BWXT announces nuclear manufacturing plant expansion

[NNadir]

BWXT announces nuclear manufacturing plant expansion

An excerpt:

...A $36.3 million USD ($50M CAD) expansion will increase the plant’s size by 25 percent—to 280,000 square feet—and another $21.7 million USD ($30M CAD) will be spent on new equipment to increase and accelerate its output of large nuclear components. The investment will increase capacity and create more than 200 long-term jobs for skilled workers, engineers, and support staff, according to the company.

BWXT is headquartered in Virginia and has 14 operating sites in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Its joint ventures provide management and operations at a dozen U.S. Department of Energy and NASA facilities.

What they are saying: “Our expansion comes at a time when we’re supporting our customers in the successful execution of some of the largest clean nuclear energy projects in the world,” said John MacQuarrie, president of commercial operations for BWXT. “The global nuclear industry is increasingly being called upon to mitigate the impacts of climate change and increase energy security and independence.

Premier of Ontario Doug Ford said, “We’re thrilled to see BWXT expand its footprint and create hundreds of new jobs in Cambridge. As our province continues to lead the future of nuclear energy, the company’s investment will help provide Ontario families and businesses with access to clean, reliable, and affordable electricity for generations to come...”

I added the bold.

This won't go over well in the cults that drive the so called "renewable energy"/fossil fuel nexus, but for humanity as a whole this is a good thing, building back better the nuclear manufacturing infrastructure destroyed by fear and ignorance, thus leaving the planet in flames.

Nuclear systems can do more than provide families "with access to clean, reliable, and affordable electricity for generations to come," although there's certainly nothing wrong with that. It's nice to see people thinking about future generations, something certainly ignored by advocates of the so called "renewable energy"/fossil fuel nexus, where future generations are treated with contempt.

Personally, though, I'm opposed on thermodynamic grounds, to the "electrify everything" bad idea that's gaining unwarranted popularity, but we have to restart somewhere. (Electricity is by its nature, thermodynamically degraded.) With the planet already in flames, notably with Canada for one subset of the climate burned regions, this comes under the rubric of "too little, too late" and is hardly enough, but the world seems to be overcoming the triumph of antiscience antinukism to try to save what is left to be saved and perhaps, even restore some of what can be restored.

Ontario is rising as a center of going nuclear against climate change, something of which citizens of the Province should be proud.

[hunter]

1. "All Electric" homes are not an unreasonable aspiration, mostly for air quality reasons.

Modern inductive stove tops, and heat pumps that work in below-freezing weather, are excellent replacements for traditional gas appliances.

People who insist on "cooking with gas" (with little consideration of air quality issues) might use synthetic bottled gas instead. The gas company could deliver this gas, just as some people buy bottled water.

Electric cars are madness. Plug-in hybrids using nuclear-derived synthetic fuels for longer trips would be superior in every way. But even better than that we could rebuild our cities, turning them into attractive affordable places where car ownership is unnecessary.

Short-hop airline flights can be replaced by comfortable electric high speed rail.

Longer airline flights, long distance trucking, and shipping can use nuclear derived synthetic fuels.

I just want clean reliable affordable electricity delivered to my house, thank you. I don't want to fuss with solar panels on my roof, batteries, inverters, or any other crap like that.

Okay, I actually do own a few hundred watts of solar panels, inverters, batteries, and associated crap. I wanted to develop some hands-on intuition about how this stuff works.

This small system did not make me a solar enthusiast. It only reinforced my objective opinion that nuclear power is the only energy resource capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely.

[NNadir]

2. In some settings I agree about electrical heating but a better option, now being commercialized in some places...

...is district heating with waste heat, perhaps enhanced by the use of heat pumps to pump heat out of the cooling lines.

Here's some recent examples of operable systems now under expansion, and proposed systems:

China starts building long-distance nuclear heating pipeline.

Construction has begun of a 23-kilometre-long pipe that will transport nuclear-generated heat from the Haiyang nuclear power plant in China's Shandong province to a wider area, State Power Investment Corp (SPIC) announced. The plant started providing district heat to the surrounding area in November 2020...

HTR-PM heating project commissioned

The nuclear heating project of the demonstration High Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor-Pebble-bed Module (HTR-PM) at the Shidaowan site in China's Shandong province has been connected to the heating grid and put into operation, China Huaneng announced...

Dukovany to Brno hot water heating supply pipeline takes step forward

Czech nuclear power operator ČEZ and municipal heating company Teplárny Brno have signed agreements relating to a 42-kilometre pipeline from the Dukovany nuclear power plant that aims to benefit 250,000 people in the city of Brno...

Systems of this type have operated in Romania, at the Cernovoda reactors, and I believe in the former Soviet Union, they may do so still.

This can - and should - be an element of process intensification. Since the thermodynamic efficiency of a system is a function of the ratio between the ratio cold reservoir and the high temperature reservoir in such a way that the colder the former is, the higher the efficiency, this is a win-win. I note that the working fluid need not be water, although in all current systems it is. The hydrogenation of CO₂ to give DME is exothermic, and the liquefaction of DME can result in temperatures much higher than the boiling point of water. Thus DME can be an excellent heat transfer tool for exploiting a system in which thermochemical hydrogen is generated and electricity is a side product.

In a sustainable world these types of things would be common; we may never have a sustainable world, but one is certainly feasible.

Where electricity is produced by combustion of dangerous natural gas, which dominates most grids in the United States, electric heating is extremely inefficient compared to just burning the dangerous natural gas in a home furnace and thus generates more carbon.