Re: Energy Density of Coal Fired Power Plant


"Bret Cahill" <BretCahill@xxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1163625873.918474.196790@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>> If they can't even get nukes to have a higher energy intensity than
>>> solar by at least ONE order of magnitude . . . .

>> At 1641 MW in .25 square mi. (0.65 x 10**6 square meters), Beaver >> Valley
>> generates about 2.5 KW per square meter.

> Land devoted to waste storage as well as mining needs to be factored in
> with nuclear.

Then land devoted to the extraction and processing of the materials for
the solar panels should also be counted.

Very true. Some claim Si PV requires more electricity that what it
will ever produce. If that is true then the coal strip mines must be
factored in.

The comparison, however, wasn't with PV but with the technology with
the highest conversion efficiency, dish Stirling.

I'm not sure how much that is,
but I suspect that for PV it is not insignificant.

The nuclear plant area includes all the waste storage (if you mean spent
fuel), as all U.S. plants presently store their spent fuel on site.

> Coal plants with SO2 scrubbers have big gypsum stacks but not anything
> like nuke waste.

>> Southern California Edison is
>> proposing building a 500 MW or 850 MW solar generating station on 4500
>> acres, which is 18.2 x 10**6 square meters.

> An experimental plant in some uninhabitable desert is not going to be
> primarily concerned watts/acre.

> They just need plenty of room to drive their cranes between the rows to
> demonstrate it can work at all, even at several dollars/watt.

I was actually surprised to see the density as low as it is

That's because you never built an experimental plant.

but I think
that any comparisons should be a made to actual, or near-to-actual
installations,

Oyster Creek is an "actual" installation.

http://www.oystercreeklr.com/

It was the first commercial nuke plant.


Hardly. Is the rest of your research so spotty? Yankee Rowe was older, Big Rock Point, ShippingPort, there were several plants before Oyster Creek. Oyster Creek's only claim is that it is still operating, while those others have been shut down.

636 MW on 860 acres -- less than 200 watts/ m^2.

That's not an order of magnitude more than the first commercial solar
Stirling plant.

Maybe 3 times more.


Again with the 'power density' instead of 'energy density'. How many MW-hrs of electricity has even Oyster Creek produced in it's some 37 year life?

<snip>

The DOE reported capacity factors for Beaver Valley 1 and 2 are,
respectively, 98.5% and 90.7%. The 98.5% is obviously for some period
(probably a year) which did not happen to have a refueling outage
(typically every 18 months), but the 90.7% factor is typical for most
U.S. plants in recent years.

Nuke plants are supposed to be fail safe. When they have unanticipated
"problems" they shut down.

Palo Verde, the largest in the nation, hardly ever runs on all 4
reactors.


Well, considering Palo Verde only has *3* reactors, I guess that's not surprising (more faulty data on your part??). PV has had a bit of trouble the past year or so, but here's their data from 2003.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/at_a_glance/reactors/palo_verde.html

<snip>

daestrom

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