Nuclear Jacksonville. The Atomic Age in Cowford that Ended in Bankruptcy.

[stephendare]

http://www.atomicinsights.com/aug96/Offshore.html


Russian Contemporary Plans for a floating Nuclear Plant

Most people associated with the nuclear industry, and many residents of Florida have some knowledge of the ill-fated Westinghouse/Newport News Offshore Power System project.

Begun in 1970, this project was based on two ideas. The first was that a series of identical reactors produced in a factory type setting could be completed in a shorter period of time than a similar number of custom made plants constructed on site. The second was that plants located several miles off shore might be able to avoid the infamous Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) syndrome that had begun to plague power plant developers.
Basic Plant Design

By 1970, Westinghouse executives realized that one of the main problems in making nuclear plants competitive was the fact that they were all custom built plants. Company engineers began producing some conceptual designs for smaller, modular plants and checking the reaction of utility executives to the designs.

At Public Service Electric and Gas, based in New Jersey, the designers found some strong interest in standardized plants. However, Richard Eckert, the main proponent of such plants, had some suggestions of his own.

He suggested that the plants should be utility sized, i.e. on the order of 1000 MWe, and constructed so that they could be moored off shore. As the man in charge of finding new sites for power plants, he had discovered that there were a very limited number of sites available in areas where power demands were high. He realized, however, that many such areas were close to the ocean.

After some give and take between the supplier and the customer, the plant design that evolved was essentially a man-made island that could support two 1200 MWe nuclear plants. The power island would be fabricated in a specialized facility, maneuvered to the site and permanently moored behind a large, protective breakwater. Ideally, the plant would be located a bit less than three miles off shore and the power would be sent via underwater cables.
Lead Customer

Westinghouse leaders recognized that they would need a partner with extensive shipbuilding experience, and attracted the participation of Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company. The two companies created a 50/50 partnership company that became known as Offshore Power Systems.

Public Service did not simply make design suggestions; they signed contracts for two plants, designated Atlantic 1 and 2. These contracts provided most of the funding required to complete the detailed engineering drawings, produce the license application, and to build the manufacturing facility.
Manufacturing Facility

The project partners soon recognized that they were attempting something new. The largest drydock in the country had a width of 140 feet, but the plant design that had evolved based on customer requirements was almost 400 feet wide.

In order to move the plant to its Atlantic moorings, the manufacturing facility needed access to a body of water with channel depth of 40 feet.

A search of the United States Atlantic coast yielded two possible sites, Norfolk, Virginia, and Blount Island, near Jacksonville, Florida. Jacksonville won based on having a shorter route to sea, lower real estate costs and the warm support of local governments.

The Blount Island facility rapidly became a major employer in the Jacksonville area, eventually employing more than 1000 people. Some of the facilities built on the island were the largest of their kind in the United States.

The bridge crane, for example, became a well known landmark on the Intercoastal Waterway. It was sized to be able to lift a plant containment dome. It had a capacity of 1000 tons, a span of 675 feet and a height of more than 130 feet.

The graving dock, where the plant platform would be constructed, measured 400 feet by 400 feet by 40 feet deep. That is large enough to contain three football fields side by side with room to spare.

The planned capacity of the facility was 4 plants per year.
Plant Site Preparation

Obviously, a facility moored in the ocean needs protection from the force of hurricane winds and waves.

For Atlantic 1 and 2 the plan was to create a breakwater that consisted of manufactured concrete structures shaped like large children's jacks. These would weigh about 80 tons each and it would take about 18,000 of them to form the breakwater. Fortunately, the site selected for the lead plants had a preexisting sand hill that reduced the number of giant jacks needed.

The projection was that it would take approximately four years to prepare the breakwater for each power station.
Environmental Impact Statement

The Offshore Power Systems project began soon after the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the completion of an environmental impact statement for any major federal action. Since the plants would need federal licenses, they qualified as major federal actions.

The Environmental Protection Agency took charge of the coordination between a variety of governmental and environmental agencies (including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club), and finally concluded that the plants could be built and operated with acceptable impact on the environment.
Additional Interested Customers

As the facility came closer to being a reality, other customers expressed their interest in purchasing one of the standardized plants. The Jacksonville Electric Authority and the Southern Company expressed their interest with formal letters of intent.

Westinghouse obtained the approval of the NRC to build as many as eight of the plants. As far as anyone could tell, all was going very well with the project.
Cancellations

With all of the positives going for this project, it is important to understand why it failed. Surprisingly enough, the initiating event was the OPEC oil embargo of 1973. Typically, an event that leads to a rapid quadrupling of the price of a competitive product is good for business, but the energy industry does not follow normal rules.

The major industrial loads on the Public Service system were oil refineries and petrochemical plants located in places like Newark, New Jersey. The embargo dramatically reduced the demand for their products, so they reduced their purchases of electricity.

Since Public Service's customers needed less electricity, they did not need the capacity represented by the two large plants that they had ordered from Offshore Power Systems. Even though the purchase contracts required them to cover the supplier's costs, including those of building the manufacturing facility, Public Service desperately needed to slow down their capacity additions.

At first Public Service asked for a two year delay, hoping that the "energy crisis" was temporary, but they eventually canceled all orders.

Since the plants and the facilities that had been designed were specifically designed for the production of 1200 MWe central station power plants for the densely populated and prosperous Northeast United States, there was little hope of finding alternative customers. This was unfortunate, since many areas of the world were desperate for moderately sized, non-oil based electric power sources.

Since no business - no matter how good their people, their facilities or their technology - can survive without customers, Offshore Power Systems closed down. The people associated with the project were either relocated or found other employment. Westinghouse sold the Blount Island facility.

The project became a bad memory for many in the nuclear industry, most of whom do not understand the business reasons for the closure. They simply remember that Westinghouse tried floating power plants and failed to produce a single plant. Unfortunately, many industry pessimists see this as a reason to believe that any project based on similar ideas is doomed to fail.

[Midway ®]

Ha Ha Ha... people like you got in the way of all that glorious progress!

BTW those Westinghouse 1970 era nuclear reactors had several distinct design flaws that would tend to make them get very very hot.

[Midway ®]

something like this:

Shearon Harris Design Flaw Brought N.C. Dangerously Close to Nuclear Disaster

A year-long problem with the emergency cooling system at the Shearon Harris nuclear power plant near Raleigh brought North Carolina dangerously close to nuclear disaster in the early 1990s -- and the problem remained hidden from the public until last week. The revelation comes as the world marks tomorrow's 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in the Ukraine.

The Harris flaw caused valve and pipe failures that rendered the emergency cooling system inoperable, and it went unnoticed until a refueling outage in 1991, according to a new report from Greenpeace titled An American Chernobyl: Nuclear Near Misses at U.S. Reactors Since 1986. If the Harris plant's primary cooling system had broken down during the malfunction, the emergency cooling system would have been unable to protect the reactor from overheating and releasing large amounts of radiation. The flaw increased the risk of a reactor meltdown by a thousandfold, according to Nuclear Regulatory Commission calculations cited by Greenpeace.

The Harris malfunction ranked among the most significant near misses at U.S. nuclear power plants, tying for first place with a 2002 problem at Ohio's Davis Besse plant that involved a football-sized hole in the reactor vessel, the report says. There were a total of four near misses at Harris, the third-most at any one plant; the others involved fire hazards and problems with heat removal systems. In all, Greenpeace documented a total of 200 near misses at U.S. nuclear power plants since the Chernobyl disaster.

"If any of these 'near misses' had progressed to a meltdown, the government regulators have little confidence that any of the nuclear reactor containments would survive," the report states.

A flaw by Harris plant designer Westinghouse led to the problem with the emergency cooling system. After Westinghouse alerted several nuclear plants about the defect, Harris owner CP&L, now Progress Energy, attempted to correct the problem but unwittingly made it worse. Progress earlier this year announced that it had selected Westinghouse to possibly build two more reactors at the Harris site.

The Durham-based nuclear watchdog group N.C. Waste Awareness and Reduction Network says Greenpeace's discovery shows Progress needs to be more open with the public about problems and how the utility corrects them.

"This is dramatic evidence that major system failures do occur at nuclear plants," according to a statement from N.C. WARN Executive Director Jim Warren. "It shows that the utilities and NRC do not have everything under control, and that they gamble on the public not finding about these problems -- instead of explaining them."

Warren also questions why the system failure persisted for a year without CP&L rechecking the correction it made after Westinghouse reported the defect.

N.C. WARN this week will publish a report on serious and ongoing safety problems at Harris. The group is also holding a forum commemorating the Chernobyl disaster on Wednesday, April 26, from 7 to 9 p.m. at McDougle Middle School, 900 Old Fayetteville Rd. in Carrboro. Mary Olson, director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service's Asheville office, will speak on what happened at Chernobyl. The forum will also consider the Harris safety problems and the adequacy of the plant's evacuation plan.

http://www.raleigheconews.com/2006/04/shearon-harris-design-flaw-brought-nc.html

The problem is, you just can't possibly foresee every condition that might occur, and when something does happen, the consequences are very dire.

[RiversideGator]

The operative phrase in midway's piece is:

according to a new report from Greenpeace

That is all you need to know.

BTW, tell us about all the "American Chernobyl"s which have occurred.  I would be interested to learn more about our nuclear disasters which didnt happen.

[BridgeTroll]

Sounds to me like nuclear power generation is off the table as a greenhouse gas cutting measure.  Without the nukes that pretty much leaves fossil fuels for electricity generation.

[civil42806]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401209.html

A very interesting take on nuclear energy.  Can't take that off the table, wind and solar are nice thoughts but so far very inefficient and the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine.  Plus the greens lawsuits against both wind plants, where the rich and famous can see them, as well as the suits against the required transmission lines make both problematical. 

[BridgeTroll]

Great article.  You simply cannot have it both ways.  To curb greenhouse gasses the world will have to commence nuclear power plant building at an unprecedented rate.  This should be at the top of President Obamas economic stimulus package.

[RiversideGator]

So you think Greenpeace is wrong about something?

Yes.  They intentionally overstate the dangers of nuclear power for their own radical political ends.

And ever heard of three Mile Island?

You mean the incident which resulted in no adverse health consequences for the public?  Here is a clip from the report of the President's Council on the accident:

Just how serious was the accident? Based on our investigation of the health effects of the accident, we conclude that in spite of serious damage to the plant, most of the radiation was contained and the actual release will have a negligible effect on the physical health of individuals. The major health effect of the accident was found to be mental stress.

The amount of radiation received by any one individual outside the plant was very low. However, even low levels of radiation may result in the later development of cancer, genetic defects, or birth defects among children who are exposed in the womb. Since there is no direct way of measuring the danger of low-level radiation to health, the degree of danger must be estimated indirectly. Different scientists make different assumptions about how this estimate should be made and, therefore, estimates vary. Fortunately, in this case the radiation doses were so low that we conclude that the overall health effects will be minimal. There will either be no case of cancer or the number of cases will be so small that it will never be possible to detect them. The same conclusion applies to the other possible health effects.

http://www.pddoc.com/tmi2/kemeny/severity_of_the_accident.htm

Is it important that Chernobyl happened in Russia?

Yes.  The accident happened in a communist run nuclear power plant which had outdated equipment and was run with customary Soviet inefficiency and incompetence.  So, such an accident was FAR more likely to have occurred there and at that time than anywhere else now.  BTW, do you find it significant that there have been no major nuclear incidents in France even though the country derives most of its power from nuclear generators?  We have also had no incidents since Three Mile Island almost 30 years ago and, as stated above, Three Mile Island was not a health hazard and was blown out of proportion by the leftist media types and the green crowd who hate nuclear power for irrational reasons.

[BridgeTroll]

Your analogy is not correct.  If anything our 30 year old reactors have proven themselves safe.  I am happy to support another energy source that does not produce greenhouse gasses, provides sufficient power, at a reasonable cost...

Do you have one that fits the bill?  Time is of the essence... we are getting ever warmer.

[BridgeTroll]

Tidal vortex generation does not fit the bill.  It is experimental and does has not been shown to produce electricity on the same scale as a nuke, oil, or gas plant.  It is a small piece of the puzzle similar to solar and wind.

[BridgeTroll]

Experimental in that it is not used on a large scale...  A raw potato will power a small clock but will not light Jacksonville...

The Detroit project is very small scale...

http://www.metromodemedia.com/innovationnews/PortAuthority12.aspx?referrerID=fbce1ca4-4d52-4248-90c8-1d38b1b5f85d

[Lunican]

Transporting and storing the nuclear fuel and waste is not 100% safe.

[BridgeTroll]

Transporting and storing the nuclear fuel and waste is not 100% safe.

I agree with this.  But neither is burning fossil fuels.  Many friends of mine would argue that burning fossil fuels has killed infinitely more people than nuclear energy accidents.

[Jason]

^ Neither is erecting 200' tall wind turbine generators.

And yes Stephen, technically the vortex generation is experimental because it is the first implementation of the technology in a real life situation on a large scale.  Nt saying it won't work or that it isn't fascinating technology though.  I'm very interested to see how well it works.

[BridgeTroll]

I am all for new technologies.  They should be explored and implemented.  Here is some more info...

http://www.vortexhydroenergy.com/library/quads/VIVACE.ProofofConcept.pdf
http://www.vortexhydroenergy.com/library/quads/VIVACE.Concept.pdf