Plastic bags, tape, broomsticks fix San Onofre leak

abc ^ | 4/30 | blacher

[OA5599]

Okay you do have San understanding of what a steam generator is and how it works. I just though the statement you made about thinking the leak was on the reactor side was odd.

Of course it’s on the reactor side, but it’s also on the steam side at the same time because the steam generator tubes are exactly what separates the two sides.

What you said read to me like, “I think the leak in my windshield is on the inside of my car.”

That’s an absurd statement as the windshield is part of what separates the inside from the outside. You wouldn’t make that statement. It would come across very odd.

As for the salt water cooling, it still doesn’t appear you are grasping just how much cooling a steam plant needs to condense the turbine exhaust steam. You can stand up and walk in the seawater cooling pipes. They’re massive.

When the unit is on line, these humongous pipes are continuously feeding pumped water from the ocean through the condenser and back out to sea (with the excess heat removed from exhaust steam). An interruption of the water supply will trip the unit within seconds (on condenser high pressure measured on the steam side of the condenser). If the unit fails to trip on a loss of salt water cooling, the condensers will explode. (Maybe that was overly dramatic. Actually, they usually have a rupture disc on the turbine exhaust hood as a back up.)

So much water is needed it would be practically impossible to desalinize it. We’re talking about removing at least a third of the energy of the fuel (nuclear or conventional) Most steam plants are only about 30-35% efficient to begin with. Now you suggest using more fuel to boil the cooling water, then cool it (with what? Seawater?) then send it through the condenser to remove the turbine exhaust heat.

The only way to not need salt water cooling is to build those expensive, high maintenance hour-glass shaped evaporative cooling towers as seen at plants not located by a river or large body of water.

[Lx]

I’ve never seen San Onofre but I have seen Rancho Seco run and it used two enormous cooling towers which are still there. When the plant was on, the water flow from these things was massive (they’re open on the bottom).

Is there no way to reclaim the heat energy they’re losing by cooling it?

They must have found a way to combat the salt water corrosion or maybe it’s not that bad. Ships using a sacrificial anode seem to survive on the ocean and you don’t hear about them having to replace systems.

[OA5599]

Sacrificial anodes are a must, as you noted to combat galvanic corrosion. High nickel alloys (such as Monel) and titanium are used in the condensers so there are no oxidization concerns. Newer plants use fiberglass piping, but older plants would use carbon steel.

The real maintenance headache with saltwater cooling isn’t actually the corrosion concerns. It’s the biological concerns. Sea life will clog the condenser tubes, resulting in reduced efficiency and would eventually trip the unit if left unchecked.

While routinely cleaning condensers, chemically treating the water, and maintaing a rotating screen system at the inlets is maintenance intensive, the real reason plants will be moving away from salt water cooling for air cooling is due to regulations.

Environmental agencies are demanding fish return systems and now monitor the return temperatures. Air cooled systems are more expensive and less efficient— think summer time air temp of 90 deg + and low specific heat capacity vs water temp of 65 deg and a specific heat capacity nearly identical to pure water—but nothing is as expensive and inefficient as the government.

Quick story: a plant built a large lake for cooling purposes, and to be good neighbors in their community, added fish to it and opened it to public for sporting purposes. Because it had fish, the EPA now regulates them, requiring a fish return system an temperature monitoring, subjected to fines for non-compliance. The plant is now responsible to maintain the fish that *they* introduced into a lake that didn’t exist until *they* built it.

As far as reclaiming waste heat of the cooling water, often a desalination plant will take the preheated sea water return from a power plant. Some smaller old steam plants do not condense their turbine exhaust steam, but instead send their steam to customers for cooling, heating and power generating purposes.

Non-nuclear plants built today are mostly combined cycle plants, which are a combined gas turbine (or combustion turbine) and steam turbine sets. The waste heat of the gas turbine is used to make steam to drive the steam turbine.

I believe CC plants do away with saltwater or evaporative cooling systems in favor of a giant radiator structure called a dry cooling system. (Four CC plants went up within five miles of my house.) I’m assuming that means the exhaust steam is directly cooled and condensed by air, without the freshwater cooling loop found between the condenser and cooling tower of an evapoarative system.

Of course that heat is not reclaimed as far as I know, but the amount of energy lost in a CC plant is far less than a regular steam plant of the same rating.

[Lx]

OK, this is funny.

Environmental agencies are demanding fish return systems and now monitor the return temperatures. Air cooled systems are more expensive and less efficient— think summer time air temp of 90 deg + and low specific heat capacity vs water temp of 65 deg and a specific heat capacity nearly identical to pure water—but nothing is as expensive and inefficient as the government.

When San Onofre went live, the environmentalists were screaming about introducing warm water into the ocean. I don't know what it does within a 20' radius but I bet you can't tell the temp increase a hundred yards away. I picked 20' as just a number although I assume their enormous pipes go out to deeper parts of the sea.

This happened at Rancho Seco:

Environmental agencies are demanding fish return systems and now monitor the return temperatures. Air cooled systems are more expensive and less efficient— think summer time air temp of 90 deg + and low specific heat capacity vs water temp of 65 deg and a specific heat capacity nearly identical to pure water—but nothing is as expensive and inefficient as the government. Quick story: a plant built a large lake for cooling purposes, and to be good neighbors in their community, added fish to it and opened it to public for sporting purposes. Because it had fish, the EPA now regulates them, requiring a fish return system an temperature monitoring, subjected to fines for non-compliance. The plant is now responsible to maintain the fish that *they* introduced into a lake that didn’t exist until *they* built it.

Their cooling (RS) pond was stocked with fish. Then the EPA says, we need to regulate this.

They tried the same thing to a friend of mine whose family owns more than 400 acres in Vacaville area. If it rained and water collected in pools as water does, suddenly it's a wetland requiring regulation and protection whatever that means? Do you have to keep it wet using their well water? My friend who is not too impressed with authority told them to take a hike (they didn't have his permission to be on his family's property), get off his property and then it dried up. They keep busting his balls because the city wants to get their mits on their property. We were shooting out there and the cops show up, guess what, it is perfectly legal for him to shoot on his land. The cops then tried the good neighbor B.S, "Don't you want to stay on good terms with your neighbors?" Answer, hell no, we've owned this property for a couple of generations and these losers who were actually almost a mile away were complaining of shooting noises and were in a hosing tract. Cops were powerless and left.

I've heard other stories like this happening around Ca.

Thanks Nixon, the EPA was not a good idea. Clean cars are great but did they need another powerful agency to abuse their powers as they are now?