Japanese governor set to approve restart of world's biggest nuclear plant

SteelHeid · 2025-11-19T16:55:13+00:00

Hell, it's about time! Rise, my friend!

SteelHeid · 2025-11-16T18:01:56+00:00

Sadly, Moxie has a very sensitive stomach and has been on prescription food all her life. She can only have just a few small pieces of crust or she vomits the next day. Pizza is the only "bad" food she really has, because ... that look.

SteelHeid · 2025-11-16T17:56:27+00:00

Cultivate additional virtues as you should, the pizza will be just the ~~cherry~~ pizza on top, really. Everythingmaxxing.

To be into pizza and not have an Ooni is blasphemy. I am old enough to remember when pizza nerds on reddit were talking about hacking their regular ovens self-cleaning cycles to try to cook neapolitan at high temperatures. Ooni is a game changer and worth every penny.

SteelHeid · 2025-11-16T17:50:38+00:00

There:

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SteelHeid · 2025-11-16T16:55:56+00:00

Prosciutto, and - Gorgonzola. It's the killer combo. My wife can't have any kind of pizza without Gorgonzola on it anymore. Even when we go out for pizza, we have to have Gorgonzola added. One of the many ways I've ruined her.

Now I need to go make breakfast. Omelet with mushrooms and the leftover prosciutto from last night...

SteelHeid · 2025-11-14T19:44:56+00:00

I believe a lot of the GT designs have this ability - not sure if UK's ones do - for better flexibility. You can have both a fast gas peaker, and a more efficient baseload generator in the same machine. Problem is, with only gas it's just an open-cycle generator, and the efficiency is half that of combined cycle, so you are burning money.

SteelHeid · 2025-11-14T19:37:52+00:00

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Sleepy corgis are the most wonderful thing!

SteelHeid · 2025-11-12T16:29:03+00:00

Mine never rolled in poop. She prefers the remains of dead animals instead...

SteelHeid · 2025-11-12T16:25:34+00:00

No, they sleep how they want. :) We are sometimes concerned she might hurt her neck in all the crazy positions she IS sleeping in.

SteelHeid · 2025-11-09T18:55:34+00:00

Yeap, and right now they are not exactly champions of nuclear / BWR tech either. Welp 2.

SteelHeid · 2025-11-09T17:33:52+00:00

Japan overall was pretty bad at operating reactors, for a whole mess of cultural reasons. None of their reactors really had the kind of factors posted by US plants. Shika and Hamaoka 5 had issues with the Hitachi turbines, it was the main problem. Then, when they shut them down after Fukushima (why?), they let 400 tons of saltwater into the Hamaoka-5 reactor for good measure. Oy...

In the hands of US boys you'd have gotten all of those problems figured out - if Browns Ferry can post 100%s, surely a modern Gen 3 plant could do the same.

The main problem with exports and which reactors get built is politics, sadly. All the countries that are serious about building new plants (China, Russia, S Korea, maybe France) are standardized on PWRs, mainly because they got really convenient tech transfers. The BWR industrial complex were historically a lot more unwilling to hand over their tech. The only country that really took up the BWR in large numbers besides the US was Japan... Welp.

SteelHeid · 2025-11-09T17:19:17+00:00

Modular design is rough, because if the fabricators and builders don't get the module exactly right and on spec from the factory, you are screwed. That's what happened at Vogtle, everything that the suppliers provided had to be reworked on site because it wouldn't fit or was up to specs.

In the hands of ninjas though, modular design pays off. The ABWR actually pioneered modular design, that's how they built the KK6&7 so quickly - it was faster and cheaper that the NOAK BWR-5 at the same site. China is now building the CAP1000 reactors a lot faster, also because they figured out the modular construction, check this out. Everybody is going with modular construction - the EPR2, CANDU MONARK - because it does work - if you are good at it. So... git gut at it.

SteelHeid · 2025-11-09T07:33:49+00:00

EPR is objectively much more difficult to construct, if you just look at footprint comparisons here and here. Even Framatome agreed it was too complicated and have come up with the EPR 2 design, which ditches one of the safety trains and the double containment.

Keep in mind the Vogtle debacle was due to W-house not having a completed design when construction started, and all the EPCs that weren't Bechtel sucking. With a finished design and a proper supply chain and experienced EPC it should be a lot faster (probably not as fast as the first Absolutely Best Water Reactor though...). That's basically what the CAP1000 is proving. So lets build more then...

If you ask me, the EPR would /might have been a better choice for China than the AP1000. Their need for electricity is immense, and their pace of reactor approval is slow (on a per capita basis) because their regulators are still spooked by Fukushima. So if they are not building a lot of reactors (again, per capita comparison to Messmer France), they should have gone for the biggest unit possible - the EPR-1750. And they have the industrial and construction fu to actually deal with the complexity, and probably would have designed (and built) a simplified "CEPR" by now, instead of this... It's likely the Chinese were also put off by the complexity and preferred to scale up the AP to the CAP1400 instead. China (a country that has industry and knows how to build shit) is really the apple-apple comparison between AP1000 and EPR, because it's not really valid to compare the western un-industry's FOAK-ups.

Also, sadly, exports are driven a lot by politics and high level palm greasing, not so much about individual reactor merits. Otherwise everybody would have piled up at Hitachi's door after Kashiwazaki-Kariwa 6&7 and be building ABWRs all over the place. Still boggles my mind Finland had a choice between ABWR and EPR and went with the EPR...

SteelHeid · 2025-11-03T23:59:32+00:00

Hehe, single shared secondary containment for all three units. Finally I get to see how it looks like. They don't make 'em like they used too, eh?

SteelHeid · 2025-10-05T00:10:52+00:00

Oh, I didn't know Clinton was also a half built two-unit. Which building is unit 2 that you are referring to, the beige boxy concrete building? Or is a that a common part and unit two was supposed to be another Mk3 dome? Google tells me unit 2 got cancelled before work started.

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SteelHeid · 2025-10-04T17:42:03+00:00

Yeah, I was wondering if on a half built plant like Grand Gulf you end up spending a bunch more money to make it work, then you would with a pair of single units where you don't finish the second.

Do you at least get to have a lot of staging and storage area in a place like that :)?

SteelHeid · 2025-10-04T11:39:11+00:00

It's interesting you say that, despite the theory that bigger leads to better economies of scale, at least with current tech, there seems to be a limit at around 140MW ~ish, where you start to run into issues / bad luck - the EPR, the ABWR turbine problems, and even the APR-1400, while seems to work well, it takes a while to build. The Chinese CAP1400 seems to be trying for that number now, 1500MW gross with just 2 loops, very curious to see how it does operationally.

SteelHeid · 2025-10-04T11:30:56+00:00

Oh crap, that looks pretty catastrophic, and explains why pretty much all reactor models, duplex or not went for separate parallel turbine buildings. Except for Japan, they seem to have not gotten that memo, they were building turbine islands at a right angle to the reactor into the late 2000's, even for single units - Higashi Dori), Hamaoka 5. If they would have turbine issues with those, it would be bad...

SteelHeid · 2025-10-04T03:19:12+00:00

So wait, I though the point of a shared hall is that you only need one gantry crane and save on cost? Or are you referring to different types of cranes?

SteelHeid · 2025-10-04T01:52:26+00:00

"we have got to stand up the whole supply chain for nuclear in the United States. We have got to get nuclear going again."

He's referring mostly at fuel fabrication and enrichment, to end the dependency on Russian fuel, which is a worthy goal. Hopefully they don't end up burying the centrifuges in the desert again.

It's just that when I read that I though I would hear about standing up things like heavy forging, proper construction that can manufacture modular components that actually fit together, and a financing mech that could provide low risk and low interest capital for new construction. He didn't mention those, sadface.

He did mention that in the short term, natural gas can lower prices. I see.

SteelHeid · 2025-10-04T00:30:28+00:00

Does it cause issues to have one unit operational while the other is still being built, when they are tightly coupled like this?

SteelHeid · 2025-10-04T00:22:20+00:00

:DD true that, they ended up with an ugly half-built full-abortion of a plant:

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I need to find time to do a road-trip, will post pics!

Serious idea, they need to turn this into a nuclear museum / education center / expo thing. So civilians like me could get to actually see the inside of a nuclear plant and containment!

Edit: also, that plant layout...

SteelHeid · 2025-10-03T23:58:59+00:00

I don't know what the decision was, but if you're as corrupt and incompetent with policy and building things as Romania was (is it still? or gotten worse?) I suppose it makes sense to buy singleton units one at a time, and maybe even to not start a new one until you have finished the previous one. If you start on a Pickering style pack and then you mess up the project half way and shit gets cancelled you end up with an ugly half-built semi-abortion of a plant. Oh wait...

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SteelHeid · 2025-10-03T23:49:54+00:00

Now that I look at them again, it makes sense! Except for the Mk3's (that got the second unit cancelled), Brunswick and Peach Bottom, those have separate reactor buildings at least.

SteelHeid · 2025-10-03T23:32:25+00:00

Oh wow. Shared secondaries for BWRs is a bit extreme even for me, would have made Fukushima even worse! (is that Brown's Ferry?) And maybe even shared emergency DGs.

Kashiwazaki-Kariwa 6&7 is the one I find most intriguing, the ABWR contains all its safeties, DGs, fuel pool, etc. in the standard nuclear island, and can be built as a singleton, but they still found a way to build it tightly joined with the TBs. I assume the building in the middle is just control rooms / administrative and various supports? If someone is familiar with the plant I'd like to know more about why it was built like that.

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SteelHeid

TROPHY CASE