Palisades reactor down 9th time since 2011; leaks radioactive water into Lake Michigan.

[kristopher]

Nuclear proponents - when nuclear has an unplanned failure, it leaves a huge hole that must be filled immediately. So how much spinning reserve is required to be on standby for the 9 shut downs mentioned in the article and how much fossil fuel have those plants used since 2011?

On the other hand, the variability of renewables is not only predictable, it is of a type that tends to be self leveling, meaning when one spot has a decrease in power related to weather, a nearby spot tends to increase its generation; so the amount of emergency back up required for renewables is actually quite small. The nature of the variability in renewables is actually very similar to the variability we see in customer demand - which makes it a problem that we are well versed in dealing with.

Palisades shutdown comes after assumed ‘unplanned’ release of radioactive water into Lake Michigan
By LINDSEY SMITH

...He confirms the unplanned release of slightly radioactive water into Lake Michigan, but couldn’t say exactly how much.

“It’s really impossible to tell at this juncture what the length of this shutdown will be because we haven’t yet had a chance to identify what the issue is that we’re going to need to fix,” Young said.

This will be the third attempt to fix the leaky tank within the last year and a half....

http://www.michiganradio.org/post/palisades-shutdown-comes-after-assumed-unplanned-release-radioactive-water-lake-michigan

[babylonsister]

1. Ugh. "SLIGHT"? nt

[FBaggins]

5. Yes... as in "virtually nonexistent"

The water in the tank would have pretty low levels to begin with, but the leak diverts to a catchment area and it's apparently a small amount of that water that made it into the lake.

It's quite likely that it isn't just "slight"... it's too low to even detect (since the water in Lake Michigan is already radioactive)

[corkhead]

2. It's clean, it's safe, it's too cheap to meter.

oops, one must not assume that everyone recognizes my automatic conversion of disillusionment energy to energy

[madokie]

3. Who in their right mind thought these were a good idea to begin with anyway

These people running this place don't know if their scratching their ass or baying at the moon.
Jaysus fucking kkrist
If you can't get a handle on this shut the sob down and leave it shut down.

From the link.

“We have gone through pretty exhaustive measures on a couple of occasions to bring the plant offline and do just extensive testing and repairs and we’ll take a look at what’s causing the leak this time,” Young said.

I asked if it would make more sense to replace the tank instead.

“I really don’t know any background information on that in terms of what that would cost, I honestly couldn’t comment on that,” Young said.

Young notes the plant has had “a lot of success” at Palisades in the year and a half in “significantly improving performance.” The NRC recently upgraded the plant's safety rating after a series of problems in 2011 left it with one of the worst safety performance ratings in the country.

Last month Site Vice President Tony Vitale noted that a number of issues “have required repairs to be done with the plant offline and that’s unacceptable.” He says they’re reviewing their procedures to see if there’s something they should change.

“We’re diving into our programs and finding out why these issues are finding us instead of us finding them,” Vitale said in April.

“It is unfortunate that this is a recurrent issue that we are dealing with here,” Young said, “but our resolve is strong to fix this issue once and for all.”

[FBaggins]

4. Sigh... more of this nonsense?

when nuclear has an unplanned failure, it leaves a huge hole that must be filled immediately.

Any power plant meets that description. The larger the plant, the larger the potential hole. It has nothing to do with it being a nuclear plant.

There's a coal plant a couple dozen miles away with four generators (each of which is about the capacity of Pallisades). The grid needs to be able to handle any of them going offline unexpectedly (or even the entire 3.3 GW plant). The key that you surely must know (but intentionally hide from your readers) is that there are over a dozen units in Michigan alone that are roughly that size. The same backup capacity serves all of them (as well as those in neighboring states). Retire all three nuclear plants in Michigan and you still need enough backup capacity to handle one or two of the larger units going down.

IOW, the incremental backup requirement for Pallisades is pretty close to zero. Nuclear only adds significantly to the need for backup capacity when the units are significantly larger in capacity than existing units.

So how much spinning reserve is required to be on standby for the 9 shut downs mentioned in the article

None. You've mischaracterized (intentionally or not) what happened. The plant didn't just drop off the grid without warning. The leak has been an ongoing issue and the NRC has given them guidelines for when it must impact operations. Even if they had zero warning that the leak was increasing beyond the standard (unlikely), they had one hour to fix it and then six additional hours before they had to shut down the reactor (then an additional 36 hours to bring it to cold shutdown).

On the other hand, the variability of renewables is not only predictable

Compared to what? Certainly not compared to other forms of generation.

it is of a type that tends to be self leveling

Which, of course, it utter nonsense. Large numbers of units of course "self level" compared to single units... but not compared to the vast bulk of generation (whether you call it "baseload" or not). Let's take Germany as the most relevant example. Wind power produced 2.2 TWh is one week close to the end of the year... but only .14 TWh during the last week of September. It's not even "leveling" over an entire week... let alone the moment-to-moment that reliable power supply requires.

Yes, that happened to be a week with lots of solar power (while the peak week had almost none at all)... but there's nothing magical about that. One week in the middle of December saw barely 1/3rd of a TWh from wind and solar combined.

And, of course, solar PV isn't "self leveling" at all. You get a little of that if clouds roll through on an otherwise sunny day, but you can also go weeks with very little generation at all.

On edit - That turned out to be data from 2011.
The 2012 version follows - Solar weeks ranged from 1.1 TWh to .06 TWh. Wind weeks ranged from 2.6 to .29. Solar/wind combined ranged from 2.7 to .65. The largest day (wind/solar) was .53TWh, while the minimum was .03. That means that the best day was almost 18-times greater than the worst. Hardly "level"
The very best moment for wind was just over 24 GW... 200-times the worst moment (.115 GW). Wind turbines spread all over Germany didn't "self level" out of that. (solar hit that well-publicized peak of 22.4 GW in May... obviously there's no need to compare it to the minimum).

[kristopher]

6. What it can be.

Cost-minimized combinations of wind power, solar power and electrochemical storage, powering the grid up to 99.9% of the time
Open Access Article
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378775312014759

Abstract
We model many combinations of renewable electricity sources (inland wind, offshore wind, and photovoltaics) with electrochemical storage (batteries and fuel cells), incorporated into a large grid system (72 GW). The purpose is twofold:

1) although a single renewable generator at one site produces intermittent power, we seek combinations of diverse renewables at diverse sites, with storage, that are not intermittent and satisfy need a given fraction of hours. And
2) we seek minimal cost, calculating true cost of electricity without subsidies and with inclusion of external costs.

Our model evaluated over 28 billion combinations of renewables and storage, each tested over 35,040 h (four years) of load and weather data. We find that the least cost solutions yield seemingly-excessive generation capacity — at times, almost three times the electricity needed to meet electrical load. This is because diverse renewable generation and the excess capacity together meet electric load with less storage, lowering total system cost.

At 2030 technology costs and with excess electricity displacing natural gas, we find that the electric system can be powered 90%–99.9% of hours entirely on renewable electricity, at costs comparable to today's — but only if we optimize the mix of generation and storage technologies.