MISSION STATEMENT
As conversations of weather occurrences and suggested anomalies become
more frequent and mainstream in the scientific community, as well as at
the grass-roots-level, the need to embrace and index substantive
information into an authoritative conduit to encourage more research and
development~~~IS IMPERATIVE.
Pertinent themes as Global Warming, Climate Change, and Melting Ice Caps
has stimulated discussions, seeded forums, and spawned additional
research, all to foster consensus, and recommend courses-of-action.
The intent of CLIMATE; THE CONVERSATION, is to be The Bulletin Board,
The Platform, The Podium, and The Credible Source & Bibliography
for such astute, sincere, and scholarly considerations.
Sincerely;
Administrators:
Andrew M. Marconi
Lou Marconi
In Tennessee, Time Comes for a Nuclear Plant Four Decades in the Making
""""""""SPRING
CITY, Tenn. — When the Tennessee Valley Authority first ordered Watts
Bar 2, the nuclear reactor now approaching completion here, demand for
electricity was growing at 7 percent a year and coal supplies were
uncertain. The mercury, soot and acid rain that coal produced were
simply accepted as the way things were, and many of the people who now
worry about global warming had not yet been born.
But
that was 1970. Today nearly all of that is reversed as Watts Bar 2, the
nuclear industry’s version of a time traveler, prepares to begin
operations. Now there is barely any growth in electricity demand, and
plenty of coal, but most aging coal-burning plants need expensive
cleaning or replacement. Thus the reactor, the T.V.A. reasons, is
arriving at an opportune moment, even if almost every projection made
over the last 44 years has proved wrong. With halting progress amid
changing projections, construction has taken longer than that for the
Panama Canal or the Great Pyramid of Cheops.
“I do find it as something of great value, maybe not for the reasons we restarted it,” said William D. Johnson, the T.V.A.’s chief executive.
The
agency started Watts Bar as part of a campaign to build 17 reactors,
but dropped the project in 1988 after spending about $1.7 billion, when
it was supposedly 80 percent complete. In 2007, with electricity demand
growing again, the T.V.A. board voted to restart work because,
consultants said, it could be finished for $2 billion. But by the end of
next year, when commercial operation is now expected, the T.V.A. will
have spent more than $4 billion.
But
the reactor still has very strong political support, as a source of
thousands of construction jobs for many years — 2,900 at the moment —
and in a region that generally accepts big government projects and
specifically nuclear power.
“When
you end up in a good place, you shouldn’t complain,” Senator Lamar
Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, said in an interview at the plant,
which he toured in early October.
The
T.V.A. proudly bills it as the first reactor of the 21st century, even
if it looks like it is in first place only because it has been lapped by
the other runners. Watts Bar 1, also mothballed in the 1980s, finally
started in 1996; of the 99 other commercial power reactors around the
country, most were completed by the late 1980s.
Watts
Bar 2 is something of an oddity. New industrial plants of any kind have
computerized controls; this one still has computer monitoring, but the
gauges and switches are all hard-wired in the style of the 1970s, partly
because the managers want it to resemble Watts Bar 1 as closely as
possible. The plan is for operators to be licensed on both plants, which
share a control room, and to switch seamlessly from one to the other.
When
work resumed in 2007, engineers decided that the mechanical switches in
the control room, although they had never been used, were too old. But
nobody manufactured mechanical switches of that type anymore, so the
T.V.A. sent them back to the manufacturer for reconditioning.
The
500-foot-tall cooling tower, narrow at the middle to create a draft, is
intended to handle 410,000 gallons of water a minute. It is still
sturdy, but dark and weathered and streaked with yellow-green moss.
Other
parts are more modern. The turbines, which convert steam from the
reactor to mechanical energy that is turned into electricity, were
replaced before they were ever used because newer designs are more
efficient and durable.
Not everyone is convinced that finishing the job is a good idea.
The
underlying difficulty, according to S. David Freeman, whom President
Jimmy Carter appointed to chair the T.V.A. in 1977, and who tried to
shut many of the nuclear projects, is that the agency’s executives are
“nuke-aholics.”
“They’re addicted to nuclear power,” said Mr. Freeman, the author of a book
that argues that renewable energy can meet nearly all electricity
needs. He said that when he joined the T.V.A. board, “they were telling
me Watts Bar was 90 percent finished, but a few years later it was 84
percent finished.”
Stephen
A. Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy,
is another skeptic. “There are elements of T.V.A. that are drawn to
nuclear like a moth to the flame,” he said. “And the reality is T.V.A.
has been burned very, very badly by nuclear power over the years.”
The
contractors lowballed the price to build it in 1970 and again in 2006,
Mr. Smith said. “To make it like new, they’re pulling out equipment that
has never operated, and replacing it with new equipment,” he said. For
people who pay electric bills, he added, “this has been a disaster.”
For
the same money being spent to finish Watts Bar 2, the agency could have
improved efficiency and reduced demand by more power than the reactor
will produce, he argued. But his group has given up trying to stop it;
now the alliance is trying to block the restart of yet another nuclear
plant project abandoned years ago, Bellefonte 1.
Still,
the changing economics of coal make a fundamental difference, said
David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the Union of Concerned
Scientists, a nonprofit group that is usually highly critical of nuclear
power.
“The Clean Air Act,
the upgrades that have to be done, coal scrubbing and stuff like that,
have basically made nuclear look a little bit better,” he said. Mr.
Lochbaum praised steps that the T.V.A. has taken to improve the safety
of the 1960s design.
Mr.
Johnson, the T.V.A. chief executive, said that despite the shifting
reasons for building the plant, Watts Bar 2 would be “a really good
asset for the people of the Tennessee Valley.”
The
approaching completion surprises even some of those most closely
involved. “I get to do something I never thought I’d see,” said Thomas
D. Wallace, the Watts Bar senior operations manager. He was part of the
skeleton staff after construction stopped, and for years made his rounds
inspecting the structures lit with temporary lights.
In
the control room, Joyce N. Artis, a senior reactor operator who has
been at the plant since 1994, acknowledged the long, twisting path to
completion. But, she said, “we had a plan, and we executed it.”
A version of this article appears in print on October 20, 2014, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: In Tennessee, Time Comes for a Nuclear Plant Four Decades in the Making. """""""
Being at the TIPPING-POINT of the many many factors that are clearly demonstrating to have an impact on this orb that we call Earth, it is becoming increasingly apparent decisions and necessary actions must be taken to reverse the detrimental trends that are increasingly self-evident.
Certainly one of the considerations to curb the dependency on fossil-fuels --- is Nuclear Power. Some will venture so far as to suggest that it is a VIABLE alternative consideration to curb this dependency. The argument for nuclear power can be stated pretty simply: We have no choice. If
the world intends to address the threat of global warming and still
satisfy its growing appetite for electricity, it needs an ambitious
expansion of nuclear power.
Scientists
agree that greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide, are building up in
the atmosphere and contributing to a gradual increase in global average
temperatures. At the same time, making electricity accounts for about a
third of U.S. greenhouse emissions, mostly from burning fossil fuels to
produce power. """One of the biggest dangers to our security is from oil nations providing support to anti-U.S. terrorist groups. The faster we can move away from carbon-based energy, the faster we take away that funding source. Nuclear energy offers the fastest and most direct path to that safer future."""
Once we have assessed their impacts, and once we have recognized the negative affects
on the environment, on the land that we are farming, on our commercial and industrial endeavors, on the atmosphere that
we are breathing, it is critical to recognize that WE MUST REVERSE THESE
TRENDS. Then, given the time
and place to implement actions and practices to have a cause-and-effect
impact in a positive
way, will influence implementation, and at least retard further
deterioration of our environment and our climate. On a larger scale,
reversing the trends of deterioration should always be----the ultimate
objective.
Its impact on the economy, pollution, and the focus on Climate; The Conversation---makes this worthy of continued enthusiasm and consideration
Lou Marconi (SuiteLou0819)
Its impact on the economy, pollution, and the focus on Climate; The Conversation---makes this worthy of continued enthusiasm and consideration
Lou Marconi (SuiteLou0819)
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