Electrical small talk

While the moms and daughters were reenacting the Yalta Conference, I was hanging out with two of the other dads.

As coincidence would have it, they were both involved in the electrical power generation and distribution industry.

Little tidbits that I picked up

• Windmills (wind turbines) are designed for a fifteen year service life
• They have enormous foundations
• Load balancing for windmills is incredibly difficult.
• Load balancing will only become more difficult as coal fired steam generation is taken off-line.  
• Natural Gas-turbine power is inefficient when you get much below peak power.  They are On/Off
• Brake shoes for windmills are the highest maintenance part
• There is no elevator. 
• All maintenance parts and equipment must either be carried up on somebody's back or pulled up in a dumb-waiter.
• People in some urban areas shoot the heck out of cables.
• They think the cables transmit camera images from intersections
• They shoot up the cables before committing crimes
• Some of the cables do transmit camera information....smart traffic management, for instance.
• Cables are designed with redundancy but 90% of the redundancy is already used up
• It is highly improbably that any of the people shooting these cables are members of the NRA
• Nearly all of the auxilliary systems that were submerged at Fukushima were on the ground floor.  
• In the US, all of those systems in Nuclear facilities are on the second floor and are partitioned off into separate, environmentally sealed rooms.
• The newest generation of US Nukes are a throwback to the Nimitz design.
• Nimitz demanded noise free, pump free designs.
• The downside of the Nimitz reactor is power density.  They are big for the power produced.
• Size is less of a restriction in a stationary power plant than in a submarine or surface ship.
• New reactor cores will be at the bottom of very, very deep water vessels.
• "Over-heat" will reduce the density of the water (think steam pockets if that helps).  Lower density water means that neutrons will not be slowed down enough to be captured by U nuclei.  The reaction becomes self-quenching. 

It is amazing how much you can learn if you can keep your mouth shut.