Nuclear Power Is The Most Unreliable of Electricity Sources And Requires 100% Rolling Reserve At All Times

I make this large claim based upon REALITY.

I make this claim BECAUSE the nuclear industry, armed with a $1.4 Billion dollar budget to send propaganda our way to try to keep their challenged industry alive, states that solar and wind is no good because it is too unreliable and requires too much backup.
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stock here

Unplanned scrams (emergency full shutdown at a nuclear plant is called a "scrams") come at any time of day or night, and require instantaneous 100% backup.

Losing this type of large supply can drop the voltage and frequency on the grid, and since many types of power generation is "inductive" meaning that they can only follow a known good electricity wave form, if the waveform (voltage, frequency, and sinusoldial shape) is not good, they are programmed to drop off, i.e. shut down.

So if the grid drops out because of of losing the nuke plant supply (wide area blackout) ....and the nuke plant gensets don't start....then we are into nuclear meltdown mode. Again, like TMI, Three Mile Island, nicknamed "They Melted It" like ice cream in the sun.

So 100% backup required for the full capacity of each nuclear plant, and instantaneous.   Instantaneous means that it is required more quickly than even rolling reserve.    That requires a shared "diversity" of power sources throughout the grid.    And say you have 3 or 4 nuclear plants serving an area, you need to do more than just back up one nuclear plant, you must back up all the nuclear plants, since the factors that take down one nuclear can confound to take down all the nuclear. 

So lots of small generation (PV solar and wind is good!) to help feed the matrix of the grid, thus cushioning the impact of the nuclear plant tripping out instantaneously.

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Paid troll at big story
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/59b81101814946c1a1306c5af5791b30/upcoming-nuke-plant-closure-could-roil-new-england-markets#comment-2338770325

vm0404

and how often do those scrams happen? Are they more or less common than say times of low wind?

stock well: Well I would say from the structure of your question, your slant to promote nuclear and pot shot wind is clear.    Nevertheless you deserve a response. 

Sadly, on average, nuclear plants have an emergency requiring a complete and immediate shutdown about ONCE PER YEAR per plant 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_debate#Reliability

Some nuke plants are much more dangerous


Which bring us to the concept of diversity.   Diversity simple says that not all sources are producing at a given time, and not all users are consuming at a given time, but when you have a wide variety of producers, say solar, wind, geothermal, sometime hydro, the average supply into the grid is much smoother than an individual supply.    That's a good thing for solar and wind, and the more the better. 


I established my company career on the cutting edge of solar in Hawaii.     Seeing it rise from a "nice idea" to a powerful force that took so much power (literally and figuratively) away from the utility and the various governmental bodies that benefit legally and illegally from the utility, that large forced were brought to bear to kill "citizen owned solar" and replace it with monopoly owned solar.

Even during this process, I was a skeptic on how well the "aging grid" would handle a lot of solar and wind.    I thought at 5% we would start to see problems and require some proactive solutions.

Per Wikipedia link above

According to Benjamin K. Sovacool, most studies critiquing solar and wind energy look only at individual generators and not at the system wide effects of solar and wind farms. Correlations between power swings drop substantially as more solar and wind farms are integrated (a process known as geographical smoothing) and a wider geographic area also enables a larger pool of energy efficiency efforts to abate intermittency.^[40]

Sovacool says that previously intermittent sources such as wind and solar can displace nuclear resources.^[40]

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A very nice summary of the ranked dangers of nuclear plants is at the Cascadia Times

 http://times.org/2013/12/18/dangerous-nuclear-power-plants-america/
 Cascaadia Times Nuke Plants Ranked by DANGER

Solar and wind have effectively no CO2 production, although I won't even agree with the Carbon Meme which even the Pope is not promoting, even though science does not support it.

But the promoters of nuclear ----well just watch

• 9 hours ago

hilarious how the nukists keep on playing the CO2 card. CO2 is an indicator of other pollutants, but is not in fact a "pollutant", its helps plants grow better.
But it boggles the mind how the producers of the most dangerous substances on earth (nuclear waste of which their is no solution) trot out a non pollutant as an excuse for their own existence, which is no longer economic.

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  Dr. Justin G. Frank Energy • 3 hours ago

  
  

  You've never heard of LFTR have you? Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors? I recommend you research this kind of reactor and learn how it takes nuclear waste and destroy it.

  TO Dr. Justin G. • 3 minutes ago
  • Yes I have heard of LFTR
    1) No real working model, no track history of operation in commercial environment.
    2) Complete rubbish that "it destroys it". It takes some of the longer lived waste 10,000 to 10,000,000 years and turn SOME of it into waste that only goes away by half in 300 years.....so it takes 3000 years to pretty much completely go away.
    We need to solve some serious issues in the next decade and two, or the human race will be gone within 100 years if not sooner.

    
    
    

    • Dr. Justin G. Frank Energy • 21 minutes ago

      So you'd rather keep the waste that stays radioactive for 10 million years? That's fine, that's not really radioactive. As a matter of fact you could hold something that radioactive in your hand for about a day before you started having any sort of genetic damage due to it. Which would be about as much as a light sunburn or less. Now the radioactive waste that has a half life of about 3000 years or less. Well that is the waste we need to be rid of. And LFTR does just that. Also you must not know about the MSR in Oak ridge that ran for 7 years until it was shutdown by Nixon. So do not say there is no 'track history' of an operational reactor of that kind.
      

    
    

    Frank Energy Dr. Justin G. • a few seconds ago Hold on, this is waiting to be approved by Johnson City Press.

    The degree of "radioactivity" of a substance is not a good measure of its danger to humans, uranium, plutonium are ALSO extremely dangerous as heavy metals that combined with even limited radioactivity, AND bioaccumulation in several specific organs and Red Bone Marrow make them up to 112,000 times more dangerous than your run of the mill radiation, say tritium.
    The Oak Ridge MSR was purely experimental, and as a material scientist, I could have "I told you so".....
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
    One unexpected finding was shallow, inter-granular cracking in all metal surfaces exposed to the fuel salt. The cause of the embrittlement was tellurium
    - a fission product generated in the fuel. This was first noted in the
    specimens that were removed from the core at intervals during the
    reactor operation. Post-operation examination of pieces of a control-rod
    thimble, heat-exchanger tubes, and pump bowl parts revealed the
    ubiquity of the cracking and emphasized its importance to the MSR
    concept. The crack growth was rapid enough to become a problem over the
    planned thirty-year life of a follow-on thorium breeder reactor. This
    cracking could be reduced by adding small amounts of niobium to the Hastelloy-N.[19]
    Decommissioning
    This section requires expansion. (June 2008)
    After shutdown the salt was believed to be in long-term safe storage.
    At low temperatures, radiolysis can free fluorine from the salt. As a
    countermeasure the salt was annually reheated to about 150°C, until
    1989.[20]
    But beginning in the mid-1980s, there was concern that radioactivity
    was migrating through the system. Sampling in 1994 revealed
    concentrations of uranium that created a potential for a nuclear criticality accident, as well as a potentially dangerous build-up of fluorine
    gas — the environment above the solidified salt was approximately one
    atmosphere of fluorine. The ensuing decontamination and decommissioning
    project was called "the most technically challenging" activity assigned
    to Bechtel Jacobs under its environmental management contract with the U.S. Department of Energy's
    Oak Ridge Operations organization. In 2003, the MSRE cleanup project
    was estimated at about $130 million, with decommissioning expected to be
    completed in 2009.[21]
    Removal of uranium from the salt was finally complete in March 2008,
    however still leaving the salt with the fission products in the tanks.[22]
    Much of the high cost was caused by the unpleasant surprise of
    fluorine and uranium hexafluoride evolution from cold fuel salt in
    storage that ORNL did not defuel and store correctly, but this has now
    been taken into consideration in MSR design.[23]
    
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  TimS  • 7 hours ago

  
  

  The erratic nature of wind/solar has to be compensated “real-time” by fossil-fuel power stations operating in back-up mode, consuming more fuel than they would otherwise.
  Nuclear is our best carbon-free option.

  
  
  
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    TO TimS • a few seconds ago

    
    

    The diversity of the grid is actually amazingly good, and smooth supply variances can be simplistically predicted by a few data points of wind and solar insolation of which the data transmission ability is already present at nearly no cost. Other supply sources can thus be strategically ramped up and down (load following) in a very energy efficient way.
    But not nuclear, one of the great weaknesses of nuclear during regular operation is that it is not at all good at load following.