schematics of LFTR that water is ever used. LFTR operates at much higher temperatures (800C at atmospheric pressure) than a light water reactor (300 C under about 150 atmospheres of pressure) and uses gas instead of steam (of course steam is a gas but I don’t think they are talking about steam as the gas) and it runs gas turbines not steam turbines.
You can check me out at the 1:50 mark of the video if you like.
The water temp of The St. Lawrence Rive varies over the course of the year from around 30F to 75F, differing in the high year to year. 1F isn’t a big difference. BTW It can remain water at 30F because it is relatively fast flowing – 1knot on average
@ur momisugly Bruce Cobb. And no Fukishima either. I am waiting for Thorium remix 2012 as I have seen this one about 8 times now. Whether it will be much better is a good question, because I think it will have to use most of the same video. There was a thorium conference in Chicago on May 31 and maybe we will get some video out of that.
I would much prefer to buy American as well. And the idea that we could make them on assembly lines and sell them like commercial airplanes means we could have an entire new industry, not to mention being competitive with all things using rare earths (as the video points out China now has a monopoly on rare earths and thorium which is very abundant here is mixed with rare earths and we would have plenty of rare earths but for the existing regulations governing thorium).
The possibility of thorium nuclear power has got me out of the dumps. Since we have enough of it the US to provide all of our power needs at present consumption for the next 1,000 years, and since these reactors can be made small enough to fit on a football field (or maybe less), and since they put out almost no nuclear waste (and most of what there is can be used for medicine and space exploration) I once again have some hope for the future.
What should anger us all is what the world could be like today if we had started doing commercial LFTRs 50 years ago when LFTR was invented.
I think we should just build more cooling towers and vent the heat directly to the atmosphere so it can be quickly radiated back to space. We don’t because they are expensive, but if intake water temperature is really a problem (and the EPA will let you add one without rebuilding the entire plant – which is doubtful) add a cooling tower to each of these facilities and let most of the heat vent rather than sending it into the local waterway.
I have also wondered if the intakes shouldn’t be built with covering shades to prevent any light shining on the intake filter areas. That would seem to be able to lower the amount of photosynthesizing algal build up. Of course it might not work if there is too much free floating algae in the waterway to begin with.
@davidgmills,
I looked at the video again and I see nowhere in the schematics of LFTR that water is ever used.
You are always going to need a ‘final heat sink’ for any thermal power plant. Air cooling is possible but water cooling is the ‘cheaper/easier’ final heat sink.
What changes between reactors is what is used in the primary cooling loop and the heat exchanger loop. The condenser loop is always going to be water or air.
I.E.
The primary loop could be water, salts, lead or any number of materials.
The secondary loop (the part that drives the turbines) could be anything that has good expansion properties.
We are then left with issue of what do we cool whatever we drove the turbines with so we can recirculate it.
That pretty much means either water or air. An air condenser would be huge.
“G. Karst says:
June 4, 2012 at 6:31 am
Accident analysis of power plants has to make certain assumptions, in order to construct a model for accident analysis. One important assumption is the temperature of incoming cooling water. If conditions arise such that incoming cooling water is above that which is assumed, then the accident analysis is no longer valid. Reactors are required, by law, to operate within the accident analysis model at all times. This is the operating envelope, and all plants operate within these parameters or must decrease output until they are.”
G. Karst is correct about the accident analysis. Just to clarify, the accident analysis temperature limitations are also about cooling, but not the main condenser. It is about removing decay heat from a shut down reactor core and about cooling the reactor containment so the pressure in containment stays below its design limits.
One more comment, due to current regulation, no new once-through cooling systems will be built in the U.S. All new plants have wet cooling towers or air-cooled condensers. Heating the water is a problem that is going away as plants retire. And some 40 to 60 GW of power plants are being retired by 2015 due to the CSAPR and utility MACT rules, most (if not all) have once through cooling.
It’s a semi-spruik for the now-green gas-burning power stations.
A gas-turbine plant has a peak efficiency of about 40%. But with heat recovery, that goes up to almost 60%… by putting a steam generator in the (very hot) exhaust gas stream and feeding the steam into a steam turbine. The cold sink for the steam turbine would still be a large body of water, or chilled water from a cooling tower.
A molten-salt reactor can be used to drive a gas turbine as well (secondary cooling loop), using the salt (at over 700°C) to heat and expand the air instead of burning a gas. The exhaust gas stream would still be warm enough for some heat recovery and generation by steam turbine. Although the peak cycle temperature is lower than with a gas-burning setup, peak efficiency should still exceed 50%.
Several years ago I attended a meeting of some federal agencies chaired by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The purpose of this meeting was to address the change in water temperature that had occurred over the years on the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers. It seems that these two rivers had changed from warm water fisheries to cold water ones. Now this is real and was due to the many dams on the rivers. Most of the time the flow out of all the dams are though the hydro-turbines and the intakes for these turbines are low in the pools. This results in the releasing of cold bottom water rather than the warmer water you get with run of river conditions. Well, neither TVA nor the Corps of Engineers had the money to pay for the massive construction to install the selective withdrawal intakes that would be necessary to control the water temperature at all the dams. Therefore, nothing was ever done with this imitative.
The bottom line here is that since the 30’s mankind has been artificially cooling the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers and any warming would just return them to more natural conditions.
By the way, selective withdrawal intakes are on some other dams but when installed during initial construction are relatively cheap; it’s the retrofitting that makes them expensive.
Many (perhaps all) of the new SMR (Small Modular Reactor) plant designs don’t require external water for cooling.
@ur momisugly harry wr2 How much cooling you need is going to depend on how efficient your turbines are. Theoretically, you would want these gas turbines consuming all of the heat. How much they could actually consume I don’t know so you may need some kind of heat sink.
Kirk Sorensen, who is the NASA engineer who is the person primarily being interviewed in the video is originally from Utah and he comments in the video he always wondered why Utah had no nuclear power plants. Of course the answer (which he realizes) is that the west has very few rivers and very few big lakes (maybe the Great Salt Lake was not a good source of water for nuclear power). And he seems to imply that the lack of water would not be a problem for LFTR.
He does mention that LFTRs could be built by the ocean to desalinate water (almost free desalinization), but he never says that water is a requirement for heat removal.
davidgmills
Thanks so much for the link.
I watched Kurt Sorensen’s LFTR video and was enthralled. It is very wide ranging and thought provoking. I recommend it to everyone and they should recommend it to their friends, too! The faster the story gets around the better.
@marchesarosa
I am addicted to the video. I must have seen it 8 or 10 times by now and certain parts of it numerous other times. For me it is as addictive as crack cocaine. I learn something new every time.
“Experts say bad-smelling blooms of Cladophora algae are linked to warmer water temperatures and are likely to get worse as a result of global warming and high phosphorous levels caused by lawn fertilizers, agricultural runoff and detergents entering the lake.”
Imagine that, detergents with Phosphates have been banned by law in the Great Lakes basin for decades, which made them difficult to impossible to find anywhere.
@davidgmills,
Theoretically, you would want these gas turbines consuming all of the heat. How much they could actually consume I don’t know so you may need some kind of heat sink.
50% is about the upper limit on turbine effiecency.
Of course the answer (which he realizes) is that the west has very few rivers and very few big lakes
France’s nuclear plants only comprise 50% of total nameplate generating capicty and at that level they have substantial ‘off peak’ over supply challenges. (Mostly they sell it cheap to neighbors). Utah doesn’t have much generating capacity to begin with.
Utah lists a total of just under 8 GW nameplate capacity and 1.6 GW is owned by the city of Los Angeles.
As a general rule you want no more then 40% of nameplate capacity as baseload. So if we take California’s plants out of Utah’s energy equation Utah has 6.4 GW nameplate which makes for a requirement for 2.5GW of baseload. A twin AP1000 is 2.2GW.
A cursory read of the study shows the study simply attempted to measured the point at which a thermal plant would begin to derate (i.e, lose rated capacity in a summer drought scenario) due to low river flow and/or warm water temperatures.
What’s striking is that the authors don’t appear to be aware that utilities already apply a summer-time derate to existing power plants and apply these derates to their projections of seasonal generation. So, the study, while interesting in concept, doesn’t really provide much insight as to wither the derates they are projecting are significant compared to “typical” summer evaluation much less to plan for a historically-based drought scenario.
Moreover, the study itself does not tell me it their projections differ significantly with the plans “effected” south-eastern utilities routinely make as a contingency against drought. For example, in the scenarios presented, I would expect south-eastern utilities, like TVA, would simply fire-up their considerable inventory of air-cooled CTs until the drought phase has passed. This really wouldn’t be a big deal.
The bottom line, without knowing the impact on a utility’s entire fleet, the study is not meaningful.
Regards,
Kforestcat
@ur momisugly harry wr2: Re: France’s off peak overcapacity — The great thing about LFTR is its ability to turn the reactor on and off. In the LFTR trial at Oak Ridge, the engineers only wanted to work during the week days so they shut the reactor down on Friday and cranked it up Monday morning. So I don’t think overcapacity at night would be a problem.
Re: turbines are about 50% efficient at best. What are you implying here? That the other 50% is waste heat that needs to be cooled? Advanced Brayton gas turbines have intercoolers, reheaters and regenerators to recycle waste heat. Are you saying that even after using them there is still going to be excess heat that you would need to cool with a water cooling system?
garymount says:
June 4, 2012 at 1:52 am
One problem I have with this study is that I recently read about a study that showed that the streams have not been getting warmer despite of global warming….
____________________________________________
That is because the stream temperatures have not yet been Hansen-ized.
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/giss/hansen-giss-1940-1980.gif
US temp raw minus adjusted: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif
US temperature blink graph of adjustments: http://i31.tinypic.com/2149sg0.gif
davidgmills says:
I want to thank you for the video on thorium. I added it to my “Collection”
On the intake water for the Nuke plant, I am not an engineer but I have worked in industry and that included the care and feeding of the DI water. I can not believe tho intake water is not “treated” by at least filtration. Otherwise you are looking at boiled trout for lunch at the outlet side (DOo I really need the /sarc tag?)