Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
1890s in Italy and Switzerland, and by the year 2000
their global capacity surpassed 90 GW (about 13% of all
installed hydro power), with Europe having one-third of
the total. Italy, Japan, and the United States have the
most high-capacity pumped storage facilities. The two
largest stations are 2.88-GW Lewiston in Niagara and
2.7-GW Bath County in Virginia (ESA 2001). Other
large projects are 2.4-GW Guangdong, part of the Day-
awan nuclear station designed to cover peak demand for
Hong Kong and Guangzhou, and 2.3-GW Dniester in
southern Russia. Reversible pump turbines serving these
projects rate 300-400 MW.
Adaptation of nuclear fission for electricity generation
progressed very rapidly. The first proof of fission was
published in February 1939 (Meitner and Frisch 1939);
the first sustained chain reaction took place at the Uni-
versity of Chicago on December 2, 1942 (Atkins 2000);
and Hyman Rickover's leadership to apply the reactor
drive to submarines led to the launch of the first
nuclear-powered vessel, Nautilus, in January 1955
(Rockwell 1992). Rickover was put immediately in
charge of reconfiguring General Electric's pressurized
water reactor (PWR), used on submarines to build the
first U.S. civilian electricity-generating station in Ship-
pingport, Pennsylvania. It went on line in December
1957, more than a year after the world's first large-scale
nuclear station, British Calder Hall (4
23 MW), was
connected to the grid on October 17, 1956. Regardless
of the reactor type, nuclear generation uses the heat
released by the fission of heavy elements (mainly
235
U)
to generate steam for electricity generation. The PWR,
with the coolant circulating through the core in a closed
loop and transferring heat into a steam generator, be-
came the dominant choice of a rapidly growing industry.
This arrangement results in e
1
of 32%.
A boiling water reactor (BWR) generates steam by
passing water directly between the elements of nuclear
fuel. The efficiency of this simpler arrangement is just
over 30%. Both PWR and BWR use ordinary water as a
coolant and as a moderator to slow down the neutrons.
In pressurized heavy water reactors (PHWRs), used by
Canada's national program, D
2
O is a moderator and
organic compounds, gas, H
2
O, and D
2
O are working
fluids. Gas-cooled reactors (GCRs), the foundation of
British nuclear development, use graphite as moderator
and He or CO
2
as coolant. The largest PWRs rate nearly
1.5 GW (the two largest are the Soviet-built Ignalina
in Lithuania at 1.45 GW and the French Chooz at
1.457 GW). The largest nuclear power plant, Japan's
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, with 8,206 MW in seven units, was
the world's largest thermal electricity-generating facility
by the end of the twentieth century.
The ten years between 1965 and 1975 saw the great-
est number of new nuclear power plant orders. Europe,
including the former USSR, eventually ordered about
twice as many power reactors as did the United States.
Expert consensus of the early 1970s envisaged worldwide
electricity generation in the year 2000 dominated by in-
expensive fission. Instead, the industry has experienced
stagnation and retreat. In retrospect, it is clear that com-
mercial development of nuclear generation was far too
rushed and that too little weight was given to public
opinion on commercial fission (Cowan 1990). The eco-
nomics of fission generation was always arguable because
its costs did not include either the enormous government
subsidies for nuclear R&D or the costs of decommission-
ing the plants and safely storing highly radioactive waste
for millennia.
Weinberg (1994, 21) conceded that ''had safety been
the primary design criterion [rather than compactness
