Calif. Gov. Brown Declares State Of Emergency Over Gas Leak

[kristopher]

Calif. Gov. Brown Declares State Of Emergency Over Gas Leak
January 7, 20161:24 AM ET
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

California Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency Wednesday over a massive natural-gas leak that has been spewing methane and other gases into a Los Angeles neighborhood for months, sickening residents and forcing thousands to evacuate.

In a statement, Brown said he acted based on the requests of people in the community of Porter Ranch and the "prolonged and continuing" nature of the gas blowout at the underground storage facility.

The well, owned by Southern California Gas Co., has been gushing up to 1,200 tons of climate-changing methane daily, along with other gases, since it was first reported in October. It will be months before workers can stem the leak, experts say.

Along with other measures underway, Brown told the gas company to come up with backup plans in case efforts to close the blowout fail and ordered emergency regulations for other gas-storage facilities throughout the state.

The utility is paying to relocate thousands of households ...

http://www.npr.org/2016/01/07/462223722/calif-gov-brown-declares-state-of-emergency-over-gas-leak

[arcane1]

1. I am honestly astonished that the utility is paying to relocate people.

It's nice to be pleasantly surprised once in a while.

[Nihil]

2. It's cheaper than fixing the problem.

Somewhat reminiscent of certain car manufacturers deciding to take the hit
on insurance & out of court payments for fatalities rather than the costlier
option of a recall to fix their shit cars.

[NNadir]

3. But...but...but...but...California is a so called "renewable energy" paradise!!!!!

The fact is, since the wind doesn't always blow, and the sun doesn't always shine, the so called "renewable energy" industry is wholly and completely dependent on fluid fossil fuels, either gas or oil, to provide rapidly dispatchable electricity.

An anti-nuke complaining about a gas leak is yet again another example of an arsonist complaining about a forest fire.

California's natural gas consumption is now at record levels, in part because it's been closing nuclear plants.

Since the fool Mark Z. Jacobson lives in California, we're all waiting for him to produce a paper on natural gas evacuations like the very stupid one he wrote about Diablo Canyon.

[kristopher]

4. As usual, you have it backwards - nuclear requires far more fossil backup than renewables.

With nuclear the system has to be prepared at all times for the immediate unscheduled loss of the entire capacity of every nuclear reactor in operation. That requires FAR MORE SPINNING RESERVES than any combination of even high penetration renewables, where the fluctuations are both predictable and distributed.

Par for the course, your facts simply aren't facts, they are just BS and dishonest vitriol.

[NNadir]

5. How clueless can one actually be?

Last edited Sun Jan 10, 2016, 08:28 AM - Edit history (1)

It never ceases to amaze me how little science anti-nukes know, how little engineering, and how facile they are at making stuff up.

It's the only way to account for such blank stupidity.

The capacity factor of US nuclear plants is the highest in the country.

I'll do something that dumb scientifically illiterate anti-nukes can't do, and provide a simple and clear reference that's easily accessible to anyone with a brain: EIA: Nuclear "Outages"

Now, one never knows how twisted anti-nukes can be in their quest to make all future generations dependent forever on dangerous natural gas, the waste of which they couldn't give a rat's ass about, but, um, um, at the risk of hearing something very, very, very, stupid, one might ask an anti-nuke "What exactly do all those figures reading "100%" mean?"

The answer is sure to be as delicious at the claim that nuclear plants, running at 100% capacity need "spinning reserve."

When was the last time that a wind plant registered 100% capacity utilization? A better question might be to ask when was the first time one registered 100% capacity utilization. Before these toxic pieces of shit, wind turbines, become rotting metal and land fill bait, littered with the carcasses of dead birds, which generally takes about 20 years, they almost never produce 100% of their rated energy, even though the liars in the so called "renewable energy" anti-nuke business, gas bags to a fault, never tire of trying to confuse capacity with production.

You hear, for instance, that "50MW of solar energy were installed in the fucking desert" without hearing that even in a fucking desert that cadmium laced crap can't reach 20% capacity utilization, meaning that "50MW" is actually less than 10MW, and in any case no one can disassemble a single gas plant because of something called "night."

Usually at this point, a dumb guy will start muttering something about batteries, which of course, is an indication that they know even less about toxicology and thermodynamics than they do about how an electric system works.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

[kristopher]

6. That's more of your obfuscation to try and hide facts

It isn't relevant to the need for spinning reserves how frequently a nuclear plant scrams, what matters is
1) the lack of predictability and 2) the consequences to the grid of the loss.

A failure of a nuclear plant without sufficient spinning reserves in place could easily lead to a widespread major blackout - in fact it almost certainly would. This means that the fossil fuel plants are up and constantly running in order to be ready to instantly step in when a nuclear plant failure occurs.

Wind and solar are variable, but their variability is both predictable and easy to compensate for. It requires very little additional consumption of fossil fuels to enable their operation safely. The more renewables are on the grid, the less fossil fuel is required since every watt produced by renewables replaces a watt of fossil fueled electricity.

Doesn’t Wind Power Need Backup Generation? Isn’t More Fossil Fuel Burned with Wind Than Without, Due to Backup Requirements?

In a power system, it is necessary to maintain a continuous balance between production and consumption. System operators deploy controllable generation to follow the change in total demand, not the variation from a single generator or customer load. When wind is added to the system, the variability in the net load becomes the operating target for the system operator. It is not necessary and, indeed, it would be quite costly for grid operators to follow the variation in generation from a single generating plant or customer load.

“Backup” generating plants dedicated to wind plants—or to any other generation plant or load for that matter—are not required, and would actually be a poor and unnecessarily costly use of power-generation resources.

Regarding whether the addition of wind generation results in more combustion of fossil fuels, a wind-generated kilowatthour displaces a kilowatthour that would have been generated by another source—usually one that burns a fossil fuel. The wind-generated kilowatthour therefore avoids the fuel consumption and emissions associated with that fossil-fuel kilowatthour. The incremental reserves (spinning or nonspinning) required by wind’s variability and uncertainty, however, themselves consume fuel and release emissions, so the net savings are somewhat reduced. But what quantity of reserves is required? Numerous studies conducted to date—many of which have been summarized in previous wind-specific special issues of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine—have found that the reserves required by wind are only a small fraction of the aggregate wind generation and vary with the level of wind output. Generally, some of these reserves are spinning and some are nonspinning. The regulating and load-following plants could be forced to operate at a reduced level of efficiency, resulting in increased fuel consumption and increased emissions per unit of output.

A conservative example serves to illustrate the fuel-consumption and emissions impacts stemming from wind’s regulation requirements. Compare three situations: 1) a block of energy is provided by fossil-fueled plants; 2) the same block of energy is provided by wind plants that require no incremental reserves; and 3) the same block of energy is provided by wind plants that do have incremental reserve requirements. It is assumed that the average fleet fossil-fuel efficiency is unchanged between situations one and two. This might not be precisely correct, but a sophisticated operational simulation is required to address this issue quantitatively. In fact, this has been done in several studies, which bear out the general conclusions reached in this simple example.

In situation one, an amount of fuel is burned to produce the block of energy. In situation two, all of that fuel is saved and all of the associated emissions are avoided. In situation three, it is assumed that 3% of the fossil generation is needed to provide reserves, all of these reserves are spinning, and that this generation incurs a 25% efficiency penalty. The corresponding fuel consumption necessary to provide the needed reserves is then 4% of the fuel required to generate the entire block of energy. Hence, the actual fuel and emissions savings percentage in situation three relative to situation one is 96% rather than 100%. The great majority of initially estimated fuel savings does in fact occur, however, and the notion that wind’s variations would actually increase system fuel consumption does not withstand scrutiny.

A study conducted by the United Kingdom Energy Research Center (UKERC) supports this example. UKERC reviewed four studies that directly addressed whether there are greater CO2 emissions from adding wind generation due to increasing operating reserves and operating fossil-fuel plants at a reduced efficiency level. The UKERC determined that the “efficiency penalty” was negligible to 7% for wind penetrations of up to 20%.

Special Masters Presentation by International Electronic and Electrical Engineers

Wind Power Myths Debunked
november/december 2009 IEEE power & energy magazine
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPE.2009.934268
1540-7977/09/$26.00©2009 IEEE

By Michael Milligan, Kevin Porter, Edgar DeMeo, Paul Denholm, Hannele Holttinen, Brendan Kirby, Nicholas Miller, Andrew Mills, Mark O’Malley, Matthew Schuerger, and Lennart Soder

This special Open Access article is available for free at http://www.ieee-pes.org/images/pdf/open-access-milligan.pdf

[NNadir]

7. I knew the response would be tortured, and it was.

Last edited Sun Jan 10, 2016, 08:52 PM - Edit history (2)

Apparently, anti-nukes can't grasp the meaning of "100%," which is pretty much par for the course, since the number of anti-nukes who can do math is zero. An "if" statement that flies in the face of data is just, well, stupid. The data shows the plants operating at 100% and yet, an anti-nuke announces, in typically bizarre scaremongering, "if they do shut down, they'll be trouble."

When was the last time in the last 70 year history of nuclear energy in this country that an entire power system shut down because a nuclear power plant went off line, something they do every two or three years for refueling?

Also the difference between "decrease" and "eliminate" is rather huge, but since anti-nukes can't understand the basic facts of rhetoric, being very badly educated, aren't good at discerning the meaning of these words.

It's pretty amusing to be accused of "obfuscation" in this context, particularly when it involves a very clear and obvious misinterpretation of a document cut and pasted that is clearly over the head of a scientific illiterate.

I have been clear and unambiguous in all of my 13 years on this website. I do not favor the reduction of fossil fuels. I favor their elimination.

As long as stupid people keep foisting the toxic and unsustainable wind crap on is, the possibility of shutting every natural gas, every oil and every coal plant is zero, because, as anyone who is not a complete and total idiot can see, the wind does not always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. (In California, the water doesn't always flow either.)

If one is a total idiot however, one might argue otherwise.

Given the high external cost of natural gas, as the ongoing disaster of a massive leak in a gas storage formation is - releasing huge amounts of the potent greenhouse gas methane demonstrates - I personally believe that natural gas is unacceptably dangerous.

California started building wind farms in the 1970's. Some of them are now useless and rotting in the desert of course, but the data on California's use of dangerous natural gas is directly available from the California website.

California Electricity Consumption By Power Source

One may download the excel file on this site and do calculations, assuming one is not a completely uneducated automaton slinging silly slogans as we confront the ever more exigent reality of climate change.

In 1983, California was consuming 199,609 GWh of electricity, 22.8% of which was generated by burning dangerous natural gas. In 2014, California was consuming 296,843 GWh, and the percentage generated by burning dangerous natural gas and dumping the waste in the planetary atmosphere was 41.0%.

What feature of these numbers is likely to go over the head of anti-nuke? All of it, to be sure. Like I said, one can't be an anti-nuke if one is familiar with the operations performed on numbers.

Now. This is something called data. It's not some theoretical polemic in the literature, but data.

Now people who hate science and scientists probably wouldn't know this, but data always trumps theory.

I note that the peak production of nuclear energy in California took place in 2000, when nuclear reactors, the facilities at Diablo Canyon and San Onofre, two relatively small buildings, produced 45,533 GWh of electricity, or 17.3% of California's electricity demand.

By contrast, the wind industry's max, 2012, was 12,733 GWh, slightly higher than both 2013 and 2014.

In more than 30 years of building useless and reliable wind junk, the wind industry has never, not once, produced as much electricity as California's two nuclear plants in small buildings were producing in 2000. Zero times. Not once.

And to be sure, as the picture below will show, some of this worthless crap is already a useless inoperable eyesore on what was once a pristine desert ecosystem.



10 Amazing Abandoned Renewable Energy Plants

We may compare this impact with the two buildings at San Onofre, which used to produce roughly 8% of California's electricity, but is now shut:



Now I concede fully that California, like many other places, is in a lemming like adventure to shut its nuclear plants and replace them with unreliable garbage. This, in my opinion is a crime against the future and history will not, nor should not, forgive the people who caused this great disaster.

Now, I'm sure that the fact that the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste, carbon dioxide, in atmosphere for the week ending, January 3, 2016 , as reported at Mauna Loa, 402.10 ppm, a record for any week ending in January ever recorded, will do nothing to dissuade our anti-nukes from their happy "renewable" horseshit blather this weekend or any weekend, and they'll do whatever it is they do when they're too damn busy to think. There's nothing, of course, as much as might like, that I can do about it. Ignorance has won the day, and the future will need to pay for it.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

[kristopher]

8. More of your off-point, diversionary nonsense

Scram
The sudden shutting down of a nuclear reactor, usually by rapid insertion of control rods, either automatically or manually by the reactor operator. Also known as a "reactor trip".

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/scram.html

What is a Reactor Trip and How Does it Protect the Plant?
April 9, 2015
Samuel Miranda, Senior Reactor Systems Engineer

Note: Last week, the Prairie Island nuclear power plant “tripped.” So, it seemed like a good time to revisit a blog post we did two years ago on the subject.

On occasion, a nuclear power plant will “trip,” meaning something happened that caused the reactor to automatically shut down to ensure safety. In other words, a trip means a plant is doing what it’s supposed to do. Let’s look at the term a bit more closely.

Key operating parameters of a nuclear power plant, such as coolant temperature, reactor power level, and pressure are continuously monitored, to detect conditions that could lead to exceeding the plant’s known safe operating limits, and possibly, to damaging the reactor core and releasing radiation to the environment.

If any of these limits is exceeded, then the reactor is automatically shut down, in order to prevent core damage. In nuclear engineering terms, the automatic shutdown of a nuclear reactor is called a reactor trip or scram. A reactor trip causes all the control rods to insert into the reactor core, and shut down the plant in a very short time (about three seconds).

...The plant operator then determines the reason for the trip, remedies it and, when it’s determined to be safe, restarts the reactor. So, while not common, a reactor trip is an important way to protect the components in a nuclear power plant from failing or becoming damaged.

http://public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov/2015/04/09/refresh-what-is-a-reactor-trip-and-how-does-it-protect-the-plant/

This is the event - a fundamental characteristic of nuclear plants - that determines there is a large amount of spinning reserve required for their operation.

Their backup requires a shitton of natural gas AND coal.