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Oyster Creek Cooling Towers
ascend68:
The NJ state senate held a hearing on proposed legislation to force Exelon to build cooling towers. The committee was split 3-3 and postponed any final decision until February. Exelon stated that if forced to build cooling towers they would shut the plant down. I'd like to hear people's thoughts on this topic. Do you believe Exelon will shut down the plant? Is it economically feasible for them to actually build the cooling towers? Will the NJ senate force Exelon's hand? Many jobs and 321 million dollars of NJ tax revenue are on the line and I would be shocked if in this national economic climate they would force a shutdown. What are your thoughts?
JustinHEMI05:
I think its clear, that if it isn't economically feasible to build cooling towers, they will shut the plant down. If it is, they won't. I also don't think Exelon would bluff by saying that they would shut the plant down if forced. They just announced the shut down a bunch of conventional units for economic reasons, so if forced to spend a ton of money on this plant, I could definitely see them shutting it down.
HydroDave63:
The watermelon greenies are also aiming their cooling tower sights on a certain INPO 3 Region IV plant as well
withroaj:
Alright, everybody. Brace for ignorance. I have questions.
Many of you out there already know my level of understanding of power generation. I don't really know anything at all about "the grid," except that my lights turn on and I pay a bill to my local utility wherever I live.
I wonder, as a response to this post, what happens when a big plant shuts down. I know that plants shut down for outages or due to trips all the time, but is there an appreciable increased load on other plants/units when one plant/unit shuts down?
What is the long-term impact on other, nearby plants when a plant decommissions?
thenuttyneutron:
--- Quote from: withroaj on Dec 15, 2009, 09:26 ---Alright, everybody. Brace for ignorance. I have questions.
Many of you out there already know my level of understanding of power generation. I don't really know anything at all about "the grid," except that my lights turn on and I pay a bill to my local utility wherever I live.
I wonder, as a response to this post, what happens when a big plant shuts down. I know that plants shut down for outages or due to trips all the time, but is there an appreciable increased load on other plants/units when one plant/unit shuts down?
What is the long-term impact on other, nearby plants when a plant decommissions?
--- End quote ---
Grid Load and power generation must be balanced. When a plant goes down, the load dispatcher must get power from somewhere else. There is some spinning reserve that can take the load in the event of a trip at a base load nuke. If the spinning reserve can't pick the load up fast enough or there is not enough reserve, people will get cut off to maintain the grid. Once the power on the grid is enough, the people can get put back on. Remember the rolling blackouts in the early 2000's in California?
The 2003 blackout was a bad event that was caused by a cascading failure of the grid. This is the worst case consequence of grid problem. The thing that sucks about nukes is the reliance on offsite power to startup and in most cases run. There are certain situations where you can get what is called a load rejection and still survive. In this situation, your house loads are all on your own main generator and you are no longer on the grid. I have only seen this on a simulator and it can't happen at 100% power for me. In the event of a loss of offsite power at 100%, the RX would trip before it could get low enough in power to not cause an automatic trip by a safety system.
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