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| Posted today: | 1 |
One of my LinkedIn contacts - an IEEE contact in this case - posted some
new data on LinkedIn, from a "Simon Gallagher, Managing Director at UK Networks Services | CEng | FIET | FEI | MBA "
"We have had an update from ENTSO-E on the Spanish complete power
failure. It is limited, but it helps to build the picture. I have
updated our charts with the new information.
Updated timeline:
1. Large generators in the South of Spain started to trip at 12:32:57
CET. Over a period of 20 seconds a total of 2.2GW was lost – this is
well beyond largest infeed so not secured against
2. The frequency looks to have been contained by system reserves until
what looks like a large trip at 12:33:16
3. At this stage, the frequency falls at about 0.5 Hz/s for 4 seconds,
until a rapid collapse starts
4. By 12:33:21 the frequency has crashed to 48 Hz. At this stage the AC interconnectors to France trip
5. Low Frequency Disconnect was activated, but looks to have had no
effect because 3 seconds later the system has collapsed completely
6. At 12:33:24 the system has completely collapsed, 27 seconds after the first trip.
Some key comments from me:
- LFDD/UFLS seems to have had no impact on the fall of frequency, I
suspect RoCoF relays were operating by this stage, showing how unstable
the grid was
- I suspect a lack of rotating mass did mean that there was not enough
time for LFDD to have an impact
- A large divergence of frequency opened up between Spain and France for about 5 seconds. This must have meant a very large phase angle and large power flows
- The previous data that showed the frequency only dropping to 49 Hz
must have been a result of local generators kicking in where the
Gridradar devices were connected to the network (UPDATE this has now
been confirmed by Gridrader, their sensor in Malaga was switched over to
a UPS and then generator at 12:33:20.7, prior to the disconnection of
the Iberian Peninsula and therefore missing some of the frequency drop)"
I haven't cut and pasted all of it. This paragraph struck me as interesting.
"While I think a lack of inertia had an impact here, that does not mean
that the level of solar and wind was to blame - rather it is how it has
been integrated - more grid forming inverters, more rotating mass is
needed, I suspect."
On 2025-05-10 9:46 a.m., Bill Sloman wrote:
One of my LinkedIn contacts - an IEEE contact in this case - posted...
some new data on LinkedIn, from a "Simon Gallagher, Managing Director
at UK Networks Services | CEng | FIET | FEI | MBA "
"We have had an update from ENTSO-E on the Spanish complete power
failure. It is limited, but it helps to build the picture. I have
updated our charts with the new information.
Updated timeline:
1. Large generators in the South of Spain started to trip at 12:32:57
CET. Over a period of 20 seconds a total of 2.2GW was lost – this is
well beyond largest infeed so not secured against
2. The frequency looks to have been contained by system reserves until
what looks like a large trip at 12:33:16
3. At this stage, the frequency falls at about 0.5 Hz/s for 4 seconds,
until a rapid collapse starts
"While I think a lack of inertia had an impact here, that does not
mean that the level of solar and wind was to blame - rather it is how
it has been integrated - more grid forming inverters, more rotating
mass is needed, I suspect."
Perhaps for systems that have large solar or wind arrays they could use
a number of large rotating masses to smooth over these burps? Vacuum and magnetic bearings...
I imagine a series of rotating masses so if any single or several fail (earthquake, etc.) the system wouldn't collapse.
As you say, there is little inertia in these solar systems unlike water
or fuel generated power.
Perhaps for systems that have large solar or wind arrays they could use a number of large rotating masses to smooth over these burps? Vacuum and magnetic
bearings...
I imagine a series of rotating masses so if any single or several fail (earthquake, etc.) the system wouldn't collapse.
As you say, there is little inertia in these solar systems unlike water or fuel
generated power.
One of my LinkedIn contacts - an IEEE contact in this case - posted some
new data on LinkedIn, from a "Simon Gallagher, Managing Director at UK >Networks Services | CEng | FIET | FEI | MBA "
"We have had an update from ENTSO-E on the Spanish complete power
failure. It is limited, but it helps to build the picture. I have
updated our charts with the new information.
Updated timeline:
1. Large generators in the South of Spain started to trip at 12:32:57
CET. Over a period of 20 seconds a total of 2.2GW was lost û this is
well beyond largest infeed so not secured against
2. The frequency looks to have been contained by system reserves until
what looks like a large trip at 12:33:16
3. At this stage, the frequency falls at about 0.5 Hz/s for 4 seconds,
until a rapid collapse starts
4. By 12:33:21 the frequency has crashed to 48 Hz. At this stage the AC >interconnectors to France trip
5. Low Frequency Disconnect was activated, but looks to have had no
effect because 3 seconds later the system has collapsed completely
6. At 12:33:24 the system has completely collapsed, 27 seconds after the >first trip.
Some key comments from me:
- LFDD/UFLS seems to have had no impact on the fall of frequency, I
suspect RoCoF relays were operating by this stage, showing how unstable
the grid was
- I suspect a lack of rotating mass did mean that there was not enough
time for LFDD to have an impact
- A large divergence of frequency opened up between Spain and France for >about 5 seconds. This must have meant a very large phase angle and large >power flows
- The previous data that showed the frequency only dropping to 49 Hz
must have been a result of local generators kicking in where the
Gridradar devices were connected to the network (UPDATE this has now
been confirmed by Gridrader, their sensor in Malaga was switched over to
a UPS and then generator at 12:33:20.7, prior to the disconnection of
the Iberian Peninsula and therefore missing some of the frequency drop)"
I haven't cut and pasted all of it. This paragraph struck me as interesting.
"While I think a lack of inertia had an impact here, that does not mean
that the level of solar and wind was to blame - rather it is how it has
been integrated - more grid forming inverters, more rotating mass is
needed, I suspect."
On 5/10/2025 9:58 AM, John Robertson wrote:
Perhaps for systems that have large solar or wind arrays they could use a
number of large rotating masses to smooth over these burps? Vacuum and magnetic
bearings...
I imagine a series of rotating masses so if any single or several fail
(earthquake, etc.) the system wouldn't collapse.
As you say, there is little inertia in these solar systems unlike water or fuel
generated power.
The sun is *still* shining. Why can't *it* supply the power
to all of the distributed inverters around the country at the
appropriate phase angle? You only need storage if your
actual source of power disappears, relative to the load.
I.e., turn excess generation capacity to "braking mass"
As solar and wind get to be dominant, micromanagement of power sources
and loads will be necessary to ensure uptime.
On Sat, 10 May 2025 11:22:20 -0700, Don Y
<blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote:
On 5/10/2025 9:58 AM, John Robertson wrote:
Perhaps for systems that have large solar or wind arrays they could use a >>> number of large rotating masses to smooth over these burps? Vacuum and magnetic
bearings...
I imagine a series of rotating masses so if any single or several fail
(earthquake, etc.) the system wouldn't collapse.
As you say, there is little inertia in these solar systems unlike water or fuel
generated power.
The sun is *still* shining. Why can't *it* supply the power
to all of the distributed inverters around the country at the
appropriate phase angle? You only need storage if your
actual source of power disappears, relative to the load.
I.e., turn excess generation capacity to "braking mass"
If every solar inverter was networked and controlled in
voltage/current/phase angle, by some intelligent system controller,
one might not be so dependant on rotating mass.
As solar and wind get to be dominant, micromanagement of power sources
and loads will be necessary to ensure uptime.
(That's a big part of the green agenda: control everything.)
On 5/10/2025 9:58 AM, John Robertson wrote:
Perhaps for systems that have large solar or wind arrays they could
use a number of large rotating masses to smooth over these burps?
Vacuum and magnetic bearings...
I imagine a series of rotating masses so if any single or several fail
(earthquake, etc.) the system wouldn't collapse.
As you say, there is little inertia in these solar systems unlike
water or fuel generated power.
The sun is *still* shining. Why can't *it* supply the power
to all of the distributed inverters around the country at the
appropriate phase angle? You only need storage if your
actual source of power disappears, relative to the load.
I.e., turn excess generation capacity to "braking mass"
This is largely unnecessary - if the control signal that was being sent out by
the central controller to micromanage each power source was derived from a function of the frequency, phase, voltage etc., then rather than trying to distribute the result of this calculation to millions of devices with low latency, it is better to distribute just the formula (once every few years or as necessary), and run it on a microcontroller in the inverters several times every mains cycle. They already have more than enough processing power.
I believe that there are some new regulatuions in at least one Austrlian state,
driven by the (fossil-fuel-stoked) fear of "too much solar destabilising the grid", which require new home solar inverters to stop exporting power, unless they receive continuous "permission to export" signals from our overlords, the
network operators. In other words, rather than exporting power in the case of communications failure, it goes into the state of "export no power" in case of
communications failure, because otherwise people might unplug their internet to
export more scary solar power if exporting power was allowed when the internet
connection fails. This is a fairly new requirement, so not many compliant devices are installed now, but once a few gigawatts of these inverters are running, it will be interesting to see what happens when there is a major internet outage on a hot summer day, and all of those gigawatts suddenly go away. Hopefully they thought of that but I doubt it.
The rapid control algorithms should be distributed, and the only low-latency communication signals they should rely upon are frequency and voltage.
On 11/05/2025 5:04 am, john larkin wrote:
As solar and wind get to be dominant, micromanagement of power sources
and loads will be necessary to ensure uptime.
This is largely unnecessary - if the control signal that was being sent
out by the central controller to micromanage each power source was
derived from a function of the frequency, phase, voltage etc., then
rather than trying to distribute the result of this calculation to
millions of devices with low latency, it is better to distribute just
the formula (once every few years or as necessary), and run it on a microcontroller in the inverters several times every mains cycle. They already have more than enough processing power.
I believe that there are some new regulations in at least one Australian state, driven by the (fossil-fuel-stoked) fear of "too much solar destabilising the grid", which require new home solar inverters to stop exporting power, unless they receive continuous "permission to export" signals from our overlords, the network operators.
In other words,
rather than exporting power in the case of communications failure, it
goes into the state of "export no power" in case of communications
failure, because otherwise people might unplug their internet to export
more scary solar power if exporting power was allowed when the internet connection fails. This is a fairly new requirement, so not many
compliant devices are installed now, but once a few gigawatts of these inverters are running, it will be interesting to see what happens when
there is a major internet outage on a hot summer day, and all of those gigawatts suddenly go away. Hopefully they thought of that but I doubt it.
The rapid control algorithms should be distributed, and the only
low-latency communication signals they should rely upon are frequency
and voltage.
On Sun, 11 May 2025 02:46:34 +1000, Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
wrote:
One of my LinkedIn contacts - an IEEE contact in this case - posted some
new data on LinkedIn, from a "Simon Gallagher, Managing Director at UK
Networks Services | CEng | FIET | FEI | MBA "
"We have had an update from ENTSO-E on the Spanish complete power
failure. It is limited, but it helps to build the picture. I have
updated our charts with the new information.
Updated timeline:
1. Large generators in the South of Spain started to trip at 12:32:57
CET. Over a period of 20 seconds a total of 2.2GW was lost – this is
well beyond largest infeed so not secured against
2. The frequency looks to have been contained by system reserves until
what looks like a large trip at 12:33:16
3. At this stage, the frequency falls at about 0.5 Hz/s for 4 seconds,
until a rapid collapse starts
4. By 12:33:21 the frequency has crashed to 48 Hz. At this stage the AC
interconnectors to France trip
5. Low Frequency Disconnect was activated, but looks to have had no
effect because 3 seconds later the system has collapsed completely
6. At 12:33:24 the system has completely collapsed, 27 seconds after the
first trip.
Some key comments from me:
- LFDD/UFLS seems to have had no impact on the fall of frequency, I
suspect RoCoF relays were operating by this stage, showing how unstable
the grid was
- I suspect a lack of rotating mass did mean that there was not enough
time for LFDD to have an impact
- A large divergence of frequency opened up between Spain and France for
about 5 seconds. This must have meant a very large phase angle and large
power flows
- The previous data that showed the frequency only dropping to 49 Hz
must have been a result of local generators kicking in where the
Gridradar devices were connected to the network (UPDATE this has now
been confirmed by Gridrader, their sensor in Malaga was switched over to
a UPS and then generator at 12:33:20.7, prior to the disconnection of
the Iberian Peninsula and therefore missing some of the frequency drop)"
I haven't cut and pasted all of it. This paragraph struck me as interesting. >>
"While I think a lack of inertia had an impact here, that does not mean
that the level of solar and wind was to blame - rather it is how it has
been integrated - more grid forming inverters, more rotating mass is
needed, I suspect."
Any hints at the precipating cause?
Maybe some modest local event triggered a fundamentally unstable
system.
I believe that there are some new regulations in at least one
Australian state, driven by the (fossil-fuel-stoked) fear of "too much
solar destabilising the grid", which require new home solar inverters
to stop exporting power, unless they receive continuous "permission to
export" signals from our overlords, the network operators.
It is cruder than that. They've just stopped paying any realistic kind
of feed-in tariff to people with roof-top solar, and as a result 40% of
new roof-top solar in Australia is now being installed with Tesla
Powerwall or similar battery. It more than doubles the cost of the installation, but reduces the pay-back time for the whole installation
to about seven years, and save you negotiating with your power supplier
about their derisory feed-in tariffs.
If your solar inverter loses internet connectivity, the excess energy you export to the grid will automatically be reduced. This ensures it can be safely
managed."
( from here: https://www.energy.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/701911/Emergency-backstop-customer-factsheet-June-2024.pdf )
So if all of the inverters lose internet, which is entirely likely at some point bearing in mind our telcos, we can expect a blackout too, all so that "it
can be safely managed." The blackout will no doubt help the telcos to get back
online promptly. Fun times ahead.
On 5/10/2025 7:22 PM, Chris Jones wrote:
This is largely unnecessary - if the control signal that was being
sent out by the central controller to micromanage each power source
was derived from a function of the frequency, phase, voltage etc.,
then rather than trying to distribute the result of this calculation
to millions of devices with low latency, it is better to distribute
just the formula (once every few years or as necessary), and run it on
a microcontroller in the inverters several times every mains cycle.
They already have more than enough processing power.
I think any reliance on a "central controller" is inherently flawed.
Model the network. Then, develop a distributed algorithm where
every cogenerator understands its role in generation -- not just that
of dumping power into the network but, also, of constraining the
*overall* network's response.
I.e., instead of thinking that the cogenerator needs to disconnect
in an anomalous situation, teach it to rectify that situation
within the constraints taht the network model imposes.
On 11/05/2025 4:18 pm, Bill Sloman wrote:
I believe that there are some new regulations in at least one
Australian state, driven by the (fossil-fuel-stoked) fear of "too much
solar destabilising the grid", which require new home solar inverters
to stop exporting power, unless they receive continuous "permission to
export" signals from our overlords, the network operators.
It is cruder than that. They've just stopped paying any realistic kind
of feed-in tariff to people with roof-top solar, and as a result 40% of
new roof-top solar in Australia is now being installed with Tesla
Powerwall or similar battery. It more than doubles the cost of the
installation, but reduces the pay-back time for the whole installation
to about seven years, and save you negotiating with your power supplier
about their derisory feed-in tariffs.
No, they say:
"What happens if my solar inverter loses internet connectivity?
If your solar inverter loses internet connectivity, the excess energy
you export to the grid will automatically be reduced. This ensures it
can be safely managed."
( from here: >https://www.energy.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/701911/Emergency-backstop-customer-factsheet-June-2024.pdf
)
So if all of the inverters lose internet, which is entirely likely at
some point bearing in mind our telcos, we can expect a blackout too, all
so that "it can be safely managed." The blackout will no doubt help the >telcos to get back online promptly. Fun times ahead.
On Sun, 11 May 2025 20:38:51 +1000, Chris Jones
<lugnut808@spam.yahoo.com> wrote:
On 11/05/2025 4:18 pm, Bill Sloman wrote:
I believe that there are some new regulations in at least one
Australian state, driven by the (fossil-fuel-stoked) fear of "too much >>>> solar destabilising the grid", which require new home solar inverters
to stop exporting power, unless they receive continuous "permission to >>>> export" signals from our overlords, the network operators.
It is cruder than that. They've just stopped paying any realistic kind
of feed-in tariff to people with roof-top solar, and as a result 40% of
new roof-top solar in Australia is now being installed with Tesla
Powerwall or similar battery. It more than doubles the cost of the
installation, but reduces the pay-back time for the whole installation
to about seven years, and save you negotiating with your power supplier
about their derisory feed-in tariffs.
No, they say:
"What happens if my solar inverter loses internet connectivity?
If your solar inverter loses internet connectivity, the excess energy
you export to the grid will automatically be reduced. This ensures it
can be safely managed."
( from here:
https://www.energy.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/701911/Emergency-backstop-customer-factsheet-June-2024.pdf
)
So if all of the inverters lose internet, which is entirely likely at
some point bearing in mind our telcos, we can expect a blackout too, all
so that "it can be safely managed." The blackout will no doubt help the
telcos to get back online promptly. Fun times ahead.
Electric power used to be reliable and affordable.
On 11/05/2025 4:18 pm, Bill Sloman wrote:
I believe that there are some new regulations in at least one
Australian state, driven by the (fossil-fuel-stoked) fear of "too
much solar destabilising the grid", which require new home solar
inverters to stop exporting power, unless they receive continuous
"permission to export" signals from our overlords, the network
operators.
It is cruder than that. They've just stopped paying any realistic kind
of feed-in tariff to people with roof-top solar, and as a result 40%
of new roof-top solar in Australia is now being installed with Tesla
Powerwall or similar battery. It more than doubles the cost of the
installation, but reduces the pay-back time for the whole installation
to about seven years, and save you negotiating with your power
supplier about their derisory feed-in tariffs.
No, they say:
"What happens if my solar inverter loses internet connectivity?
If your solar inverter loses internet connectivity, the excess energy
you export to the grid will automatically be reduced. This ensures it
can be safely managed."
( from here: https://www.energy.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/701911/Emergency-backstop-customer-factsheet-June-2024.pdf )
So if all of the inverters lose internet, which is entirely likely at
some point bearing in mind our telcos, we can expect a blackout too, all
so that "it can be safely managed." The blackout will no doubt help the telcos to get back online promptly. Fun times ahead.
On 2025-05-11 08:18, Don Y wrote:
On 5/10/2025 7:22 PM, Chris Jones wrote:
This is largely unnecessary - if the control signal that was being sent out >>> by the central controller to micromanage each power source was derived from >>> a function of the frequency, phase, voltage etc., then rather than trying to
distribute the result of this calculation to millions of devices with low >>> latency, it is better to distribute just the formula (once every few years >>> or as necessary), and run it on a microcontroller in the inverters several >>> times every mains cycle. They already have more than enough processing power.
I think any reliance on a "central controller" is inherently flawed.
Model the network. Then, develop a distributed algorithm where
every cogenerator understands its role in generation -- not just that
of dumping power into the network but, also, of constraining the
*overall* network's response.
I.e., instead of thinking that the cogenerator needs to disconnect
in an anomalous situation, teach it to rectify that situation
within the constraints taht the network model imposes.
I see a problem if the network is hacked. Same as routers are hacked today.
... (distributed algorithms)
On 11/05/2025 8:38 pm, Chris Jones wrote:
On 11/05/2025 4:18 pm, Bill Sloman wrote:
I believe that there are some new regulations in at least one
Australian state, driven by the (fossil-fuel-stoked) fear of "too
much solar destabilising the grid", which require new home solar
inverters to stop exporting power, unless they receive continuous
"permission to export" signals from our overlords, the network
operators.
It is cruder than that. They've just stopped paying any realistic
kind of feed-in tariff to people with roof-top solar, and as a result
40% of new roof-top solar in Australia is now being installed with
Tesla Powerwall or similar battery. It more than doubles the cost of
the installation, but reduces the pay-back time for the whole
installation to about seven years, and save you negotiating with your
power supplier about their derisory feed-in tariffs.
No, they say:
"What happens if my solar inverter loses internet connectivity?
If your solar inverter loses internet connectivity, the excess energy
you export to the grid will automatically be reduced. This ensures it
can be safely managed."
( from here:
https://www.energy.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/701911/Emergency-backstop-customer-factsheet-June-2024.pdf )
What they say isn't all that interesting. What they do is discourage
people from trying to sell their excess power back to the grid.
So if all of the inverters lose internet, which is entirely likely at
some point bearing in mind our telcos, we can expect a blackout too,
all so that "it can be safely managed." The blackout will no doubt
help the telcos to get back online promptly. Fun times ahead.
I haven't lost my internet recently - the last time it happened it was
not due to anything the telcos had done - the mains supply to my
apartment block had to be cut off for hours while they replaced the
local distribution transformer, which sits just outside our front gate,
and it was entirely local. A few years back it dropped out for couple of hours due a problem with my telco, but it only affected people served
by that telco, and was confined to a single suburb.
The chance of all the inverters losing internet connectivity at once
doesn't seem to be all that high.
On 12/05/2025 1:21 am, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 11/05/2025 8:38 pm, Chris Jones wrote:
On 11/05/2025 4:18 pm, Bill Sloman wrote:
I believe that there are some new regulations in at least one
Australian state, driven by the (fossil-fuel-stoked) fear of "too
much solar destabilising the grid", which require new home solar
inverters to stop exporting power, unless they receive continuous
"permission to export" signals from our overlords, the network
operators.
It is cruder than that. They've just stopped paying any realistic
kind of feed-in tariff to people with roof-top solar, and as a
result 40% of new roof-top solar in Australia is now being installed
with Tesla Powerwall or similar battery. It more than doubles the
cost of the installation, but reduces the pay-back time for the
whole installation to about seven years, and save you negotiating
with your power supplier about their derisory feed-in tariffs.
No, they say:
"What happens if my solar inverter loses internet connectivity?
If your solar inverter loses internet connectivity, the excess energy
you export to the grid will automatically be reduced. This ensures it
can be safely managed."
( from here:
https://www.energy.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/701911/Emergency-backstop-customer-factsheet-June-2024.pdf )
What they say isn't all that interesting. What they do is discourage
people from trying to sell their excess power back to the grid.
So if all of the inverters lose internet, which is entirely likely at
some point bearing in mind our telcos, we can expect a blackout too,
all so that "it can be safely managed." The blackout will no doubt
help the telcos to get back online promptly. Fun times ahead.
I haven't lost my internet recently - the last time it happened it was
not due to anything the telcos had done - the mains supply to my
apartment block had to be cut off for hours while they replaced the
local distribution transformer, which sits just outside our front
gate, and it was entirely local. A few years back it dropped out for
couple of hours due a problem with my telco, but it only affected
people served by that telco, and was confined to a single suburb.
The chance of all the inverters losing internet connectivity at once
doesn't seem to be all that high.
I think the chance of at least one major telco going offline in the next decade is pretty high. It's happened to mobile networks and payment
systems several times.
For problems to occur, it isn't necessary that the inverters all lose internet - the other end of the connection could also fail. If the other
end of the connection goes to just a few datacentres, and if for some
reason they get misconfigured, or just encounter a DNS problem, it might cause an unnecessary blackout.
There are enough unavoidable causes of power failures, we needn't create
new ones through legislated fragility in otherwise resilient equipment.
They could at least build in a long random time delay between loss of internet connection and the inverter shutting down (so the population of inverters will gradually shut down over a 5+ hour period).
On Sat, 10 May 2025 11:22:20 -0700, Don Y
<blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote:
On 5/10/2025 9:58 AM, John Robertson wrote:
Perhaps for systems that have large solar or wind arrays they could use a >> number of large rotating masses to smooth over these burps? Vacuum and magnetic
bearings...
I imagine a series of rotating masses so if any single or several fail
(earthquake, etc.) the system wouldn't collapse.
As you say, there is little inertia in these solar systems unlike water or fuel
generated power.
The sun is *still* shining. Why can't *it* supply the power
to all of the distributed inverters around the country at the
appropriate phase angle? You only need storage if your
actual source of power disappears, relative to the load.
I.e., turn excess generation capacity to "braking mass"
If every solar inverter was networked and controlled in
voltage/current/phase angle, by some intelligent system controller,
one might not be so dependant on rotating mass.
As solar and wind get to be dominant, micromanagement of power sources
and loads will be necessary to ensure uptime.
On 2025-05-10 9:46 a.m., Bill Sloman wrote:
One of my LinkedIn contacts - an IEEE contact in this case - posted...
some new data on LinkedIn, from a "Simon Gallagher, Managing Director
at UK Networks Services | CEng | FIET | FEI | MBA "
"We have had an update from ENTSO-E on the Spanish complete power
failure. It is limited, but it helps to build the picture. I have
updated our charts with the new information.
Updated timeline:
1. Large generators in the South of Spain started to trip at 12:32:57
CET. Over a period of 20 seconds a total of 2.2GW was lost – this is
well beyond largest infeed so not secured against
2. The frequency looks to have been contained by system reserves until
what looks like a large trip at 12:33:16
3. At this stage, the frequency falls at about 0.5 Hz/s for 4 seconds,
until a rapid collapse starts
"While I think a lack of inertia had an impact here, that does not
mean that the level of solar and wind was to blame - rather it is how
it has been integrated - more grid forming inverters, more rotating
mass is needed, I suspect."
Perhaps for systems that have large solar or wind arrays they could use
a number of large rotating masses to smooth over these burps? Vacuum and magnetic bearings...
I imagine a series of rotating masses so if any single or several fail (earthquake, etc.) the system wouldn't collapse.
As you say, there is little inertia in these solar systems unlike water
or fuel generated power.
On 10/05/2025 17:58, John Robertson wrote:
On 2025-05-10 9:46 a.m., Bill Sloman wrote:
One of my LinkedIn contacts - an IEEE contact in this case - posted...
some new data on LinkedIn, from a "Simon Gallagher, Managing Director
at UK Networks Services | CEng | FIET | FEI | MBA "
"We have had an update from ENTSO-E on the Spanish complete power
failure. It is limited, but it helps to build the picture. I have
updated our charts with the new information.
Updated timeline:
1. Large generators in the South of Spain started to trip at 12:32:57
CET. Over a period of 20 seconds a total of 2.2GW was lost – this is
well beyond largest infeed so not secured against
2. The frequency looks to have been contained by system reserves
until what looks like a large trip at 12:33:16
3. At this stage, the frequency falls at about 0.5 Hz/s for 4
seconds, until a rapid collapse starts
That is not unlike the failure in the UK Aug 2019 where an apparently inconsequential minor power station dropping off due to a lightning
strike started a cascade failure that spread until they shed enough load
to get a balance again. Wide area power cut resulted.
Green energy systems often react badly to frequency deviations. Whilst
there is no reason why this should be the case it is frequently shown to happen. Some BESS systems *are* configured to maintain grid frequency
but by no means all. They have the advantage of fast response but for
that to be true they must not also be already running at full capacity.
Problem in the UK is that daytime load is such that everything that can
is running close to the limits during the daytime with an evening peak
that stresses the N-S interconnectors even in summer. I noticed last
week one evening at peaktime that the supergrid power cables were
visibly sagging as a result of the current flowing through them. I'd
never really noticed that before but I expect it happens all weekdays.
"While I think a lack of inertia had an impact here, that does not
mean that the level of solar and wind was to blame - rather it is how
it has been integrated - more grid forming inverters, more rotating
mass is needed, I suspect."
Perhaps for systems that have large solar or wind arrays they could
use a number of large rotating masses to smooth over these burps?
Vacuum and magnetic bearings...
They are intrinsically dangerous if they store enough energy to really matter. We had such a steel reinforced lead flywheel and motor generator configuration on big radio telescopes storing just enough energy to stow
them in the event of a storm taking out 3 phase mains power. The dishes
can only reliably survive storms if they are pointed at the zenith. (sometimes not even then)
Working out how far it would travel if it ever broke free from its very substantial bearings was used as an exam question. It was installed
pointing so that it would not hit any property if it did.
I imagine a series of rotating masses so if any single or several fail
(earthquake, etc.) the system wouldn't collapse.
Magnetic levitation vacuum pumps were all the rage when I was in Japan.
That was until one day the entire world moved an inch to the left. Every
last one of them crashed with shattered titanium blades everywhere and
no vacuum/moist summer air in the chambers. Hell of a mess. After that
we went back to conventional bearings in all earthquake countries.
As you say, there is little inertia in these solar systems unlike
water or fuel generated power.
The advantage of gas turbines or diesel generators is that when the
rotor starts to slow it automatically increases the gas supply to try
and maintain frequency. The stored energy in the rotor is significant
but it it have the ability to output a bit extra or a bit less in
response to changing load that makes them so handy for stability.
The other alternative is to have loads of last resort that can be shed
at any time to compensate for loss of generating capacity, but losing
2.2GW in a single shot over 5s would severely test most networks.
On 11/05/2025 5:04 am, john larkin wrote:
As solar and wind get to be dominant, micromanagement of power sources
and loads will be necessary to ensure uptime.
This is largely unnecessary - if the control signal that was being sent
out by the central controller to micromanage each power source was
derived from a function of the frequency, phase, voltage etc., then
rather than trying to distribute the result of this calculation to
millions of devices with low latency, it is better to distribute just
the formula (once every few years or as necessary), and run it on a >microcontroller in the inverters several times every mains cycle. They >already have more than enough processing power.
I believe that there are some new regulatuions in at least one Austrlian >state, driven by the (fossil-fuel-stoked) fear of "too much solar >destabilising the grid", which require new home solar inverters to stop >exporting power, unless they receive continuous "permission to export" >signals from our overlords, the network operators. In other words,
rather than exporting power in the case of communications failure, it
goes into the state of "export no power" in case of communications
failure, because otherwise people might unplug their internet to export
more scary solar power if exporting power was allowed when the internet >connection fails. This is a fairly new requirement, so not many
compliant devices are installed now, but once a few gigawatts of these >inverters are running, it will be interesting to see what happens when
there is a major internet outage on a hot summer day, and all of those >gigawatts suddenly go away. Hopefully they thought of that but I doubt it.
The rapid control algorithms should be distributed, and the only
low-latency communication signals they should rely upon are frequency
and voltage.
On Sun, 11 May 2025 02:46:34 +1000, Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
wrote:
One of my LinkedIn contacts - an IEEE contact in this case - posted some >>new data on LinkedIn, from a "Simon Gallagher, Managing Director at UK >>Networks Services | CEng | FIET | FEI | MBA "
"We have had an update from ENTSO-E on the Spanish complete power
failure. It is limited, but it helps to build the picture. I have
updated our charts with the new information.
Updated timeline:
1. Large generators in the South of Spain started to trip at 12:32:57
CET. Over a period of 20 seconds a total of 2.2GW was lost û this is
well beyond largest infeed so not secured against
2. The frequency looks to have been contained by system reserves until
what looks like a large trip at 12:33:16
3. At this stage, the frequency falls at about 0.5 Hz/s for 4 seconds, >>until a rapid collapse starts
4. By 12:33:21 the frequency has crashed to 48 Hz. At this stage the AC >>interconnectors to France trip
5. Low Frequency Disconnect was activated, but looks to have had no
effect because 3 seconds later the system has collapsed completely
6. At 12:33:24 the system has completely collapsed, 27 seconds after the >>first trip.
Some key comments from me:
- LFDD/UFLS seems to have had no impact on the fall of frequency, I
suspect RoCoF relays were operating by this stage, showing how unstable
the grid was
- I suspect a lack of rotating mass did mean that there was not enough
time for LFDD to have an impact
- A large divergence of frequency opened up between Spain and France for >>about 5 seconds. This must have meant a very large phase angle and large >>power flows
- The previous data that showed the frequency only dropping to 49 Hz
must have been a result of local generators kicking in where the
Gridradar devices were connected to the network (UPDATE this has now
been confirmed by Gridrader, their sensor in Malaga was switched over to
a UPS and then generator at 12:33:20.7, prior to the disconnection of
the Iberian Peninsula and therefore missing some of the frequency drop)"
I haven't cut and pasted all of it. This paragraph struck me as interesting. >>
"While I think a lack of inertia had an impact here, that does not mean >>that the level of solar and wind was to blame - rather it is how it has >>been integrated - more grid forming inverters, more rotating mass is >>needed, I suspect."
Any hints at the precipating cause?
Maybe some modest local event triggered a fundamentally unstable
system.
A naive question: why do we need to get these signals from the grid at all? Why can't we broadcast a synchronisation message on something like LW radio that is picked up by every generator large or small? Then the network operator can monitor what's happening and adjust the signal as appropriate.
No need for internet connectivity means no problems with network delays,
only the speed of RF from one end of the country to the other. You would of
course have multiple transmitter sites - they would cost in terms of power
to run, but compared with grid power it's tiny. (before anyone says you cannae get the transmitters any more, yes you can - Nautel will sell you
a new one)
Or is the problem that we actually do need slight desynchronisation - some parts of the network become overloaded and need to 'slow down' compared with other parts? (and they do that by phase differences rather than voltage
sag) In which case the frequency differences follow the network topology
and the power flows.
Theo
On 5/12/2025 7:31 AM, Theo wrote:
A naive question: why do we need to get these signals from the grid at all? >> Why can't we broadcast a synchronisation message on something like LW radio >> that is picked up by every generator large or small? Then the network
operator can monitor what's happening and adjust the signal as appropriate.
How have we managed to distribute electrical power over huge swaths of land from multiple independent operators WITHOUT such a mechanism?
No need for internet connectivity means no problems with network delays,
only the speed of RF from one end of the country to the other. You would of
The actual path -- and the "terrain" over which it travels -- will determine the propagation delay.
How does the system react to a (inevitable) loss of that control signal?
Inertia implies memory. Memory can be implemented in silicon -- with whatever dynamic characteristics the modelers choose.
But, if you treat new cogeneration facilities as "optional bolt-on products", you likely won't model the NEW system with them in place. Rather, you will design them to disconnect from the OLD (existing) system if they "feel"
they can't cope with their current observations of that system's behavior.
course have multiple transmitter sites - they would cost in terms of power >> to run, but compared with grid power it's tiny. (before anyone says you
cannae get the transmitters any more, yes you can - Nautel will sell you
a new one)
Or is the problem that we actually do need slight desynchronisation - some >> parts of the network become overloaded and need to 'slow down' compared with >> other parts? (and they do that by phase differences rather than voltage
sag) In which case the frequency differences follow the network topology
and the power flows.
Theo
Yes, in essence voltage and frequency are all that must to be monitored. I think the unfortunate thing is to date most co-generation has been designed to follow the grid but now their share is greater their algorithms need to
be updated to more closely participate in contributing to the grid rather than passively following?
On 5/12/2025 7:31 AM, Theo wrote:
A naive question: why do we need to get these signals from the grid at
all?
Why can't we broadcast a synchronisation message on something like LW
radio
that is picked up by every generator large or small? Then the network
operator can monitor what's happening and adjust the signal as
appropriate.
How have we managed to distribute electrical power over huge swaths of land from multiple independent operators WITHOUT such a mechanism?
On 10/05/2025 17:58, John Robertson wrote:
On 2025-05-10 9:46 a.m., Bill Sloman wrote:
Perhaps for systems that have large solar or wind arrays they could
use a number of large rotating masses to smooth over these burps?
Vacuum and magnetic bearings...
They are intrinsically dangerous if they store enough energy to really matter. We had such a steel reinforced lead flywheel and motor generator configuration on big radio telescopes storing just enough energy to stow
them in the event of a storm taking out 3 phase mains power. The dishes
can only reliably survive storms if they are pointed at the zenith. (sometimes not even then)
Working out how far it would travel if it ever broke free from its very substantial bearings was used as an exam question. It was installed
pointing so that it would not hit any property if it did.
On Sun, 11 May 2025 12:22:11 +1000, Chris Jones
<lugnut808@spam.yahoo.com> wrote:
On 11/05/2025 5:04 am, john larkin wrote:
As solar and wind get to be dominant, micromanagement of power sources
and loads will be necessary to ensure uptime.
This is largely unnecessary - if the control signal that was being sent
out by the central controller to micromanage each power source was
derived from a function of the frequency, phase, voltage etc., then
rather than trying to distribute the result of this calculation to
millions of devices with low latency, it is better to distribute just
the formula (once every few years or as necessary), and run it on a
microcontroller in the inverters several times every mains cycle. They
already have more than enough processing power.
A central (international!) controller would want to know what every contributor was pushing into the grid, and probably see wind flow and
clouds moving around. One local transmission line could fail and take
down half of Europe. Again.
The rapid control algorithms should be distributed, and the only
low-latency communication signals they should rely upon are frequency
and voltage.
A solar panel with an algorithm can't now about potential system
overloads. Solar and wind will have to be shed sometimes to protect
the entire system. Loads shed too. Renewable-heavy grids are fragile.
On 5/12/2025 7:31 AM, Theo wrote:
A naive question: why do we need to get these signals from the grid at all? >> Why can't we broadcast a synchronisation message on something like LW radio >> that is picked up by every generator large or small? Then the network
operator can monitor what's happening and adjust the signal as appropriate.
How have we managed to distribute electrical power over huge swaths of land >from multiple independent operators WITHOUT such a mechanism?
On 2025-05-12 16:36, Martin Brown wrote:
On 10/05/2025 17:58, John Robertson wrote:
On 2025-05-10 9:46 a.m., Bill Sloman wrote:
...
Perhaps for systems that have large solar or wind arrays they could
use a number of large rotating masses to smooth over these burps?
Vacuum and magnetic bearings...
They are intrinsically dangerous if they store enough energy to really
matter. We had such a steel reinforced lead flywheel and motor generator
configuration on big radio telescopes storing just enough energy to stow
them in the event of a storm taking out 3 phase mains power. The dishes
can only reliably survive storms if they are pointed at the zenith.
(sometimes not even then)
Working out how far it would travel if it ever broke free from its very
substantial bearings was used as an exam question. It was installed
pointing so that it would not hit any property if it did.
It would affect earth rotation, too. Some huge water reservoir in China
is affecting it already.
On 5/12/2025 1:27 PM, piglet wrote:
Yes, in essence voltage and frequency are all that must to be monitored. I >> think the unfortunate thing is to date most co-generation has been designed >> to follow the grid but now their share is greater their algorithms need to >> be updated to more closely participate in contributing to the grid rather
than passively following?
Exactly. As I said:
"But, if you treat new cogeneration facilities as "optional bolt-on
products", you likely won't model the NEW system with them in place.
Rather, you will design them to disconnect from the OLD (existing)
system if they "feel" they can't cope with their current observations
of that system's behavior."
The networks characteristics /with cogeneration in place/ have to be >remodeled and the dynamics of how those cogenerators are expected
to behave has to be (iteratively) refactored into that model.
If you have lots of *tiny*, independent cogeneration facilities (e.g., >rooftop solar), all the moreso as each of them can act without
involving others.
What if my system is TAKEN off-line (because I'm having the roof repaired)? >That (those!) abrupt removal of capacity has to be anticipated instead
of some MW plant whose absence can be planned. Likewise for new capacity >brought on-line haphazardly (yet another rooftop system connected, today!)
On Mon, 12 May 2025 23:33:30 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-12 16:36, Martin Brown wrote:
On 10/05/2025 17:58, John Robertson wrote:
On 2025-05-10 9:46 a.m., Bill Sloman wrote:
...
Perhaps for systems that have large solar or wind arrays they could
use a number of large rotating masses to smooth over these burps?
Vacuum and magnetic bearings...
They are intrinsically dangerous if they store enough energy to really
matter. We had such a steel reinforced lead flywheel and motor generator >>> configuration on big radio telescopes storing just enough energy to stow >>> them in the event of a storm taking out 3 phase mains power. The dishes
can only reliably survive storms if they are pointed at the zenith.
(sometimes not even then)
Working out how far it would travel if it ever broke free from its very
substantial bearings was used as an exam question. It was installed
pointing so that it would not hit any property if it did.
It would affect earth rotation, too. Some huge water reservoir in China
is affecting it already.
Three Gorges Dam?
.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam>
On Sun, 11 May 2025 12:22:11 +1000, Chris Jones
<lugnut808@spam.yahoo.com> wrote:
On 11/05/2025 5:04 am, john larkin wrote:
As solar and wind get to be dominant, micromanagement of power sources
and loads will be necessary to ensure uptime.
This is largely unnecessary - if the control signal that was being sent
out by the central controller to micromanage each power source was
derived from a function of the frequency, phase, voltage etc., then
rather than trying to distribute the result of this calculation to
millions of devices with low latency, it is better to distribute just
the formula (once every few years or as necessary), and run it on a
microcontroller in the inverters several times every mains cycle. They
already have more than enough processing power.
A central (international!) controller would want to know what every contributor was pushing into the grid, and probably see wind flow and
clouds moving around. One local transmission line could fail and take
down half of Europe. Again.
I believe that there are some new regulatuions in at least one Australian
state, driven by the (fossil-fuel-stoked) fear of "too much solar
destabilising the grid", which require new home solar inverters to stop
exporting power, unless they receive continuous "permission to export"
signals from our overlords, the network operators. In other words,
rather than exporting power in the case of communications failure, it
goes into the state of "export no power" in case of communications
failure, because otherwise people might unplug their internet to export
more scary solar power if exporting power was allowed when the internet
connection fails.
This is a fairly new requirement, so not many
compliant devices are installed now, but once a few gigawatts of these
inverters are running, it will be interesting to see what happens when
there is a major internet outage on a hot summer day, and all of those
gigawatts suddenly go away. Hopefully they thought of that but I doubt it. >>
The rapid control algorithms should be distributed, and the only
low-latency communication signals they should rely upon are frequency
and voltage.
A solar panel with an algorithm can't know about potential system
overloads. Solar and wind will have to be shed sometimes to protect
the entire system. Loads shed too. Renewable-heavy grids are fragile.
Working out how far it would travel if it ever broke free from its very
substantial bearings was used as an exam question. It was installed pointing >> so that it would not hit any property if it did.
It would affect earth rotation, too. Some huge water reservoir in China is affecting it already.
On Mon, 12 May 2025 12:42:11 -0700, Don Y
<blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote:
On 5/12/2025 7:31 AM, Theo wrote:
A naive question: why do we need to get these signals from the grid at all? >>> Why can't we broadcast a synchronisation message on something like LW radio >>> that is picked up by every generator large or small? Then the networkHow have we managed to distribute electrical power over huge swaths of land >>from multiple independent operators WITHOUT such a mechanism?
operator can monitor what's happening and adjust the signal as appropriate. >>
Big steam turbines with lots of spinning inertia and boilers full of gigajoules of superheated water. And enough 24/7 local generation so
we don't need to import power from France.
And no commitments to take (or pay for) power that we don't need.
On 13/05/2025 3:35 am, john larkin wrote:
On Sun, 11 May 2025 12:22:11 +1000, Chris Jones
<lugnut808@spam.yahoo.com> wrote:
On 11/05/2025 5:04 am, john larkin wrote:
As solar and wind get to be dominant, micromanagement of power sources >>>> and loads will be necessary to ensure uptime.
This is largely unnecessary - if the control signal that was being sent
out by the central controller to micromanage each power source was
derived from a function of the frequency, phase, voltage etc., then
rather than trying to distribute the result of this calculation to
millions of devices with low latency, it is better to distribute just
the formula (once every few years or as necessary), and run it on a
microcontroller in the inverters several times every mains cycle. They
already have more than enough processing power.
A central (international!) controller would want to know what every
contributor was pushing into the grid, and probably see wind flow and
clouds moving around. One local transmission line could fail and take
down half of Europe. Again.
What makes you think that?
The current control system clearly isn't that well informed, and it
works pretty much all the time.
I believe that there are some new regulatuions in at least one
Australian
state, driven by the (fossil-fuel-stoked) fear of "too much solar
destabilising the grid", which require new home solar inverters to stop
exporting power, unless they receive continuous "permission to export"
signals from our overlords, the network operators. In other words,
rather than exporting power in the case of communications failure, it
goes into the state of "export no power" in case of communications
failure, because otherwise people might unplug their internet to export
more scary solar power if exporting power was allowed when the internet
connection fails.
This is nonsense. The Australian grid don't like having to deal with
excess power being exported by roof-top solar installation, and
discourage people from doing it, to the point where 40% of new roof-top
solar installations in Australia include a Tesla Powerwall or an
equivalent battery, and don't export anything.
This is a fairly new requirement, so not many
compliant devices are installed now, but once a few gigawatts of these
inverters are running, it will be interesting to see what happens when
there is a major internet outage on a hot summer day, and all of those
gigawatts suddenly go away. Hopefully they thought of that but I
doubt it.
The rapid control algorithms should be distributed, and the only
low-latency communication signals they should rely upon are frequency
and voltage.
A solar panel with an algorithm can't know about potential system
overloads. Solar and wind will have to be shed sometimes to protect
the entire system. Loads shed too. Renewable-heavy grids are fragile.
The existing system doesn't know about potential system overloads, and
it works pretty much all the time. Regular grids are fragile too.
The renewable-heavy grid in South Australia was fragile, until they
bought the world first grid scale battery in 2017.
https://hornsdalepowerreserve.com.au/
They promptly devoted half the battery to short term phase correction
and frequency satabilisation, and it isn't fragile any more.
Carlos says that the Spanish mainland grid hasn't got any storage - no
grid battery and no pumped hydro, which is a bit silly.
On 2025-05-13 06:25, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 3:35 am, john larkin wrote:
On Sun, 11 May 2025 12:22:11 +1000, Chris Jones
<lugnut808@spam.yahoo.com> wrote:
On 11/05/2025 5:04 am, john larkin wrote:
As solar and wind get to be dominant, micromanagement of power sources >>>>> and loads will be necessary to ensure uptime.
This is largely unnecessary - if the control signal that was being sent >>>> out by the central controller to micromanage each power source was
derived from a function of the frequency, phase, voltage etc., then
rather than trying to distribute the result of this calculation to
millions of devices with low latency, it is better to distribute just
the formula (once every few years or as necessary), and run it on a
microcontroller in the inverters several times every mains cycle. They >>>> already have more than enough processing power.
A central (international!) controller would want to know what every
contributor was pushing into the grid, and probably see wind flow and
clouds moving around. One local transmission line could fail and take
down half of Europe. Again.
What makes you think that?
The current control system clearly isn't that well informed, and it
works pretty much all the time.
I believe that there are some new regulatuions in at least one
Australian
state, driven by the (fossil-fuel-stoked) fear of "too much solar
destabilising the grid", which require new home solar inverters to stop >>>> exporting power, unless they receive continuous "permission to export" >>>> signals from our overlords, the network operators. In other words,
rather than exporting power in the case of communications failure, it
goes into the state of "export no power" in case of communications
failure, because otherwise people might unplug their internet to export >>>> more scary solar power if exporting power was allowed when the internet >>>> connection fails.
This is nonsense. The Australian grid don't like having to deal with
excess power being exported by roof-top solar installation, and
discourage people from doing it, to the point where 40% of new roof-top
solar installations in Australia include a Tesla Powerwall or an
equivalent battery, and don't export anything.
This is a fairly new requirement, so not many
compliant devices are installed now, but once a few gigawatts of these >>>> inverters are running, it will be interesting to see what happens when >>>> there is a major internet outage on a hot summer day, and all of those >>>> gigawatts suddenly go away. Hopefully they thought of that but I
doubt it.
The rapid control algorithms should be distributed, and the only
low-latency communication signals they should rely upon are frequency
and voltage.
A solar panel with an algorithm can't know about potential system
overloads. Solar and wind will have to be shed sometimes to protect
the entire system. Loads shed too. Renewable-heavy grids are fragile.
The existing system doesn't know about potential system overloads, and
it works pretty much all the time. Regular grids are fragile too.
The renewable-heavy grid in South Australia was fragile, until they
bought the world first grid scale battery in 2017.
https://hornsdalepowerreserve.com.au/
They promptly devoted half the battery to short term phase correction
and frequency satabilisation, and it isn't fragile any more.
Carlos says that the Spanish mainland grid hasn't got any storage - no
grid battery and no pumped hydro, which is a bit silly.
No, no grid batteries yet. Pumped hydro there is somewhere; some island
have it for sure, it has gone an entire month on renewables alone.
I asked chatgpt:
Does the Spanish electricity network has storage capability?
Yes, the Spanish electricity network does have storage capabilities, but
on a limited scale relative to its overall electricity demand and
production.
*Key Points:*
1. Pumped Hydro Storage
This is the main form of energy storage in Spain. It's a mature and
widely used technology that involves pumping water uphill to a reservoir >during times of low electricity demand and releasing it to generate >electricity during peak demand.
Spain has several pumped hydro plants, including:
La Muela II (one of the largest in Europe)
Estany Gento-Sallente
Total pumped hydro storage capacity in Spain is estimated to be
around 6 GW (gigawatts) of installed capacity.
2. Battery Storage
Grid-scale battery storage is still in early development in Spain
but is growing.
Projects have been announced or launched, particularly to
complement renewable energy (especially solar and wind).
As of recent years, installed battery capacity is relatively small
(in the tens to hundreds of megawatts), but it's expected to grow >significantly under SpainÆs energy transition plans.
3. Other Technologies
Thermal storage: Used in concentrated solar power (CSP) plants,
where molten salts store heat that can be used to generate electricity
after the sun goes down.
Hydrogen: In development, with pilot projects aiming to use green
hydrogen for seasonal or long-duration storage.
4. Future Plans
Spain's National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP) and other strategic
documents aim to:
Expand storage to around 20 GW by 2030, including batteries, pumped
hydro, and other technologies.
Enable better integration of intermittent renewables like wind and
solar.
Conclusion:
Yes, Spain's electricity network has storage capabilities, primarily
through pumped hydro, with growing use of batteries and thermal storage. >Significant expansion is planned to support the country's renewable
energy targets and grid stability.
On 2025-05-13 00:20, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Mon, 12 May 2025 23:33:30 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-12 16:36, Martin Brown wrote:
On 10/05/2025 17:58, John Robertson wrote:
On 2025-05-10 9:46 a.m., Bill Sloman wrote:
...
Perhaps for systems that have large solar or wind arrays they could
use a number of large rotating masses to smooth over these burps?
Vacuum and magnetic bearings...
They are intrinsically dangerous if they store enough energy to really >>>> matter. We had such a steel reinforced lead flywheel and motor generator >>>> configuration on big radio telescopes storing just enough energy to stow >>>> them in the event of a storm taking out 3 phase mains power. The dishes >>>> can only reliably survive storms if they are pointed at the zenith.
(sometimes not even then)
Working out how far it would travel if it ever broke free from its very >>>> substantial bearings was used as an exam question. It was installed
pointing so that it would not hit any property if it did.
It would affect earth rotation, too. Some huge water reservoir in China
is affecting it already.
Three Gorges Dam?
.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam>
Yep.
On 5/12/25 21:42, Don Y wrote:
On 5/12/2025 7:31 AM, Theo wrote:
A naive question: why do we need to get these signals from the grid at
all?
Why can't we broadcast a synchronisation message on something like LW
radio that is picked up by every generator large or small? Then the
network operator can monitor what's happening and adjust the signal as
appropriate.
How have we managed to distribute electrical power over huge swaths of
land from multiple independent operators WITHOUT such a mechanism?
I don't think that using broadcast radio for real time mains grid
control is a good idea. It would be far too unreliable.
To first order, power plants adjust the power injected into the grid by observing the grid frequency. When the frequency drops, the injected
power is increased.
This says nothing about the dynamic behavior, which is far more
involved, and variable too. Apparently there are some issues with that
on the European grid.
Jeroen Belleman
[Snip...]
I don't think that using broadcast radio for real time mains grid
control is a good idea. It would be far too unreliable.
Point to point RF links have been in use in (mostly hard wired) grid
control SCADA (System Control And Data Acquisition) systems for at least
30 years, which is when a former employer did some work on a SCADA upgrade project for the Egyptian Electrical Authority. A search on 'SCADA radio link' will turn up several vendors.
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 06:25, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 3:35 am, john larkin wrote:
On Sun, 11 May 2025 12:22:11 +1000, Chris Jones
<lugnut808@spam.yahoo.com> wrote:
On 11/05/2025 5:04 am, john larkin wrote:
As solar and wind get to be dominant, micromanagement of power sources >>>>>> and loads will be necessary to ensure uptime.
This is largely unnecessary - if the control signal that was being sent >>>>> out by the central controller to micromanage each power source was
derived from a function of the frequency, phase, voltage etc., then
rather than trying to distribute the result of this calculation to
millions of devices with low latency, it is better to distribute just >>>>> the formula (once every few years or as necessary), and run it on a
microcontroller in the inverters several times every mains cycle. They >>>>> already have more than enough processing power.
A central (international!) controller would want to know what every
contributor was pushing into the grid, and probably see wind flow and
clouds moving around. One local transmission line could fail and take
down half of Europe. Again.
What makes you think that?
The current control system clearly isn't that well informed, and it
works pretty much all the time.
I believe that there are some new regulatuions in at least one
Australian
state, driven by the (fossil-fuel-stoked) fear of "too much solar
destabilising the grid", which require new home solar inverters to stop >>>>> exporting power, unless they receive continuous "permission to export" >>>>> signals from our overlords, the network operators. In other words,
rather than exporting power in the case of communications failure, it >>>>> goes into the state of "export no power" in case of communications
failure, because otherwise people might unplug their internet to export >>>>> more scary solar power if exporting power was allowed when the internet >>>>> connection fails.
This is nonsense. The Australian grid don't like having to deal with
excess power being exported by roof-top solar installation, and
discourage people from doing it, to the point where 40% of new roof-top
solar installations in Australia include a Tesla Powerwall or an
equivalent battery, and don't export anything.
This is a fairly new requirement, so not many
compliant devices are installed now, but once a few gigawatts of these >>>>> inverters are running, it will be interesting to see what happens when >>>>> there is a major internet outage on a hot summer day, and all of those >>>>> gigawatts suddenly go away. Hopefully they thought of that but I
doubt it.
The rapid control algorithms should be distributed, and the only
low-latency communication signals they should rely upon are frequency >>>>> and voltage.
A solar panel with an algorithm can't know about potential system
overloads. Solar and wind will have to be shed sometimes to protect
the entire system. Loads shed too. Renewable-heavy grids are fragile.
The existing system doesn't know about potential system overloads, and
it works pretty much all the time. Regular grids are fragile too.
The renewable-heavy grid in South Australia was fragile, until they
bought the world first grid scale battery in 2017.
https://hornsdalepowerreserve.com.au/
They promptly devoted half the battery to short term phase correction
and frequency satabilisation, and it isn't fragile any more.
Carlos says that the Spanish mainland grid hasn't got any storage - no
grid battery and no pumped hydro, which is a bit silly.
No, no grid batteries yet. Pumped hydro there is somewhere; some island
have it for sure, it has gone an entire month on renewables alone.
I asked chatgpt:
Does the Spanish electricity network has storage capability? >>
Yes, the Spanish electricity network does have storage capabilities, but
on a limited scale relative to its overall electricity demand and
production.
*Key Points:*
1. Pumped Hydro Storage
This is the main form of energy storage in Spain. It's a mature and
widely used technology that involves pumping water uphill to a reservoir
during times of low electricity demand and releasing it to generate
electricity during peak demand.
Spain has several pumped hydro plants, including:
La Muela II (one of the largest in Europe)
Estany Gento-Sallente
Total pumped hydro storage capacity in Spain is estimated to be
around 6 GW (gigawatts) of installed capacity.
2. Battery Storage
Grid-scale battery storage is still in early development in Spain
but is growing.
Projects have been announced or launched, particularly to
complement renewable energy (especially solar and wind).
As of recent years, installed battery capacity is relatively small
(in the tens to hundreds of megawatts), but it's expected to grow
significantly under Spain’s energy transition plans.
3. Other Technologies
Thermal storage: Used in concentrated solar power (CSP) plants,
where molten salts store heat that can be used to generate electricity
after the sun goes down.
Hydrogen: In development, with pilot projects aiming to use green
hydrogen for seasonal or long-duration storage.
4. Future Plans
Spain's National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP) and other strategic
documents aim to:
Expand storage to around 20 GW by 2030, including batteries, pumped
hydro, and other technologies.
Enable better integration of intermittent renewables like wind and
solar.
Conclusion:
Yes, Spain's electricity network has storage capabilities, primarily
through pumped hydro, with growing use of batteries and thermal storage.
Significant expansion is planned to support the country's renewable
energy targets and grid stability.
Renewable and stable conflict. Both are expensive.
Pumped hydro is 70 to 80% efficient, but can't be located just
anywhere, so add transmission line losses. And there's a limit to how
much can be built.
Thermal storage is usually less efficient.
Batteries are big and expensive and often dangerous. Backing up a
country for a week is basically impossible.
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Lots of money is being spent to (mostly not) fix a problem that used
to not exist. If Europe wants to shiver in the dark and
de-industrialize, it's fine with us. And with China.
Germany and Japan lost WWII largely because they ran out of energy
resources, and the US didn't.
Now europe is voluntarily wrecking itself.
When unemployed people get cold and hungry in the dark,
politics will change. The left will put up a big fight but will lose.
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
Now europe is voluntarily wrecking itself.
They haven't elected anybody as silly as Donald Trump yet.
On 12/05/2025 18:35, john larkin wrote:<...>
They are all connected to the national grid. The grid frequency target
and voltage is extremely well known and all that is needed is for each
unit that can to try and drive the grid voltage and frequency towards
that target. Things get iffy when they drop out a lot of stuff all at
once because they are using the same rules and rapid collapse follows.
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation
damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a
few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few hundred thousand years.
Lots of money is being spent to (mostly not) fix a problem that used
to not exist. If Europe wants to shiver in the dark and
de-industrialize, it's fine with us. And with China.
The only well-informed people who think that anthopogenic global warming isn't a problem work for the fossil carbon extraction industry, and they
are well-informed about what would happen to their jobs if they thought differently.
Germany and Japan lost WWII largely because they ran out of energy
resources, and the US didn't.
That's not the usual formulation.
Now europe is voluntarily wrecking itself.
They haven't elected anybody as silly as Donald Trump yet.
They are phasing out fossil carbon fueled energy sources, but the
renewable alternatives seem to be able to replace them.
When unemployed people get cold and hungry in the dark,
politics will change. The left will put up a big fight but will lose.
That's pretty much what got Donald Trump elected. America has exported a
lot of manufacturing jobs, and the people stuck with the low paid work
they can get aren't happy about it. They are going to be even unhappier
when they work out that his hare-brained schemes aren't going to make
them any better off.
Europe hasn't got the same kind of problem - there's less economic
inequality there than there is in the USA, and less of the social
problems it generates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level_(Wilkinson_and_Pickett_book)
James Arthur doesn't like the book, because he doesn't like the message.
He didn't seem to be able to fault the research.
Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
[...]
Now europe is voluntarily wrecking itself.
They haven't elected anybody as silly as Donald Trump yet.
They don't need to. Our politicians know they have to do his bidding or >we're sunk.
On Tue, 13 May 2025 17:54:55 +0100, liz@poppyrecords.invalid.invalid
(Liz Tuddenham) wrote:
Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
[...]
Now europe is voluntarily wrecking itself.
They haven't elected anybody as silly as Donald Trump yet.
They don't need to. Our politicians know they have to do his bidding or
we're sunk.
Sounds good to me.
On 5/13/2025 6:26 AM, Glen Walpert wrote:
I don't think that using broadcast radio for real time mains grid
control is a good idea. It would be far too unreliable.
Point to point RF links have been in use in (mostly hard wired) grid
control SCADA (System Control And Data Acquisition) systems for at
least 30 years, which is when a former employer did some work on a
SCADA upgrade project for the Egyptian Electrical Authority. A search
on 'SCADA radio link' will turn up several vendors.
And they used these to control instantaneous frequency and phase? Or,
just coarse data collection and /supervisory/ control?
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation
damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a
few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few
hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of
managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage.
I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported
there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation
damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a >>> few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few
hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of
managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage.
I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported
there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more
fuel.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly
fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who
really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
One of my LinkedIn contacts - an IEEE contact in this case - posted some
new data on LinkedIn, from a "Simon Gallagher, Managing Director at UK Networks Services | CEng | FIET | FEI | MBA "
On Tue, 13 May 2025 07:50:36 -0700, Don Y wrote:
On 5/13/2025 6:26 AM, Glen Walpert wrote:
I don't think that using broadcast radio for real time mains grid
control is a good idea. It would be far too unreliable.
Point to point RF links have been in use in (mostly hard wired) grid
control SCADA (System Control And Data Acquisition) systems for at
least 30 years, which is when a former employer did some work on a
SCADA upgrade project for the Egyptian Electrical Authority. A search
on 'SCADA radio link' will turn up several vendors.
And they used these to control instantaneous frequency and phase? Or,
just coarse data collection and /supervisory/ control?
SCADA is used to monitor and control the grid, where control is done in
real time by adjusting the set points for real and reactive power at all controlled power sources. A small percentage of sources being
inaccessible degrades control by an insignificant amount.
Real power is regulated by the prime mover governors, which must be
operated in droop mode in order to share the load (the speed set point is reduced with increasing load). The grid Hz/Gw figure which has been mentioned is not directly related to generator inertia, where
insignificant energy is stored, it is the aggregate droop setting of the prime mover governors feeding the grid. After speed/frequency shift (the governors only measure shaft speed) due to a load change the grid control center adjusts the governor set points to bring the frequency back to
normal.
Voltage regulation is entirely separate and is done by setting the
reactive power output of sources, again by adjusting set points in real
time over SCADA (or one of the other approved standard comm protocols).
This is a bit complex for a quick explanation but is described in detail
in any decent text covering synchronous generator control.
Voltage regulation is more likely to be a stability issue than frequency.
If you take two widely separated generators or sets of locally paralleled generators at two power plants which are optimally tuned for stand alone operation and connect them with a long transmission line, voltage will
begin to oscillate due to the time delay in locally detecting changes in
the other plants output. Detuning the regulators to achieve stability results in inadequate response to load changes - thus central control of
both plants over SCADA.
Large generator voltage response time is limited by the L/R time constant, which will be in the 10's of seconds, over a minute for some large multi- pole hydroelectric generators. Inverters can respond much faster, with potentially worse stability issues, and dividing power sources into many small units does not make stability any easier, you still can't set
optimal tuning parameters for widely separated groups of sources which
will be both stable and fast, central control of some percentage of source set points is required. This problem and it's solution is well understood and the current generation of inverters are designed to allow remote
control of set points.
In the US more than 2/3 of all solar power is utility owned 10 MW or
larger and all of this is under central grid operator control, so no stability issues there.
More intermittent power sources need more batteries, which are being
deployed by utilities as fast as they can be manufactured, being far
cheaper then peaking gas turbines, the most expensive of power sources.
<https://www.tdworld.com/distributed-energy-resources/energy-storage/news/ 55287560/us-energy-storage-industry-commits-100-billion-investment-in- american-made-grid-batteries>
On 2025-05-10 18:46, Bill Sloman wrote:
One of my LinkedIn contacts - an IEEE contact in this case - posted some
new data on LinkedIn, from a "Simon Gallagher, Managing Director at UK
Networks Services | CEng | FIET | FEI | MBA "
Today the ministry said that they have ruled out a hacking of the REE,
but not in other places. And that it originated in Granada, Badajoz and >Sevilla (loss of generation).
Spanish:
<https://www.eldiario.es/economia/aagesen-avanza-desconexiones-generacion-apagon-empezaron-granada-badajoz-sevilla_1_12297171.html>
Aagesen says that the generation disconnections before the blackout
began in Granada, Badajoz and Seville.
They began with a substation in Granada and then occurred in
Badajoz and Seville; the vice-president speaks of æovervoltageÆ
problems, rules out a cyber-attack on Red ElΘctrica and stresses that >æhypotheses have already been ruled outÆ: it was not a problem of
coverage, reserve æor the size of the networksÆ.
The Third Vice-President and Minister for Ecological Transition, Sara >Aagesen, announced this Wednesday in the Congress of Deputies that the >generation losses prior to the historic blackout on 28 April æbegan in >Granada, Badajoz and SevilleÆ. Aagesen, who confirmed that a
cyber-attack on Red ElΘctrica has been ruled out, spoke of problems of >æovervoltageÆ in the system and explained that they are analysing
whether the oscillations detected in Europe half an hour before the cut
were related to the incident.
In an appearance in the plenary session to explain the crisis, the >vice-president explained that, after æat least two periods of
oscillationsÆ in the 30 minutes prior to the blackout, which were
detected in the peninsular and European system, with ôlowö demand at
that time, there were æthree lossesÆ of generation: the first, æin a >substation in GranadaÆ at 12 hours, 32 minutes and 57 seconds; 19
seconds later, another substation in Badajoz was disconnected; and 20.3 >seconds later, another in Seville. æThe sum of these three eventsÆ >accumulated a loss of just over 2.2 gigawatts æin 20 secondsÆ.
The committee investigating the blackout is analyzing ôdisconnections
that may be due to overvoltage as a triggering element of the cascading
dropö that came just after. The control systems of the different
operators reflect that that morning ôrecorded volatility in the
voltagesö, previous: ôRises and fallsö prior to that zero and those >oscillations. That is why they are analyzing ônot only that morningö,
but also the days prior to the blackout.
Aagesen explained that after these disconnections in these three
provinces, the synchronism with the European system was lost: the >interconnections with France jump, the Iberian Peninsula is isolated
from the rest of the continent and the ôderegulationö occurs, that is,
the demand ceases to be fed. After disconnecting ôthe first step of >deregulationö, the frequency in the grid ôcontinues to dropö and
ôsuccessive steps of deregulationö are activated in a short period of
time. At 12 hours, 33 minutes and 22 seconds ôthe sixth time step of >dredgingö is activated and the system ends up collapsing to ôpeninsular >zeroö.
The Vice-president explained that the inter-ministerial committee that
is analyzing the causes of the incident, which has already held six
meetings and has a group dedicated to the electricity system and another
for cybersecurity, is analyzing ômillions of data with the best
equipment on behalf of the Administrationö. He stated that the
collaboration of the sector's agents is being ôfullö. Information has
been requested from more than thirty generation control centers,
distributors and aggregations of large generation productions above
1,000 megawatts.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
(... continues on the link)
On Tue, 13 May 2025 07:50:36 -0700, Don Y wrote:
On 5/13/2025 6:26 AM, Glen Walpert wrote:
I don't think that using broadcast radio for real time mains grid
control is a good idea. It would be far too unreliable.
Point to point RF links have been in use in (mostly hard wired) grid
control SCADA (System Control And Data Acquisition) systems for at
least 30 years, which is when a former employer did some work on a
SCADA upgrade project for the Egyptian Electrical Authority. A search
on 'SCADA radio link' will turn up several vendors.
And they used these to control instantaneous frequency and phase? Or,
just coarse data collection and /supervisory/ control?
SCADA is used to monitor and control the grid, where control is done in
real time by adjusting the set points for real and reactive power at all controlled power sources. A small percentage of sources being
inaccessible degrades control by an insignificant amount.
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation >>>> damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a >>>> few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few >>>> hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of
managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage. >>> I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported
there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more
fuel.
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly
fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who
really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation >>>>> damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a >>>>> few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few >>>>> hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of
managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage. >>>> I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported
there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more
fuel.
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools forever.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly
fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who
really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
The little modular reactors sound cool.
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:07:21 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-10 18:46, Bill Sloman wrote:
One of my LinkedIn contacts - an IEEE contact in this case - posted some >>> new data on LinkedIn, from a "Simon Gallagher, Managing Director at UK
Networks Services | CEng | FIET | FEI | MBA "
Today the ministry said that they have ruled out a hacking of the REE,
but not in other places. And that it originated in Granada, Badajoz and
Sevilla (loss of generation).
Spanish:
<https://www.eldiario.es/economia/aagesen-avanza-desconexiones-generacion-apagon-empezaron-granada-badajoz-sevilla_1_12297171.html>
(... continues on the link)
The Times of London published an article today:
.<https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/blackout-risk-was-highlighted-two-years-before-spains-grid-went-down-lzvxdxvzf>
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation
damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a >>> few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few
hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of
managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage.
I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported
there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more
fuel.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly
fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who
really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
On 2025-05-14 16:16, Glen Walpert wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 07:50:36 -0700, Don Y wrote:
On 5/13/2025 6:26 AM, Glen Walpert wrote:
I don't think that using broadcast radio for real time mains grid
control is a good idea. It would be far too unreliable.
Point to point RF links have been in use in (mostly hard wired) grid
control SCADA (System Control And Data Acquisition) systems for at
least 30 years, which is when a former employer did some work on a
SCADA upgrade project for the Egyptian Electrical Authority. A search >>>> on 'SCADA radio link' will turn up several vendors.
And they used these to control instantaneous frequency and phase? Or,
just coarse data collection and /supervisory/ control?
SCADA is used to monitor and control the grid, where control is done in
real time by adjusting the set points for real and reactive power at all
controlled power sources. A small percentage of sources being
inaccessible degrades control by an insignificant amount.
Real power is regulated by the prime mover governors, which must be
operated in droop mode in order to share the load (the speed set point is
reduced with increasing load). The grid Hz/Gw figure which has been
mentioned is not directly related to generator inertia, where
insignificant energy is stored, it is the aggregate droop setting of the
prime mover governors feeding the grid. After speed/frequency shift (the >> governors only measure shaft speed) due to a load change the grid control
center adjusts the governor set points to bring the frequency back to
normal.
Voltage regulation is entirely separate and is done by setting the
reactive power output of sources, again by adjusting set points in real
time over SCADA (or one of the other approved standard comm protocols).
This is a bit complex for a quick explanation but is described in detail
in any decent text covering synchronous generator control.
Voltage regulation is more likely to be a stability issue than frequency.
If you take two widely separated generators or sets of locally paralleled
generators at two power plants which are optimally tuned for stand alone
operation and connect them with a long transmission line, voltage will
begin to oscillate due to the time delay in locally detecting changes in
the other plants output. Detuning the regulators to achieve stability
results in inadequate response to load changes - thus central control of
both plants over SCADA.
Large generator voltage response time is limited by the L/R time
constant,
which will be in the 10's of seconds, over a minute for some large multi-
pole hydroelectric generators. Inverters can respond much faster, with
potentially worse stability issues, and dividing power sources into many
small units does not make stability any easier, you still can't set
optimal tuning parameters for widely separated groups of sources which
will be both stable and fast, central control of some percentage of
source
set points is required. This problem and it's solution is well
understood
and the current generation of inverters are designed to allow remote
control of set points.
In the US more than 2/3 of all solar power is utility owned 10 MW or
larger and all of this is under central grid operator control, so no
stability issues there.
More intermittent power sources need more batteries, which are being
deployed by utilities as fast as they can be manufactured, being far
cheaper then peaking gas turbines, the most expensive of power sources.
<https://www.tdworld.com/distributed-energy-resources/energy-storage/news/ >> 55287560/us-energy-storage-industry-commits-100-billion-investment-in-
american-made-grid-batteries>
Wouldn't it be easier to have the entire distribution network using DC?
just saying with a glass of wine in my hand :-)
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation >>>>> damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a >>>>> few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few >>>>> hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of
managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage. >>>> I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported
there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more
fuel.
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools forever.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly
fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who
really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
The little modular reactors sound cool.
On 2025-05-14 22:45, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:07:21 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-10 18:46, Bill Sloman wrote:
One of my LinkedIn contacts - an IEEE contact in this case - posted
some
new data on LinkedIn, from a "Simon Gallagher, Managing Director at UK >>>> Networks Services | CEng | FIET | FEI | MBA "
Today the ministry said that they have ruled out a hacking of the REE,
but not in other places. And that it originated in Granada, Badajoz and
Sevilla (loss of generation).
Spanish:
<https://www.eldiario.es/economia/aagesen-avanza-desconexiones-generacion-apagon-empezaron-granada-badajoz-sevilla_1_12297171.html>
...
(... continues on the link)
The Times of London published an article today:
.<https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/blackout-risk-was-highlighted-two-years-before-spains-grid-went-down-lzvxdxvzf>
pay wall.
Disabling javascript allows reading 4 paragraphs.
Anyway, government denies that a risk of total blackout had been
highlighted on any report.
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation >>>>> damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a >>>>> few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few >>>>> hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of
managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage. >>>> I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported
there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more
fuel.
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools forever.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly
fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who
really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
The little modular reactors sound cool.
On 15/05/2025 01:20, Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 2025-05-14 22:45, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:07:21 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-10 18:46, Bill Sloman wrote:
One of my LinkedIn contacts - an IEEE contact in this case - posted
some
new data on LinkedIn, from a "Simon Gallagher, Managing Director at UK >>>>> Networks Services | CEng | FIET | FEI | MBA "
Today the ministry said that they have ruled out a hacking of the REE, >>>> but not in other places. And that it originated in Granada, Badajoz and >>>> Sevilla (loss of generation).
Spanish:
<https://www.eldiario.es/economia/aagesen-avanza-desconexiones-
generacion-apagon-empezaron-granada-badajoz-sevilla_1_12297171.html>
...
(... continues on the link)
The Times of London published an article today:
.<https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/blackout-risk-was-
highlighted-two-years-before-spains-grid-went-down-lzvxdxvzf>
pay wall.
Disabling javascript allows reading 4 paragraphs.
Anyway, government denies that a risk of total blackout had been
highlighted on any report.
You trust your government *not* to lie about such things? How quaint!!
It conflicts with this popular media source and other tech sources:
https://www.surinenglish.com/spain/the-government-known-since-january- from-red-20250506082807-nt.html
Only the date when they were warned varies with the source.
On 2025-05-15 08:18, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 15/05/2025 5:14 am, Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 2025-05-14 16:16, Glen Walpert wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 07:50:36 -0700, Don Y wrote:
Wouldn't it be easier to have the entire distribution network using DC?
just saying with a glass of wine in my hand :-)
That's probably correct, but it wouldn't be cheaper. It's probably
true that taking DC down to the sub-station level could be cheaper,
with today's technology, if you were starting from scratch, but since
that kit is already there you would be throwing away a lot of big
expensive transformers from the next level up, and replacing them with
a lot of big, expensive - if less expensive - inverters. It would take
a lot of capital investment to make the switch, and the people who
operate the grid are adminstrators rather than entrepreneurs.
I'm just thinking that adding sources to a DC distribution network is
easier: the voltage just rises or drops. Possibly it autoregulates.
But of course, we have a huge installed system, replacing it would be terribly expensive.
On 15/05/2025 5:14 am, Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 2025-05-14 16:16, Glen Walpert wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 07:50:36 -0700, Don Y wrote:
On 5/13/2025 6:26 AM, Glen Walpert wrote:
I don't think that using broadcast radio for real time mains grid
control is a good idea. It would be far too unreliable.
Point to point RF links have been in use in (mostly hard wired) grid >>>>> control SCADA (System Control And Data Acquisition) systems for at
least 30 years, which is when a former employer did some work on a
SCADA upgrade project for the Egyptian Electrical Authority. A search >>>>> on 'SCADA radio link' will turn up several vendors.
And they used these to control instantaneous frequency and phase? Or, >>>> just coarse data collection and /supervisory/ control?
SCADA is used to monitor and control the grid, where control is done in
real time by adjusting the set points for real and reactive power at all >>> controlled power sources. A small percentage of sources being
inaccessible degrades control by an insignificant amount.
Real power is regulated by the prime mover governors, which must be
operated in droop mode in order to share the load (the speed set
point is
reduced with increasing load). The grid Hz/Gw figure which has been
mentioned is not directly related to generator inertia, where
insignificant energy is stored, it is the aggregate droop setting of the >>> prime mover governors feeding the grid. After speed/frequency shift
(the
governors only measure shaft speed) due to a load change the grid
control
center adjusts the governor set points to bring the frequency back to
normal.
Voltage regulation is entirely separate and is done by setting the
reactive power output of sources, again by adjusting set points in real
time over SCADA (or one of the other approved standard comm protocols).
This is a bit complex for a quick explanation but is described in detail >>> in any decent text covering synchronous generator control.
Voltage regulation is more likely to be a stability issue than
frequency.
If you take two widely separated generators or sets of locally
paralleled
generators at two power plants which are optimally tuned for stand alone >>> operation and connect them with a long transmission line, voltage will
begin to oscillate due to the time delay in locally detecting changes in >>> the other plants output. Detuning the regulators to achieve stability
results in inadequate response to load changes - thus central control of >>> both plants over SCADA.
Large generator voltage response time is limited by the L/R time
constant,
which will be in the 10's of seconds, over a minute for some large
multi-
pole hydroelectric generators. Inverters can respond much faster, with >>> potentially worse stability issues, and dividing power sources into many >>> small units does not make stability any easier, you still can't set
optimal tuning parameters for widely separated groups of sources which
will be both stable and fast, central control of some percentage of
source
set points is required. This problem and it's solution is well
understood
and the current generation of inverters are designed to allow remote
control of set points.
In the US more than 2/3 of all solar power is utility owned 10 MW or
larger and all of this is under central grid operator control, so no
stability issues there.
More intermittent power sources need more batteries, which are being
deployed by utilities as fast as they can be manufactured, being far
cheaper then peaking gas turbines, the most expensive of power sources.
<https://www.tdworld.com/distributed-energy-resources/energy-storage/
news/
55287560/us-energy-storage-industry-commits-100-billion-investment-in-
american-made-grid-batteries>
Wouldn't it be easier to have the entire distribution network using DC?
just saying with a glass of wine in my hand :-)
That's probably correct, but it wouldn't be cheaper. It's probably true
that taking DC down to the sub-station level could be cheaper, with
today's technology, if you were starting from scratch, but since that
kit is already there you would be throwing away a lot of big expensive transformers from the next level up, and replacing them with a lot of
big, expensive - if less expensive - inverters. It would take a lot of capital investment to make the switch, and the people who operate the
grid are adminstrators rather than entrepreneurs.
On 5/14/2025 7:16 AM, Glen Walpert wrote:Sounds like a perfect recipe to blow things up. No individual
On Tue, 13 May 2025 07:50:36 -0700, Don Y wrote:
On 5/13/2025 6:26 AM, Glen Walpert wrote:
I don't think that using broadcast radio for real time mains grid
control is a good idea. It would be far too unreliable.
Point to point RF links have been in use in (mostly hard wired) grid
control SCADA (System Control And Data Acquisition) systems for at
least 30 years, which is when a former employer did some work on a
SCADA upgrade project for the Egyptian Electrical Authority. A search >>>> on 'SCADA radio link' will turn up several vendors.
And they used these to control instantaneous frequency and phase? Or,
just coarse data collection and /supervisory/ control?
SCADA is used to monitor and control the grid, where control is done in
real time by adjusting the set points for real and reactive power at all
controlled power sources. A small percentage of sources being
inaccessible degrades control by an insignificant amount.
"Real-time" means different things to different applications.
I took Theo's upthread suggestion to mean broadcasting a *reference*
that all genertors would track -- instead of using the actual power line, itself. I.e., the spain event could have been avoided if such a broadcast reference were used by each generator DISREGARDING THE ACTUAL POWER SIGNAL. [...]
On 2025-05-14 17:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible.
Radiation
damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down
after a
few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for
a few
hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of
managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste
storage.
I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported >>>>> there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more
fuel.
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools
forever.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly
fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who
really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
The little modular reactors sound cool.
Putting used nuclear fuel someplace deepish underground is important.
While a nuclear war would be very very bad, surface storage makes it
much, much worse.
[...]
On 5/14/25 23:35, Don Y wrote:
On 5/14/2025 7:16 AM, Glen Walpert wrote:
SCADA is used to monitor and control the grid, where control is done in
real time by adjusting the set points for real and reactive power at all >>> controlled power sources. A small percentage of sources being
inaccessible degrades control by an insignificant amount.
"Real-time" means different things to different applications.
I took Theo's upthread suggestion to mean broadcasting a *reference*
that all genertors would track -- instead of using the actual power line,
itself. I.e., the spain event could have been avoided if such a
broadcast
reference were used by each generator DISREGARDING THE ACTUAL POWER
SIGNAL.
[...]
Sounds like a perfect recipe to blow things up. No individual
generator can pretend to force the grid. Either they track
or they trip.
Driving power into the grid only makes sense in reference to
what is happening at the injection point.
On 15/05/2025 13:43, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
On 5/14/25 23:35, Don Y wrote:
On 5/14/2025 7:16 AM, Glen Walpert wrote:
SCADA is used to monitor and control the grid, where control is done in >>>> real time by adjusting the set points for real and reactive power at all >>>> controlled power sources. A small percentage of sources being
inaccessible degrades control by an insignificant amount.
I'll believe it is used to monitor the parameters at key locations in "realtime", update set points and try to reset tripped breakers.
Indeed. And smaller generation systems can just get crushed like flies if they
try to stop a rampaging elephant as big GW systems drop offline.
If the system did fail due to local over voltage excursions somewhere and then
failed to become stable again after a few suppliers dropped out then their network stability analysis must be appallingly bad.
On 5/15/25 01:38, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2025-05-14 17:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible.
Radiation
damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down >>>>>>> after a
few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for >>>>>>> a few
hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of >>>>>> managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste
storage.
I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported >>>>>> there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more >>>>> fuel.
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools
forever.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly >>>>> fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who
really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
The little modular reactors sound cool.
Putting used nuclear fuel someplace deepish underground is important.
While a nuclear war would be very very bad, surface storage makes it
much, much worse.
[...]
Yes! Now convince the populace and the politicians.
Jeroen Belleman
On 2025-05-14 23:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible.
Radiation
damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down
after a
few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for
a few
hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of
managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste
storage.
I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported >>>>> there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more
fuel.
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools
forever.
Transporting nuclear waste long distances is dangerous.
Pools are a temporary solution till someone develops a permanent
solution. Nobody has, in decades.
[...]
On 2025-05-14 17:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation >>>>>> damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a >>>>>> few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few >>>>>> hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of
managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage. >>>>> I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported >>>>> there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more
fuel.
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools
forever.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly
fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who
really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
The little modular reactors sound cool.
Putting used nuclear fuel someplace deepish underground is important.
While a nuclear war would be very very bad, surface storage makes it
much, much worse.
The Chernobyl disaster released about 3.5% of the core inventory of one >reactor out of four.(*)
One Hiroshima-size bomb on top of a comparable large nuke plant could
release all the inventory in all four cores, which would be about
4/0.035 ~ 114 times worse than Chernobyl.
If the site included extensive spent-fuel pools, the total would be >correspondingly larger--maybe 500 Chernobyls, maybe more. And that's
just one installation.
Not a bad score for one small bomb--there are lots bigger ones. :(
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
(*) >https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28292/chernobyl-chapter-ii-the-release-dispersion-deposition-and-behaviour-of-radionuclides
On 2025-05-14 23:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation >>>>>> damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a >>>>>> few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few >>>>>> hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of
managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage. >>>>> I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported >>>>> there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more
fuel.
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools
forever.
Transporting nuclear waste long distances is dangerous.
Pools are a temporary solution till someone develops a permanent
solution. Nobody has, in decades.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly
fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who
really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
Everybody does it carefully, yet there are accidents with consequences. >Fukushima, Chernobyl, and many others. And close encounters or near misses.
On 2025-05-15 12:37, Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 2025-05-15 08:18, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 15/05/2025 5:14 am, Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 2025-05-14 16:16, Glen Walpert wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 07:50:36 -0700, Don Y wrote:
...
Wouldn't it be easier to have the entire distribution network using DC? >>>>
just saying with a glass of wine in my hand :-)
That's probably correct, but it wouldn't be cheaper. It's probably
true that taking DC down to the sub-station level could be cheaper,
with today's technology, if you were starting from scratch, but since
that kit is already there you would be throwing away a lot of big
expensive transformers from the next level up, and replacing them
with a lot of big, expensive - if less expensive - inverters. It
would take a lot of capital investment to make the switch, and the
people who operate the grid are adminstrators rather than entrepreneurs.
I'm just thinking that adding sources to a DC distribution network is
easier: the voltage just rises or drops. Possibly it autoregulates.
But of course, we have a huge installed system, replacing it would be
terribly expensive.
Thinking again. Would it be possible to have even the rotating mass generators connect via inverters? I mean, the inverters would inject
power always at the exact frequency no matter what. The voltage could
vary, but the frequency would be stuck.
Of course, I know basically nothing of power generation/distribution, so don't take me too seriously :-)
On 2025-05-14 22:45, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:07:21 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-10 18:46, Bill Sloman wrote:
One of my LinkedIn contacts - an IEEE contact in this case - posted some >>>> new data on LinkedIn, from a "Simon Gallagher, Managing Director at UK >>>> Networks Services | CEng | FIET | FEI | MBA "
Today the ministry said that they have ruled out a hacking of the REE,
but not in other places. And that it originated in Granada, Badajoz and
Sevilla (loss of generation).
Spanish:
<https://www.eldiario.es/economia/aagesen-avanza-desconexiones-generacion-apagon-empezaron-granada-badajoz-sevilla_1_12297171.html>
...
(... continues on the link)
The Times of London published an article today:
.<https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/blackout-risk-was-highlighted-two-years-before-spains-grid-went-down-lzvxdxvzf>
pay wall.
Disabling javascript allows reading 4 paragraphs.
Anyway, government denies that a risk of total blackout had been
highlighted on any report.
On 2025-05-14 17:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation >>>>>> damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a >>>>>> few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few >>>>>> hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of
managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage. >>>>> I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported >>>>> there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more
fuel.
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools
forever.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly
fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who
really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
The little modular reactors sound cool.
Putting used nuclear fuel someplace deepish underground is important.
While a nuclear war would be very very bad, surface storage makes it
much, much worse.
The Chernobyl disaster released about 3.5% of the core inventory of one >reactor out of four.(*)
One Hiroshima-size bomb on top of a comparable large nuke plant could
release all the inventory in all four cores, which would be about
4/0.035 ~ 114 times worse than Chernobyl.
If the site included extensive spent-fuel pools, the total would be >correspondingly larger--maybe 500 Chernobyls, maybe more. And that's
just one installation.
Not a bad score for one small bomb--there are lots bigger ones. :(
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
(*) ><https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28292/chernobyl-chapter-ii-the-release-dispersion-deposition-and-behaviour-of-radionuclides>
On Wed, 14 May 2025 19:38:09 -0400, Phil Hobbs ><pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 17:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation >>>>>>> damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a
few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few >>>>>>> hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of >>>>>> managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage. >>>>>> I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported >>>>>> there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more >>>>> fuel.
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools
forever.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly >>>>> fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who
really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
The little modular reactors sound cool.
Putting used nuclear fuel someplace deepish underground is important.
While a nuclear war would be very very bad, surface storage makes it
much, much worse.
The Chernobyl disaster released about 3.5% of the core inventory of one >>reactor out of four.(*)
One Hiroshima-size bomb on top of a comparable large nuke plant could >>release all the inventory in all four cores, which would be about
4/0.035 ~ 114 times worse than Chernobyl.
If the site included extensive spent-fuel pools, the total would be >>correspondingly larger--maybe 500 Chernobyls, maybe more. And that's
just one installation.
Not a bad score for one small bomb--there are lots bigger ones. :(
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
(*) >><https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28292/chernobyl-chapter-ii-the-release-dispersion-deposition-and-behaviour-of-radionuclides>
I'd be tempted to put hot waste in very heavy steel casks and drop
them into the Mariana Trench:
.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench>
It's 11 Km deep, and is where the Pacific Plate is subducting under
the Mariana plate, so those caskets are in for the long term. Nor is >retrieval all that easy, or a nuclear weapon of much consequence. If
it even works under such pressure.
Joe
On Wed, 14 May 2025 19:38:09 -0400, Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 17:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation >>>>>>> damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a
few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few >>>>>>> hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of >>>>>> managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage. >>>>>> I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported >>>>>> there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more >>>>> fuel.
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools
forever.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly >>>>> fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who
really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
The little modular reactors sound cool.
Putting used nuclear fuel someplace deepish underground is important.
While a nuclear war would be very very bad, surface storage makes it
much, much worse.
The Chernobyl disaster released about 3.5% of the core inventory of one
reactor out of four.(*)
One Hiroshima-size bomb on top of a comparable large nuke plant could
release all the inventory in all four cores, which would be about
4/0.035 ~ 114 times worse than Chernobyl.
If the site included extensive spent-fuel pools, the total would be
correspondingly larger--maybe 500 Chernobyls, maybe more. And that's
just one installation.
Not a bad score for one small bomb--there are lots bigger ones. :(
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
(*)
<https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28292/chernobyl-chapter-ii-the-release-dispersion-deposition-and-behaviour-of-radionuclides>
I'd be tempted to put hot waste in very heavy steel casks and drop
them into the Mariana Trench:
.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench>
It's 11 Km deep, and is where the Pacific Plate is subducting under
the Mariana plate, so those caskets are in for the long term. Nor is retrieval all that easy, or a nuclear weapon of much consequence. If
it even works under such pressure.
Joe
On 2025-05-15 08:18, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 15/05/2025 5:14 am, Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 2025-05-14 16:16, Glen Walpert wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 07:50:36 -0700, Don Y wrote:
On 5/13/2025 6:26 AM, Glen Walpert wrote:
I don't think that using broadcast radio for real time mains grid >>>>>>> control is a good idea. It would be far too unreliable.
Point to point RF links have been in use in (mostly hard wired) grid >>>>>> control SCADA (System Control And Data Acquisition) systems for at >>>>>> least 30 years, which is when a former employer did some work on a >>>>>> SCADA upgrade project for the Egyptian Electrical Authority.á A search >>>>>> on 'SCADA radio link' will turn up several vendors.
And they used these to control instantaneous frequency and phase?á Or, >>>>> just coarse data collection and /supervisory/ control?
SCADA is used to monitor and control the grid, where control is done in >>>> real time by adjusting the set points for real and reactive power at all >>>> controlled power sources.á A small percentage of sources being
inaccessible degrades control by an insignificant amount.
Real power is regulated by the prime mover governors, which must be
operated in droop mode in order to share the load (the speed set
point is
reduced with increasing load).á The grid Hz/Gw figure which has been
mentioned is not directly related to generator inertia, where
insignificant energy is stored, it is the aggregate droop setting of the >>>> prime mover governors feeding the grid.á After speed/frequency shift
(the
governors only measure shaft speed) due to a load change the grid
control
center adjusts the governor set points to bring the frequency back to
normal.
Voltage regulation is entirely separate and is done by setting the
reactive power output of sources, again by adjusting set points in real >>>> time over SCADA (or one of the other approved standard comm protocols). >>>> This is a bit complex for a quick explanation but is described in detail >>>> in any decent text covering synchronous generator control.
Voltage regulation is more likely to be a stability issue than
frequency.
If you take two widely separated generators or sets of locally
paralleled
generators at two power plants which are optimally tuned for stand alone >>>> operation and connect them with a long transmission line, voltage will >>>> begin to oscillate due to the time delay in locally detecting changes in >>>> the other plants output.á Detuning the regulators to achieve stability >>>> results in inadequate response to load changes - thus central control of >>>> both plants over SCADA.
Large generator voltage response time is limited by the L/R time
constant,
which will be in the 10's of seconds, over a minute for some large
multi-
pole hydroelectric generators.á Inverters can respond much faster, with >>>> potentially worse stability issues, and dividing power sources into many >>>> small units does not make stability any easier, you still can't set
optimal tuning parameters for widely separated groups of sources which >>>> will be both stable and fast, central control of some percentage of
source
set points is required.á This problem and it's solution is well
understood
and the current generation of inverters are designed to allow remote
control of set points.
In the US more than 2/3 of all solar power is utility owned 10 MW or
larger and all of this is under central grid operator control, so no
stability issues there.
More intermittent power sources need more batteries, which are being
deployed by utilities as fast as they can be manufactured, being far
cheaper then peaking gas turbines, the most expensive of power sources. >>>>
<https://www.tdworld.com/distributed-energy-resources/energy-storage/
news/
55287560/us-energy-storage-industry-commits-100-billion-investment-in- >>>> american-made-grid-batteries>
Wouldn't it be easier to have the entire distribution network using DC?
just saying with a glass of wine in my hand :-)
That's probably correct, but it wouldn't be cheaper. It's probably true
that taking DC down to the sub-station level could be cheaper, with
today's technology, if you were starting from scratch, but since that
kit is already there you would be throwing away a lot of big expensive
transformers from the next level up, and replacing them with a lot of
big, expensive - if less expensive - inverters. It would take a lot of
capital investment to make the switch, and the people who operate the
grid are adminstrators rather than entrepreneurs.
I'm just thinking that adding sources to a DC distribution network is
easier: the voltage just rises or drops. Possibly it autoregulates.
But of course, we have a huge installed system, replacing it would be >terribly expensive.
Another very wild idea was increasing the frequency to around 600Hz. It
would make transformers and all coiled things smaller. Planes do this. >Possibly would also radiate more. And would not help with control.
Disabling javascript allows reading 4 paragraphs.
I'd also try incognito mode. Or a VPN.
Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net> wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 19:38:09 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 17:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation
damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down
after a few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off
very radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed
for a few hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of
managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste
storage. I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be
transported there. We have some storage at each station, a large
water pool.
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more
fuel.
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools
forever.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly >> >>>> fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who
really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
The little modular reactors sound cool.
Putting used nuclear fuel someplace deepish underground is important.
While a nuclear war would be very very bad, surface storage makes it
much, much worse.
The Chernobyl disaster released about 3.5% of the core inventory of one
reactor out of four.(*)
One Hiroshima-size bomb on top of a comparable large nuke plant could
release all the inventory in all four cores, which would be about
4/0.035 ~ 114 times worse than Chernobyl.
If the site included extensive spent-fuel pools, the total would be
correspondingly larger--maybe 500 Chernobyls, maybe more. And that's
just one installation.
Not a bad score for one small bomb--there are lots bigger ones. :(
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
(*)
<https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28292/chernobyl-chapter-ii-the-release- >> >dispersion-deposition-and-behaviour-of-radionuclides>
I'd be tempted to put hot waste in very heavy steel casks and drop
them into the Mariana Trench:
.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench>
It's 11 Km deep, and is where the Pacific Plate is subducting under
the Mariana plate, so those caskets are in for the long term. Nor is
retrieval all that easy, or a nuclear weapon of much consequence. If
it even works under such pressure.
I thought extreme pressure was one of the ways of setting off a nuclear
bomb.
On Wed, 14 May 2025 19:38:09 -0400, Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 17:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation >>>>>> damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down >>>>>> after a few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off >>>>>> very radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed >>>>>> for a few hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of >>>>> managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste
storage. I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be >>>>> transported there. We have some storage at each station, a large
water pool.
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more >>>> fuel.
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools
forever.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly >>>> fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who
really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
The little modular reactors sound cool.
Putting used nuclear fuel someplace deepish underground is important.
While a nuclear war would be very very bad, surface storage makes it
much, much worse.
The Chernobyl disaster released about 3.5% of the core inventory of one >reactor out of four.(*)
One Hiroshima-size bomb on top of a comparable large nuke plant could >release all the inventory in all four cores, which would be about
4/0.035 ~ 114 times worse than Chernobyl.
If the site included extensive spent-fuel pools, the total would be >correspondingly larger--maybe 500 Chernobyls, maybe more. And that's
just one installation.
Not a bad score for one small bomb--there are lots bigger ones. :(
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
(*) ><https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28292/chernobyl-chapter-ii-the-release- >dispersion-deposition-and-behaviour-of-radionuclides>
I'd be tempted to put hot waste in very heavy steel casks and drop
them into the Mariana Trench:
.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench>
It's 11 Km deep, and is where the Pacific Plate is subducting under
the Mariana plate, so those caskets are in for the long term. Nor is retrieval all that easy, or a nuclear weapon of much consequence. If
it even works under such pressure.
On Thu, 15 May 2025 12:37:24 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-15 08:18, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 15/05/2025 5:14 am, Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 2025-05-14 16:16, Glen Walpert wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 07:50:36 -0700, Don Y wrote:
On 5/13/2025 6:26 AM, Glen Walpert wrote:
Another very wild idea was increasing the frequency to around 600Hz. It
would make transformers and all coiled things smaller. Planes do this.
Possibly would also radiate more. And would not help with control.
But our clocks would run ten times faster.
And everything would hum.
On Wed, 14 May 2025 19:38:09 -0400, Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 17:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
I'd be tempted to put hot waste in very heavy steel casks and drop
them into the Mariana Trench:
.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench>
It's 11 Km deep, and is where the Pacific Plate is subducting under
the Mariana plate, so those caskets are in for the long term. Nor is retrieval all that easy, or a nuclear weapon of much consequence. If
it even works under such pressure.
On Thu, 15 May 2025 11:22:42 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 19:38:09 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 17:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation >>>>>>>> damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a
few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few
hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of >>>>>>> managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage.
I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported >>>>>>> there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more >>>>>> fuel.
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools
forever.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly >>>>>> fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who >>>>>> really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
The little modular reactors sound cool.
Putting used nuclear fuel someplace deepish underground is important.
While a nuclear war would be very very bad, surface storage makes it
much, much worse.
The Chernobyl disaster released about 3.5% of the core inventory of one
reactor out of four.(*)
One Hiroshima-size bomb on top of a comparable large nuke plant could
release all the inventory in all four cores, which would be about
4/0.035 ~ 114 times worse than Chernobyl.
If the site included extensive spent-fuel pools, the total would be
correspondingly larger--maybe 500 Chernobyls, maybe more. And that's
just one installation.
Not a bad score for one small bomb--there are lots bigger ones. :(
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
(*)
<https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28292/chernobyl-chapter-ii-the-release-dispersion-deposition-and-behaviour-of-radionuclides>
I'd be tempted to put hot waste in very heavy steel casks and drop
them into the Mariana Trench:
.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench>
It's 11 Km deep, and is where the Pacific Plate is subducting under
the Mariana plate, so those caskets are in for the long term. Nor is
retrieval all that easy, or a nuclear weapon of much consequence. If
it even works under such pressure.
Joe
Yes. Waste can be mixed into concrete or vitrified and dumped tens of thousands of feet into a trench. Only irrational fear prevents that.
On Thu, 15 May 2025 12:29:03 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 23:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation >>>>>>> damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a
few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few >>>>>>> hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of >>>>>> managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage. >>>>>> I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported >>>>>> there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more >>>>> fuel.
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools
forever.
Transporting nuclear waste long distances is dangerous.
Not as dangerous as transporting gasoline or chlorine, and we do that
all the time.
Pools are a temporary solution till someone develops a permanent
solution. Nobody has, in decades.
Of course we have, but public fear keeps the things from happening.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
Why?
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly >>>>> fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who
really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
Everybody does it carefully, yet there are accidents with consequences.
Fukushima, Chernobyl, and many others. And close encounters or near misses.
The Fukushima and Chernobyl messes were caused by stupid design. Stop
doing that.
A dam or a grain elevator or a parking garage will kill people if they
are designed by idiots.
Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net> wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 19:38:09 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 17:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation
damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down
after a few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off
very radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed
for a few hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of
managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste
storage. I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be
transported there. We have some storage at each station, a large
water pool.
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more
fuel.
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools
forever.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly >> >>>> fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who
really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
The little modular reactors sound cool.
Putting used nuclear fuel someplace deepish underground is important.
While a nuclear war would be very very bad, surface storage makes it
much, much worse.
The Chernobyl disaster released about 3.5% of the core inventory of one
reactor out of four.(*)
One Hiroshima-size bomb on top of a comparable large nuke plant could
release all the inventory in all four cores, which would be about
4/0.035 ~ 114 times worse than Chernobyl.
If the site included extensive spent-fuel pools, the total would be
correspondingly larger--maybe 500 Chernobyls, maybe more. And that's
just one installation.
Not a bad score for one small bomb--there are lots bigger ones. :(
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
(*)
<https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28292/chernobyl-chapter-ii-the-release- >> >dispersion-deposition-and-behaviour-of-radionuclides>
I'd be tempted to put hot waste in very heavy steel casks and drop
them into the Mariana Trench:
.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench>
It's 11 Km deep, and is where the Pacific Plate is subducting under
the Mariana plate, so those caskets are in for the long term. Nor is
retrieval all that easy, or a nuclear weapon of much consequence. If
it even works under such pressure.
I thought extreme pressure was one of the ways of setting off a nuclear
bomb.
On 5/15/2025 6:18 AM, Martin Brown wrote:
On 15/05/2025 13:43, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
On 5/14/25 23:35, Don Y wrote:
On 5/14/2025 7:16 AM, Glen Walpert wrote:
SCADA is used to monitor and control the grid, where control is done >>>>> in real time by adjusting the set points for real and reactive power >>>>> at all controlled power sources. A small percentage of sources
being inaccessible degrades control by an insignificant amount.
I'll believe it is used to monitor the parameters at key locations in
"realtime", update set points and try to reset tripped breakers.
The 'S' in SCADA -- SUPERVISORY. Like deciding how fas the subway car
will travel but not actually commutating the current in the motor.
You want local control that reports status (Data Acquisition)
and accepts control (Supervisory Control) from a higher level
functionary.
Indeed. And smaller generation systems can just get crushed like flies
if they try to stop a rampaging elephant as big GW systems drop
offline.
If the system did fail due to local over voltage excursions somewhere
and then failed to become stable again after a few suppliers dropped
out then their network stability analysis must be appallingly bad.
The problem is all of the distributed "residential" solar rivals "big GW systems". E.g., we have ~10GW of total solar, here -- but, of that,
300,000 individual residential systems in the 5KW (avg) power rating.
So, 1.5GW whose location is varied and diverse BUT whose control is
*likely* mandated by regulations/specifications created when solar was intended to be "the dog's tail" -- tracking an otherwise stable grid.
And, if a residential cogenerator goes offline, the residence's LOAD is
still there, no longer being supported by that "local" generation.
SCADA is used to monitor and control the grid, where control is done >>>>>> in real time by adjusting the set points for real and reactive power >>>>>> at all controlled power sources. A small percentage of sources
being inaccessible degrades control by an insignificant amount.
I'll believe it is used to monitor the parameters at key locations in
"realtime", update set points and try to reset tripped breakers.
The 'S' in SCADA -- SUPERVISORY. Like deciding how fas the subway car
will travel but not actually commutating the current in the motor.
You want local control that reports status (Data Acquisition)
and accepts control (Supervisory Control) from a higher level
functionary.
Right, I had a feeling I was misremembering but was too lazy to look it
up. Realtime depends on the application - SCADA signaling is fast
compared to the response times of large generators, realtime control of
the grid, not of the local inner loop generator controls (governor and
field exciter).
Indeed. And smaller generation systems can just get crushed like flies
if they try to stop a rampaging elephant as big GW systems drop
offline.
If the system did fail due to local over voltage excursions somewhere
and then failed to become stable again after a few suppliers dropped
out then their network stability analysis must be appallingly bad.
The problem is all of the distributed "residential" solar rivals "big GW
systems". E.g., we have ~10GW of total solar, here -- but, of that,
300,000 individual residential systems in the 5KW (avg) power rating.
So, 1.5GW whose location is varied and diverse BUT whose control is
*likely* mandated by regulations/specifications created when solar was
intended to be "the dog's tail" -- tracking an otherwise stable grid.
And, if a residential cogenerator goes offline, the residence's LOAD is
still there, no longer being supported by that "local" generation.
Right, the first generation of solar inverters was like that, the second generation of 'grid assist' inverters will assist in grid stabilization if properly used. At least some of these require a local battery and limit
grid connected inverter output to 80% of stand-alone rating so there is almost always some reserve for grid support.
BTW the reason for using reactive power setpoints to control grid voltage
can be illustrated by considering the connection of a generator to the
grid. The generator is brought up to slightly above synchronous speed
with the governor in droop mode (power output subtracts from speed
setpoint) and the field excitation will be in voltage regulation mode, voltage set the same as the local grid connection. As soon as the output breaker is closed (in phase!) the generator speed and voltage is locked to the grid, local control is not possible. The governor will increase power until the negative power feedback reduces the setpoint to exactly grid
speed, delivering a small amount of power to prevent the reverse power
relay from tripping; the governor speed knob now controls real power
output, not speed.
At the instant the main breaker closes on the grid an aux contact switches the field exciter to reactive power control mode, easily measured in a balanced 3 phase system as Vac(-Ib), and initially set at 0. With
reactive power output at 0 the field exciter will provide as much field as required for real power output as set by the governor. More excitation
than required for real power produces reactive power, less is a bad idea. Small cogen may not get paid for or be required to provide reactive power
and won't for maximum efficiency, larger cogen will, and overall reactive power supply must be balanced with load requirements by the grid
operator. Increasing reactive power set points above load requirements
will raise grid voltage with the excess field excitation, not enough
reduces voltage.
Thus the requirement that grid support inverters deliver reactive power on low grid voltage - it has a much larger effect on grid voltage than real power, at least when there are enough rotating generators and induction motors on it. Plus you can get quite a bit of it with a small reduction
in real power due to the sin-cos relationship.
Glen
On 16/05/2025 3:51 am, john larkin wrote:
On Thu, 15 May 2025 12:37:24 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-15 08:18, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 15/05/2025 5:14 am, Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 2025-05-14 16:16, Glen Walpert wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 07:50:36 -0700, Don Y wrote:
On 5/13/2025 6:26 AM, Glen Walpert wrote:
Another very wild idea was increasing the frequency to around 600Hz. It
would make transformers and all coiled things smaller. Planes do this.
Possibly would also radiate more. And would not help with control.
But our clocks would run ten times faster.
And everything would hum.
This doesn't happen in aircraft.
On Thu, 15 May 2025 11:22:42 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 19:38:09 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 17:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation >>>>>>>> damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a
few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few
hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of >>>>>>> managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage.
I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported >>>>>>> there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more >>>>>> fuel.
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools
forever.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly >>>>>> fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who >>>>>> really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
The little modular reactors sound cool.
Putting used nuclear fuel someplace deepish underground is important.
While a nuclear war would be very very bad, surface storage makes it
much, much worse.
The Chernobyl disaster released about 3.5% of the core inventory of one
reactor out of four.(*)
One Hiroshima-size bomb on top of a comparable large nuke plant could
release all the inventory in all four cores, which would be about
4/0.035 ~ 114 times worse than Chernobyl.
If the site included extensive spent-fuel pools, the total would be
correspondingly larger--maybe 500 Chernobyls, maybe more. And that's
just one installation.
Not a bad score for one small bomb--there are lots bigger ones. :(
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
(*)
<https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28292/chernobyl-chapter-ii-the-release-dispersion-deposition-and-behaviour-of-radionuclides>
I'd be tempted to put hot waste in very heavy steel casks and drop
them into the Mariana Trench:
.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench>
It's 11 Km deep, and is where the Pacific Plate is subducting under
the Mariana plate, so those caskets are in for the long term. Nor is
retrieval all that easy, or a nuclear weapon of much consequence. If
it even works under such pressure.
Joe
Yes. Waste can be mixed into concrete or vitrified and dumped tens of thousands of feet into a trench. Only irrational fear prevents that.
Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:
On 16/05/2025 3:51 am, john larkin wrote:
On Thu, 15 May 2025 12:37:24 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-15 08:18, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 15/05/2025 5:14 am, Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 2025-05-14 16:16, Glen Walpert wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 07:50:36 -0700, Don Y wrote:
On 5/13/2025 6:26 AM, Glen Walpert wrote:
Another very wild idea was increasing the frequency to around 600Hz. It >>>> would make transformers and all coiled things smaller. Planes do this. >>>> Possibly would also radiate more. And would not help with control.
But our clocks would run ten times faster.
And everything would hum.
This doesn't happen in aircraft.
The ambient noise level in an aeroplane is much higher than in a house
on a quiet night. (Also, look up Fletcher-Munson curves to see why 600
c/s would be a lot worse than 50 or 60 c/s.)
Alternators for 600 c/s are feasible at a few kW in aircraft but they
are difficult to scale up to power station size.
Another problem with large-scale distribution at 600 c/s would be the inductive reactance of cross-country power lines and the need for
special alloys and thin laminations to reduce core-losses in
transformers.
Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net> wrote:
[...]
Disabling javascript allows reading 4 paragraphs.
I'd also try incognito mode. Or a VPN.
A trick that sometimes works is to do 'Select All' from the keyboard, followed by 'Copy'. Then the text can be pasted into a text document
and read at leisure. It has to be done quickly before the page has
finished loading and the script blanks it out.
On 5/15/25 12:43, Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 2025-05-15 12:37, Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 2025-05-15 08:18, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 15/05/2025 5:14 am, Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 2025-05-14 16:16, Glen Walpert wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 07:50:36 -0700, Don Y wrote:
...
Wouldn't it be easier to have the entire distribution network using
DC?
just saying with a glass of wine in my hand :-)
That's probably correct, but it wouldn't be cheaper. It's probably
true that taking DC down to the sub-station level could be cheaper,
with today's technology, if you were starting from scratch, but
since that kit is already there you would be throwing away a lot of
big expensive transformers from the next level up, and replacing
them with a lot of big, expensive - if less expensive - inverters.
It would take a lot of capital investment to make the switch, and
the people who operate the grid are adminstrators rather than
entrepreneurs.
I'm just thinking that adding sources to a DC distribution network is
easier: the voltage just rises or drops. Possibly it autoregulates.
But of course, we have a huge installed system, replacing it would be
terribly expensive.
Thinking again. Would it be possible to have even the rotating mass
generators connect via inverters? I mean, the inverters would inject
power always at the exact frequency no matter what. The voltage could
vary, but the frequency would be stuck.
Of course, I know basically nothing of power generation/distribution,
so don't take me too seriously :-)
The frequency is the signal that tells generators how to adjust
their power! You *don't* want to interfere with that.
Individual generators and inverters can't force the frequency.
They *must* sync to the grid. The frequency is the same all over
Europe. (Barring small excursions to dynamically adjust the phase
from place to place. f=dphi/dt.)
On 5/15/25 17:54, john larkin wrote:
On Thu, 15 May 2025 11:22:42 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 19:38:09 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 17:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more >>>>>>> fuel.
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation
damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a
few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very >>>>>>>>> radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few
hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of >>>>>>>> managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage.
I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported >>>>>>>> there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool. >>>>>>>
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools >>>>> forever.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop >>>>>>> barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly >>>>>>> fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who >>>>>>> really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
The little modular reactors sound cool.
Putting used nuclear fuel someplace deepish underground is important.
While a nuclear war would be very very bad, surface storage makes it
much, much worse.
The Chernobyl disaster released about 3.5% of the core inventory of one >>>> reactor out of four.(*)
One Hiroshima-size bomb on top of a comparable large nuke plant could
release all the inventory in all four cores, which would be about
4/0.035 ~ 114 times worse than Chernobyl.
If the site included extensive spent-fuel pools, the total would be
correspondingly larger--maybe 500 Chernobyls, maybe more. And that's
just one installation.
Not a bad score for one small bomb--there are lots bigger ones. :(
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
(*)
<https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28292/chernobyl-chapter-ii-the-release-dispersion-deposition-and-behaviour-of-radionuclides>
I'd be tempted to put hot waste in very heavy steel casks and drop
them into the Mariana Trench:
.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench>
It's 11 Km deep, and is where the Pacific Plate is subducting under
the Mariana plate, so those caskets are in for the long term. Nor is
retrieval all that easy, or a nuclear weapon of much consequence. If
it even works under such pressure.
Joe
Yes. Waste can be mixed into concrete or vitrified and dumped tens of
thousands of feet into a trench. Only irrational fear prevents that.
Maybe, but counting on geological subduction to cover it all
is ridiculous. You don't seem to realize how slow that is.
Jeroen Belleman
Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:
On 16/05/2025 3:51 am, john larkin wrote:
On Thu, 15 May 2025 12:37:24 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-15 08:18, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 15/05/2025 5:14 am, Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 2025-05-14 16:16, Glen Walpert wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 07:50:36 -0700, Don Y wrote:
On 5/13/2025 6:26 AM, Glen Walpert wrote:
Another very wild idea was increasing the frequency to around 600Hz. It >> >> would make transformers and all coiled things smaller. Planes do this.
Possibly would also radiate more. And would not help with control.
But our clocks would run ten times faster.
And everything would hum.
This doesn't happen in aircraft.
The ambient noise level in an aeroplane is much higher than in a house
on a quiet night. (Also, look up Fletcher-Munson curves to see why 600
c/s would be a lot worse than 50 or 60 c/s.)
Alternators for 600 c/s are feasible at a few kW in aircraft but they
are difficult to scale up to power station size.
Another problem with large-scale distribution at 600 c/s would be the >inductive reactance of cross-country power lines and the need for
special alloys and thin laminations to reduce core-losses in
transformers.
On 2025-05-15 19:51, Liz Tuddenham wrote:
Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net> wrote:
[...]
Disabling javascript allows reading 4 paragraphs.
I'd also try incognito mode. Or a VPN.
A trick that sometimes works is to do 'Select All' from the keyboard, followed by 'Copy'. Then the text can be pasted into a text document
and read at leisure. It has to be done quickly before the page has finished loading and the script blanks it out.
Yay, would be possible if connected via modem, not via fibre and a
powerful computer.
On Fri, 16 May 2025 07:23:08 +0100, liz@poppyrecords.invalid.invalid
(Liz Tuddenham) wrote:
Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:
On 16/05/2025 3:51 am, john larkin wrote:
On Thu, 15 May 2025 12:37:24 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-15 08:18, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 15/05/2025 5:14 am, Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 2025-05-14 16:16, Glen Walpert wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 07:50:36 -0700, Don Y wrote:
On 5/13/2025 6:26 AM, Glen Walpert wrote:
Another very wild idea was increasing the frequency to around 600Hz. It >>>>> would make transformers and all coiled things smaller. Planes do this. >>>>> Possibly would also radiate more. And would not help with control.
But our clocks would run ten times faster.
And everything would hum.
This doesn't happen in aircraft.
The ambient noise level in an aeroplane is much higher than in a house
on a quiet night. (Also, look up Fletcher-Munson curves to see why 600
c/s would be a lot worse than 50 or 60 c/s.)
Alternators for 600 c/s are feasible at a few kW in aircraft but they
are difficult to scale up to power station size.
Another problem with large-scale distribution at 600 c/s would be the
inductive reactance of cross-country power lines and the need for
special alloys and thin laminations to reduce core-losses in
transformers.
Sometimes on a commercial flight the pilot will address the passengers
and you can hear a distinct 400 Hz background noise.
And big transformers push the saturation limits of the steel, so there
will be magnetostriction. You can already hear 60 Hz hum near a big transformer.
Sloman has to deny anything that I say. Beats thinking.
On Fri, 16 May 2025 09:50:52 +0200, Jeroen Belleman
<jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:
On 5/15/25 17:54, john larkin wrote:
On Thu, 15 May 2025 11:22:42 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 19:38:09 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 17:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more >>>>>>>> fuel.
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation
damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a
few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very >>>>>>>>>> radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few
hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of >>>>>>>>> managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the >>>>>>>>> government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage.
I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported >>>>>>>>> there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool. >>>>>>>>
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd >>>>>> get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools >>>>>> forever.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop >>>>>>>> barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly >>>>>>>> fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who >>>>>>>> really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
The little modular reactors sound cool.
Putting used nuclear fuel someplace deepish underground is important. >>>>> While a nuclear war would be very very bad, surface storage makes it >>>>> much, much worse.
The Chernobyl disaster released about 3.5% of the core inventory of one >>>>> reactor out of four.(*)
One Hiroshima-size bomb on top of a comparable large nuke plant could >>>>> release all the inventory in all four cores, which would be about
4/0.035 ~ 114 times worse than Chernobyl.
If the site included extensive spent-fuel pools, the total would be
correspondingly larger--maybe 500 Chernobyls, maybe more. And that's >>>>> just one installation.
Not a bad score for one small bomb--there are lots bigger ones. :(
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
(*)
<https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28292/chernobyl-chapter-ii-the-release-dispersion-deposition-and-behaviour-of-radionuclides>
I'd be tempted to put hot waste in very heavy steel casks and drop
them into the Mariana Trench:
.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench>
It's 11 Km deep, and is where the Pacific Plate is subducting under
the Mariana plate, so those caskets are in for the long term. Nor is
retrieval all that easy, or a nuclear weapon of much consequence. If
it even works under such pressure.
Joe
Yes. Waste can be mixed into concrete or vitrified and dumped tens of
thousands of feet into a trench. Only irrational fear prevents that.
Maybe, but counting on geological subduction to cover it all
is ridiculous. You don't seem to realize how slow that is.
Do the math.
On 5/16/25 16:05, john larkin wrote:
On Fri, 16 May 2025 09:50:52 +0200, Jeroen Belleman
<jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:
On 5/15/25 17:54, john larkin wrote:
On Thu, 15 May 2025 11:22:42 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 19:38:09 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 17:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more >>>>>>>>> fuel.
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation
damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a
few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very >>>>>>>>>>> radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few
hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of >>>>>>>>>> managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the >>>>>>>>>> government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage.
I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported
there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool. >>>>>>>>>
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd >>>>>>> get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools >>>>>>> forever.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop >>>>>>>>> barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly >>>>>>>>> fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who >>>>>>>>> really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
The little modular reactors sound cool.
Putting used nuclear fuel someplace deepish underground is important. >>>>>> While a nuclear war would be very very bad, surface storage makes it >>>>>> much, much worse.
The Chernobyl disaster released about 3.5% of the core inventory of one >>>>>> reactor out of four.(*)
One Hiroshima-size bomb on top of a comparable large nuke plant could >>>>>> release all the inventory in all four cores, which would be about
4/0.035 ~ 114 times worse than Chernobyl.
If the site included extensive spent-fuel pools, the total would be >>>>>> correspondingly larger--maybe 500 Chernobyls, maybe more. And that's >>>>>> just one installation.
Not a bad score for one small bomb--there are lots bigger ones. :( >>>>>>
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
(*)
<https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28292/chernobyl-chapter-ii-the-release-dispersion-deposition-and-behaviour-of-radionuclides>
I'd be tempted to put hot waste in very heavy steel casks and drop
them into the Mariana Trench:
.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench>
It's 11 Km deep, and is where the Pacific Plate is subducting under
the Mariana plate, so those caskets are in for the long term. Nor is >>>>> retrieval all that easy, or a nuclear weapon of much consequence. If >>>>> it even works under such pressure.
Joe
Yes. Waste can be mixed into concrete or vitrified and dumped tens of
thousands of feet into a trench. Only irrational fear prevents that.
Maybe, but counting on geological subduction to cover it all
is ridiculous. You don't seem to realize how slow that is.
Jeroen Belleman
Do the math.
Subduction is usually in the cm/year ballpark. The waste will be
lying on the seabed for millennia, likely lots of millennia, if
it doesn't dissolve before that. Besides, it's a bit gross to
pollute an environment we have barely even seen yet.
Oh well, it's not your backyard.
Jeroen Belleman
On Fri, 16 May 2025 09:50:52 +0200, Jeroen Belleman
<jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:
On 5/15/25 17:54, john larkin wrote:
On Thu, 15 May 2025 11:22:42 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 19:38:09 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 17:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more >>>>>>>> fuel.
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation
damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a
few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very >>>>>>>>>> radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few
hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of >>>>>>>>> managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the >>>>>>>>> government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage.
I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported >>>>>>>>> there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool. >>>>>>>>
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd >>>>>> get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools >>>>>> forever.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop >>>>>>>> barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly >>>>>>>> fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who >>>>>>>> really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
The little modular reactors sound cool.
Putting used nuclear fuel someplace deepish underground is important. >>>>> While a nuclear war would be very very bad, surface storage makes it >>>>> much, much worse.
The Chernobyl disaster released about 3.5% of the core inventory of one >>>>> reactor out of four.(*)
One Hiroshima-size bomb on top of a comparable large nuke plant could >>>>> release all the inventory in all four cores, which would be about
4/0.035 ~ 114 times worse than Chernobyl.
If the site included extensive spent-fuel pools, the total would be
correspondingly larger--maybe 500 Chernobyls, maybe more. And that's >>>>> just one installation.
Not a bad score for one small bomb--there are lots bigger ones. :(
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
(*)
<https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28292/chernobyl-chapter-ii-the-release-dispersion-deposition-and-behaviour-of-radionuclides>
I'd be tempted to put hot waste in very heavy steel casks and drop
them into the Mariana Trench:
.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench>
It's 11 Km deep, and is where the Pacific Plate is subducting under
the Mariana plate, so those caskets are in for the long term. Nor is
retrieval all that easy, or a nuclear weapon of much consequence. If
it even works under such pressure.
Joe
Yes. Waste can be mixed into concrete or vitrified and dumped tens of
thousands of feet into a trench. Only irrational fear prevents that.
Maybe, but counting on geological subduction to cover it all
is ridiculous. You don't seem to realize how slow that is.
Jeroen Belleman
Do the math.
On Fri, 16 May 2025 17:30:00 +0200, Jeroen Belleman
<jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:
On 5/16/25 16:05, john larkin wrote:
On Fri, 16 May 2025 09:50:52 +0200, Jeroen Belleman
<jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:
On 5/15/25 17:54, john larkin wrote:
On Thu, 15 May 2025 11:22:42 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net> >>>>> wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 19:38:09 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 17:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more >>>>>>>>>> fuel.
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation
damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a
few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very >>>>>>>>>>>> radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few
hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of >>>>>>>>>>> managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the >>>>>>>>>>> government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage.
I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported
there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool. >>>>>>>>>>
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd >>>>>>>> get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools >>>>>>>> forever.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop >>>>>>>>>> barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly
fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who >>>>>>>>>> really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
The little modular reactors sound cool.
Putting used nuclear fuel someplace deepish underground is important. >>>>>>> While a nuclear war would be very very bad, surface storage makes it >>>>>>> much, much worse.
The Chernobyl disaster released about 3.5% of the core inventory of one >>>>>>> reactor out of four.(*)
One Hiroshima-size bomb on top of a comparable large nuke plant could >>>>>>> release all the inventory in all four cores, which would be about >>>>>>> 4/0.035 ~ 114 times worse than Chernobyl.
If the site included extensive spent-fuel pools, the total would be >>>>>>> correspondingly larger--maybe 500 Chernobyls, maybe more. And that's >>>>>>> just one installation.
Not a bad score for one small bomb--there are lots bigger ones. :( >>>>>>>
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
(*)
<https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28292/chernobyl-chapter-ii-the-release-dispersion-deposition-and-behaviour-of-radionuclides>
I'd be tempted to put hot waste in very heavy steel casks and drop >>>>>> them into the Mariana Trench:
.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench>
It's 11 Km deep, and is where the Pacific Plate is subducting under >>>>>> the Mariana plate, so those caskets are in for the long term. Nor is >>>>>> retrieval all that easy, or a nuclear weapon of much consequence. If >>>>>> it even works under such pressure.
Joe
Yes. Waste can be mixed into concrete or vitrified and dumped tens of >>>>> thousands of feet into a trench. Only irrational fear prevents that. >>>>>
Maybe, but counting on geological subduction to cover it all
is ridiculous. You don't seem to realize how slow that is.
Jeroen Belleman
Do the math.
Subduction is usually in the cm/year ballpark. The waste will be
lying on the seabed for millennia, likely lots of millennia, if
it doesn't dissolve before that. Besides, it's a bit gross to
pollute an environment we have barely even seen yet.
Oh well, it's not your backyard.
A well sealed cask of vitrified nuclear waste, roughly a cubic meter,
will be insoluble, basically a rock, and will be secure for millenia,
as the hotter nucleotides decay. It will probably be sunk deep into
muck, under kilometers of water. It won't be back for millions of
years.
The earth's oceans are 1.3 billion cubic kilometers, and that water is already mildly radiactive, mostly from potassium. Cosmic rays keep
generating radioactive isotopes in sea water. There's enough uranium
in sea water that we would extract it if we didn't have cheaper
sources.
Math.
Carlos E.R. <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-15 19:51, Liz Tuddenham wrote:
Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net> wrote:
[...]
Disabling javascript allows reading 4 paragraphs.
I'd also try incognito mode. Or a VPN.
A trick that sometimes works is to do 'Select All' from the keyboard,
followed by 'Copy'. Then the text can be pasted into a text document
and read at leisure. It has to be done quickly before the page has
finished loading and the script blanks it out.
Yay, would be possible if connected via modem, not via fibre and a
powerful computer.
Is there any way of slowing it down?
On Thu, 15 May 2025 11:22:42 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 19:38:09 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 17:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation >>>>>>>> damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a
few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few
hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of >>>>>>> managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage.
I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported >>>>>>> there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more >>>>>> fuel.
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools
forever.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly >>>>>> fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who >>>>>> really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
The little modular reactors sound cool.
Putting used nuclear fuel someplace deepish underground is important.
While a nuclear war would be very very bad, surface storage makes it
much, much worse.
The Chernobyl disaster released about 3.5% of the core inventory of one
reactor out of four.(*)
One Hiroshima-size bomb on top of a comparable large nuke plant could
release all the inventory in all four cores, which would be about
4/0.035 ~ 114 times worse than Chernobyl.
If the site included extensive spent-fuel pools, the total would be
correspondingly larger--maybe 500 Chernobyls, maybe more. And that's
just one installation.
Not a bad score for one small bomb--there are lots bigger ones. :(
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
(*)
<https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28292/chernobyl-chapter-ii-the-release-dispersion-deposition-and-behaviour-of-radionuclides>
I'd be tempted to put hot waste in very heavy steel casks and drop
them into the Mariana Trench:
.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench>
It's 11 Km deep, and is where the Pacific Plate is subducting under
the Mariana plate, so those caskets are in for the long term. Nor is
retrieval all that easy, or a nuclear weapon of much consequence. If
it even works under such pressure.
Joe
Yes. Waste can be mixed into concrete or vitrified and dumped tens of thousands of feet into a trench. Only irrational fear prevents that.
Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:
On 16/05/2025 3:51 am, john larkin wrote:
On Thu, 15 May 2025 12:37:24 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-15 08:18, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 15/05/2025 5:14 am, Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 2025-05-14 16:16, Glen Walpert wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 07:50:36 -0700, Don Y wrote:
On 5/13/2025 6:26 AM, Glen Walpert wrote:
Another very wild idea was increasing the frequency to around 600Hz. It >>>> would make transformers and all coiled things smaller. Planes do this. >>>> Possibly would also radiate more. And would not help with control.
But our clocks would run ten times faster.
And everything would hum.
This doesn't happen in aircraft.
The ambient noise level in an aeroplane is much higher than in a house
on a quiet night. (Also, look up Fletcher-Munson curves to see why 600
c/s would be a lot worse than 50 or 60 c/s.)
Alternators for 600 c/s are feasible at a few kW in aircraft but they
are difficult to scale up to power station size.
Another problem with large-scale distribution at 600 c/s would be the inductive reactance of cross-country power lines and the need for
special alloys and thin laminations to reduce core-losses in
transformers.
On 5/15/25 11:23 PM, Liz Tuddenham wrote:
Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:
On 16/05/2025 3:51 am, john larkin wrote:
On Thu, 15 May 2025 12:37:24 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-15 08:18, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 15/05/2025 5:14 am, Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 2025-05-14 16:16, Glen Walpert wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 07:50:36 -0700, Don Y wrote:
On 5/13/2025 6:26 AM, Glen Walpert wrote:
Another very wild idea was increasing the frequency to around 600Hz. It >>>>> would make transformers and all coiled things smaller. Planes do this. >>>>> Possibly would also radiate more. And would not help with control.
But our clocks would run ten times faster.
And everything would hum.
This doesn't happen in aircraft.
The ambient noise level in an aeroplane is much higher than in a house
on a quiet night. (Also, look up Fletcher-Munson curves to see why 600
c/s would be a lot worse than 50 or 60 c/s.)
Alternators for 600 c/s are feasible at a few kW in aircraft but they
are difficult to scale up to power station size.
A modern large aircraft may have close to a megawatt of generation capacity.
This doesn't happen in aircraft.
The ambient noise level in an aeroplane is much higher than in a house
on a quiet night. (Also, look up Fletcher-Munson curves to see why 600
c/s would be a lot worse than 50 or 60 c/s.)
Alternators for 600 c/s are feasible at a few kW in aircraft but they
are difficult to scale up to power station size.
A modern large aircraft may have close to a megawatt of generation capacity.
That seems too paltry.
.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimitz-class_aircraft_carrier>
Propulsion is 190 Megawatts. In earlier ships, this would be all
steam and mechanical.
.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_John_F._Kennedy_(CVN-79)>
Later ships are increasingly electric, to support modern things like
big radars, electromagnetic launch systems, lasers, railguns, and so
on.
On 5/15/2025 2:37 PM, Glen Walpert wrote:
SCADA is used to monitor and control the grid, where control is
done in real time by adjusting the set points for real and
reactive power at all controlled power sources. A small
percentage of sources being inaccessible degrades control by an
insignificant amount.
I'll believe it is used to monitor the parameters at key locations in
"realtime", update set points and try to reset tripped breakers.
The 'S' in SCADA -- SUPERVISORY. Like deciding how fas the subway car
will travel but not actually commutating the current in the motor.
You want local control that reports status (Data Acquisition)
and accepts control (Supervisory Control) from a higher level
functionary.
Right, I had a feeling I was misremembering but was too lazy to look it
up. Realtime depends on the application - SCADA signaling is fast
compared to the response times of large generators, realtime control of
the grid, not of the local inner loop generator controls (governor and
field exciter).
Yes. I think Theo's notion was to provide a "reference signal"
to the "network" (via RF) instead of letting the network itself supply
that. Thinking, perhaps, that <something> could better hold the
network's individual cogenerators in closer "check"
than allowing them to be semi-autonomous.
Indeed. And smaller generation systems can just get crushed like
flies if they try to stop a rampaging elephant as big GW systems drop
offline.
If the system did fail due to local over voltage excursions somewhere
and then failed to become stable again after a few suppliers dropped
out then their network stability analysis must be appallingly bad.
The problem is all of the distributed "residential" solar rivals "big
GW systems". E.g., we have ~10GW of total solar, here -- but, of
that, 300,000 individual residential systems in the 5KW (avg) power
rating. So, 1.5GW whose location is varied and diverse BUT whose
control is *likely* mandated by regulations/specifications created
when solar was intended to be "the dog's tail" -- tracking an
otherwise stable grid.
And, if a residential cogenerator goes offline, the residence's LOAD
is still there, no longer being supported by that "local" generation.
Right, the first generation of solar inverters was like that, the
second generation of 'grid assist' inverters will assist in grid
stabilization if properly used. At least some of these require a local
battery and limit grid connected inverter output to 80% of stand-alone
rating so there is almost always some reserve for grid support.
How are the "legacy" installations treated? Are they mandated to
replace (or update) their controllers to comply with "new requirements"?
Or,
is the hope that their effects will be lost in the noise?
(I'm thinking particularly about folks who paid for residential solar installation and might -- potentially -- be forced/coerced into having
to do an equipment upgrade because of issues with "their version" of the hardware.)
Yes. I think Theo's notion was to provide a "reference signal"
to the "network" (via RF) instead of letting the network itself supply
that. Thinking, perhaps, that <something> could better hold the
network's individual cogenerators in closer "check"
than allowing them to be semi-autonomous.
I would seem to be possible to sync all sources to a common reference such
as GPS time, with the grid operator providing power and phase settings to
all sources via network to balance load and sources. Stability analysis
of such a network might be a good subject for a PhD thesis. There is work being done on standards for micro-grids where all sources could be
inverters, and there has to be some method of synchronizing and load
sharing but I haven't heard any details on how.
Right, the first generation of solar inverters was like that, the
second generation of 'grid assist' inverters will assist in grid
stabilization if properly used. At least some of these require a local
battery and limit grid connected inverter output to 80% of stand-alone
rating so there is almost always some reserve for grid support.
How are the "legacy" installations treated? Are they mandated to
replace (or update) their controllers to comply with "new requirements"?
Or,
is the hope that their effects will be lost in the noise?
(I'm thinking particularly about folks who paid for residential solar
installation and might -- potentially -- be forced/coerced into having
to do an equipment upgrade because of issues with "their version" of the
hardware.)
In the US there has never been a requirement to update legacy
installations, not sure about elsewhere.
There is a 35 minute UL advertisement at:
https://www.ul.com/grid-code-compliance-ul-solutions
Ignore the form and play the video, suggest sound off and drag cursor from slide to slide, should take less than 5 min to read them all.
The status of much of the proposed EU harmonized grid standards is "lack
of agreement" :-).
Distributing the signal wouldn't be an issue. The problem might be that
the network exhibits different phase shifts over such a large geographical area. I.e., is a zero crossing in Boston coincident with one in San Diego, *presently*?
On 2025-05-15 17:54, john larkin wrote:
On Thu, 15 May 2025 11:22:42 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 19:38:09 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 17:37, john larkin wrote:
On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more >>>>>>> fuel.
On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation
damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a
few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very >>>>>>>>> radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few
hundred thousand years.
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of >>>>>>>> managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage.
I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported >>>>>>>> there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool. >>>>>>>
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools >>>>> forever.
When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop >>>>>>> barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
That's simply wrong.
It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly >>>>>>> fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who >>>>>>> really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
Why? It's very safe when done carefully.
The little modular reactors sound cool.
Putting used nuclear fuel someplace deepish underground is important.
While a nuclear war would be very very bad, surface storage makes it
much, much worse.
The Chernobyl disaster released about 3.5% of the core inventory of one >>>> reactor out of four.(*)
One Hiroshima-size bomb on top of a comparable large nuke plant could
release all the inventory in all four cores, which would be about
4/0.035 ~ 114 times worse than Chernobyl.
If the site included extensive spent-fuel pools, the total would be
correspondingly larger--maybe 500 Chernobyls, maybe more. And that's
just one installation.
Not a bad score for one small bomb--there are lots bigger ones. :(
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
(*)
<https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28292/chernobyl-chapter-ii-the-release-dispersion-deposition-and-behaviour-of-radionuclides>
I'd be tempted to put hot waste in very heavy steel casks and drop
them into the Mariana Trench:
.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench>
It's 11 Km deep, and is where the Pacific Plate is subducting under
the Mariana plate, so those caskets are in for the long term. Nor is
retrieval all that easy, or a nuclear weapon of much consequence. If
it even works under such pressure.
Joe
Yes. Waste can be mixed into concrete or vitrified and dumped tens of
thousands of feet into a trench. Only irrational fear prevents that.
On the contrary, it is a very rational knowledge that prevents it.
On 5/17/25 10:25 PM, Don Y wrote:
<...>
Distributing the signal wouldn't be an issue. The problem might be that
the network exhibits different phase shifts over such a large geographical >> area. I.e., is a zero crossing in Boston coincident with one in San Diego, >> *presently*?
It is not. The US is divided into multiple regions with DC interties.
The physical size of the US is about one cycle of 60Hz at light speed!
