Reactor Shutdown Darkens South Florida

grassy_knoll asks, "So how fragile is the electrical grid, and just what technical problems could shut down five reactors?" "Five reactors at a nuclear power plant in Florida had gone down on Tuesday and two were now back online amid a massive power outage in the southern state, CNN reported. The report on the Turkey Point nuclear plant came as four million people had lost electricity in Miami and elsewhere in Florida, with traffic signals out and major delays on roads, authorities and media said."

D'oh

[longacre (1090157)]

I hear the problem originated with a drone in sector 7-G.

Well, crap...

[Penguinisto (415985)]

...I never knew Florida had a town named Springfield.

/P

Re:Well, crap...

[milsoRgen (1016505)]

Alaska

Some background information.

[palegray.net (1195047)]

Here is FPL's page on the Turkey Point reactor: About Turkey Point [fpl.com]. Their site also has a News Releases [fpl.com] page, which I'll be watching for updates whenever they get their PR department in gear.

Soon things will look like a Mad Max movie.

[xC0000005 (715810)]

Oh, wait. This is Florida. Things already look like a Mad Max movie, minus Tina Turner and with a lot more cubans.

5 reactors?

[drachenfyre (550754)]

Uh.. Turkey Point has *2* reactors and 3 major fossil fuel generators (As well as several generators under 5 MWs).

Re:5 reactors?

[by Anonymous Coward]

I demand a recount!

Re:5 reactors?

[johnny maxwell (1050822)]

Well, the problem is that huge, bulky plants are much more fragile - in terms of network disruptions - than a more distributed net of many smaller plants.

Nuclear plants however are only available in the huge, bulky variation. In fact they come from some technological stone-age where the idea of giant-gigawatt-city-plants was considered the best solution imaginable.

Nowadays one tries to break power generation up into much smaller parts - perhaps as far as to your own cellar. This would have in fact many advantages besides reliability, "combined heat and power" comes to mind.

Re:5 reactors?

[ColdWetDog (752185)]

Nuclear plants however are only available in the huge, bulky variation

Of course, one can have various definitions of "huge" (insert Viagra jokes here), but the US Navy might not agree with you.

But I really don't think it's a good idea for everyone to have a nuclear reactor in their cellar. Most folks don't have the technologic where-with-all to keep their PC's or cars running correctly. Until and unless you can get any power generation technology simple enough that it rivals a toaster in complexity, I will take centralized facilities any day.

"Mommy! Why is the basement glowing?.

Re:5 reactors?

[gardyloo (512791)]

"wherewithal" :)

Re:5 reactors?

[Gertlex (722812)]

One does *not* currently try to break up generation into smaller parts for nuclear reactors...

For nuclear, the economics of initial construction and design requirements make much more sense to do huge reactors. A reactor has to have huge amounts of shielding for protection in case of mishap (it's mostly not for the regular reaction from the core). We're talking shells of concrete several feet thick. And steel too. It's cheaper the larger your volume/power ratio and such is.

None of the reactors listed here [doe.gov] are below 1 MW of electric power.

Re:5 reactors?

[AlvinTheNerd (1174143)]

They are "huge and bulky" because that is what is efficient. A smaller power plant is less efficient especially for nuclear since its main cost is human resources. Having to have a team of engineers for a small plant cost almost as much as for a large plant. That is why you see a lot of multiple cores at single sites.

BTW, there are very small reactors that are designed for something like a small town in Alaska and also ones for ships.

And the reason there are a lot of small plants in the last 20 years or so is that the rate of electricity demand is growing slowly and large plants that won't be fully needed for several years weren't as profitable as something smaller albeit less efficient.

However, that is changing as many companies want to replace groups of smaller plants with a large ones. That and the 'why have anything else' natural gas power plants of the nineties now operate often at a lost and are run only when needed. And the reactors are only getting bigger, not because people still think in the stone age, but because that is what they are being called for. France wants all the power it can get per reactor, they just sell the excess to Germany who is having issues with a stable power grid. South Africa wants 23 gigawatts, China wants 50 gigawatts, Texas 15, UK 20, etc. And they are willing to pay for it, because over its lifespan there are very very few plants that aren't profitable at any scale and many much more profitable than originally thought, look at entrgy and exelon profits in the last few quarters.

And a large system of many small plants are have great reliability in terms of having some power, but are very poor at consistent power. Germany and Denmark are good examples of nations with many small plants and they depend heavily on other nations power systems as a back up.

Reactors shut down because nowhere to send power

[AJWM (19027)]

The power outage -- ie, some serious switch failures -- triggered the reactor shutdown. Nuclear reactors are great at supplying base load power but if all of a sudden the grid goes offline, they have nowhere to send that power and have to shut themselves down. (Power reactors don't do well with highly dynamic loads.)

It was not, as some posters seem to have misread even the summary, that the reactors went down first and caused the outage. Mind, once the reactors are down it takes longer to bring the whole grid back up, so in that sense it's contributory.

Re:Reactors shut down because nowhere to send powe

[Tesen (858022)]

Actually, I believe they shutdown due to a safety issue. When they lose grid power for powering water cooling pumps etc, their standard response is to shutdown for safety reasons. Yes I know, a power generating plant that gets power off the grid, but consider if the plant is unable to drive a turbine to power its own pumps, where does it get the power from? Okay backup generators, but they can also fail. From what I hear the current dropped enough from the grid to cause them to need to shutdown the reactors. This is a good safety thing. The bad thing is the issues on the grid that caused this and other sites to shutdown generation.

And now, we return you to regular scheduled blackout... if this were an actual emergency, you would of killed the person sitting next to you.

Tes

Re:Reactors shut down because nowhere to send powe

[nbritton (823086)]

The backup generators have backups. All critical systems have at least double redundancy, that's why nuke plants are so darn expensive to build.

Re:Reactors shut down because nowhere to send powe

[chris mazuc (8017)]

What I've heard on the radio so far (in Tallahassee, FL) is that the nuclear reactors have their coolant pumps connected to the grid so if the reactor ever had to be shut down the coolant would continue to flow, avoiding a meltdown. There was apparently a problem with the substation supplying (backup) power to the coolant pumps, and as a precaution the entire reactor shut down automatically.

I guess this is bound to crop up in CSI Miami...

[Channard (693317)]

... at least given how much crime shows draw on real life events, albeit massively embellished. Cue Horatio Caine.. 'Looks like someone's been left in the dark.. permanently.' *removes sunglasses*

And what did nuclear have to do with it?

[vanyel (28049)]

The article says that a switch caused the power outage; if the transmission lines get shut off (perhaps the switch caused a cascading failure, as has happened before), of course power plants (no matter what type) will shut down --- there's nowhere for the power to go!

Re:And what did nuclear have to do with it?

[HiddenCamper (811539)]

I agree, using the word nuclear in this article was not necessary. The only 'story' about the nuclear plant is the safety system activated, disconnected them from the grid, and scrammed the reactor (shut it down), which just results in less electricity to go around when the grid reconnected. Nuclear reactors take a while to start up, and some models get poisoned quickly if they are shut down and can't be restarted for several days.

Re:And what did nuclear have to do with it?

[xaxa (988988)]

You joke, but a few years ago my physics teacher showed me a video of a really dense part of a power grid (right next to the power station) when something failed and the power had nowhere to go -- the wires drooped, then glowed red/orange/white hot as they melted and snapped.

Its a good thing

[Dr. Eggman (932300)]

The system detected there was a problem and automatically shut the reactors down; The system worked! Maybe massive blackouts aren't the best result, but they are by far better than the worst result.

Dear God where are the facts?

[Bryansix (761547)]

Did anybody seem to notice that while yes, the nuclear plants shut down, so did the coal plants. Neither of of the plants had problems. It was a problem with the substation.http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/200802261723DOWJONESDJONLINE000845_FORTUNE5.htm

This is what it was SUPPOSED to do!

[gardyloo (512791)]

(NPR is running a story on it right now):

    These plants were designed to shut down in case of a fall in the power reaching them from *other sources* (because they need, e.g., to run cooling pumps for a safe shutdown and can't count on their own power). I'm not sure why the outside power browned out, but it did, so these plants did what they were designed to do.

Re:This is what it was SUPPOSED to do!

[puetzk (98046)]

Close - they don't need it, but it's (one of) the backups, and by policy they won't run without it. Once things start going awry, better to shut down while you're still in control than wait for something else to make it a serious incident...

All sorts of things could do this

[jd (1658)]

Nuclear reactors are, by design, extremely sensitive to unexpected conditions. The reactor fire at Windscale, amongst others, convinced reactor designers very early on to install mechanisms for shutting down reactors quickly and safely. Graphite rods, held by fail-safe hair-trigger mechanisms, can be slammed into place, shutting down a reactor quickly. Failures in the lowering of the control rods have happened, but are fortunately rare.

What would it take to trigger the automatic release of the control rods? An earth tremor above a pre-set limit, insufficient input of cooling water from rivers (or water that's too hot or too impure), a controller hitting the wrong switch, a software glitch, a glitch in a clock crystal screwing with timing calculations, a loose connector, a chip in an old-style spring-based socket catapulting itself into the air (which they had a nasty habit of doing), erronious control signals from other power stations, a downed power line on any segment with single points of failure, etc.

Of these, the vast majority apply to any power station - one line down not too long ago caused a blackout that covered three States and half of Canada. One line down between the east and west coasts about 14-15 years ago shut down large parts of the northwest USA for a couple of weeks. Cascading failures are inherent in the meta-stable mashup of networks that form the power grid. Too many SPFs, too little redundancy, too many communication glitches, too few contingency plans.

Personally, I think the grid needs to be massively redesigned, with far better (and more intelligent) signalling, far more redundancy at all levels and a huge upgrade on software and hardware (NT4 and Windows 3.11 are not acceptable to me for mission-critical systems - they're tried and tested, but they're not reliable and they're not secure).

Of course, this won't happen, massive cascading faults will continue to be reported on a regular basis, and people will continue to be surprised when they occur. Preventative maintenance on the scale needed to cure the system as a system is so expensive (even though it's one-off), the distributed costs of regular blackouts on even a gigantic scale look cheaper on the balace sheet, so an inefficient, decrepid, flawed power grid becomes the preferred option.

Five undersea cables! Five reactors!

[A nonymous Coward (7548)]

I smell something fivey .... the Pentagon!

Argh! Quit the terrorism angle already!

[achurch (201270)]

1998: "A massive power outage left millions of people without power Friday. The cause of the blackout is unclear."

2008: "A massive power outage left millions of people without power Friday. The government says terrorism was not involved, but the cause of the blackout is unclear."

Sigh . . .

It's not Nuke's fault!

[John117 (717182)]

Most everything's been covered here, but I'll put my two cents in as a Nuclear Engineer (albeit in PA). Nuclear power plants run all safety systems on offsite power. This is a perfectly understandable setup, because if something goes wrong and we need to scram the reactor, the safety systems need to keep running. At my plant, we have two completely separate backup diesel generators to supply power in the event of loss of offsite power, but shutdown is nevertheless the automatic response, both because the diesels won't run forever and because a sudden loss of load messes with a very delicate balance of turbine power, reactor power, and load. Nuclear power is a popular black sheep for these kinds of events because people are afraid of it, and the news media profits from sensationalist broadcasting. Whatever garners the greatest response, they'll run with it. As for the grid as a whole, it is not a Florida problem. The same issue came up with that massive northeast blackout in what was it, 2003? The whole system is ancient, but it's too expensive to completely overhaul it, not to mention people wouldn't stand for the loss of power as systems were replaced and/or updated. In terms of power distribution, there's a delicate balance as plants come on and offline and demand goes up and down. Any significant transients (like this undervoltage line) just causes a complete mess. This is a problem that's only going to get worse as power demands continue to rise, especially if we don't build enough plants to keep a healthy amount of excess capacity.

I'm from Florida and have no power or internet

[by Anonymous Coward]

good thing I backup IP over carrier pigeon.

Re:I'm from Florida and have no power or internet

[tattood (855883)]

Dude, you need to upgrade your service to IP over carrier pidgeon with Quality of Service [faqs.org].

Vaporware

[CODiNE (27417)]

You know all too often I hear of IP over Carrier Pidgeon as the next generation of internet technology, something even bigger than Web 2.0 and software as a service. I'm sure it's going to actualize our paradigm shifts and all that but seriously lets get some cold hard FACTS into the discussion.

Firstly:
Where are the numbers on latency and bandwidth?
Details like this are frequently brushed aside when making unrealistic promises. Let's stop listening to the marketing department and talk to the engineers working specifically with IP over Carrier Pidgeon and IP over Avian Carrier in general. (From here on referred to as IPoAC) We have no hard numbers on packet size limits.

Secondly:
What is the average delay on DNS resolution?
Another salient fact glossed over is that IPoAC completely depends on DNS caches as name lookups are expensive. As well as how long does it take to train new carriers til they are able to follow the new routes?

These and other questions lead me to believe that IPoAC is entirely VAPOR and has most likely not even been successfully implemented in the real world.

Does anyone have any real stats we can use to examine this? Or is IPoAC just going to be rammed down our throats by another mega-corporation with an agenda? It's time to really open the discussion on IPoAC.

Re:global warming

[hamburger lady (218108)]

your ideas are intriguing and i would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:global warming

[funwithBSD (245349)]

It comes with a free Ron Paul and Ralph Nader subscription, both voted The Only Man Who Can Save America!

Re:global warming

[Shakrai (717556)]

It comes with a free Ron Paul and Ralph Nader subscription, both voted The Only Man Who Can Save America!

I'd love to see the two of them in a debate with each other. That'd be great. Think of the drinking games you could create off that.

Re:global warming

[MightyMartian (840721)]

I'd be a little scared of the vortex of intense stupidity that would form as these two approached each other. I mean, this would probably rip quarks from each other, rip space time and bring the dinosaurs back. I think, in the interest of galactic peace that these two be kept a minimum of two hundred miles apart.

Re:global warming

[Shakrai (717556)]

Naw, if anything it would take the form of a smug cloud [wikipedia.org], which isn't quite as impressive as ripping space time -- though no less deadly.

Re:global warming

[armada (553343)]

I'm in Miami and experienced the horrific even (playing tennis for 45 minutes because I could not log into wow). I spoke to my bud in FPL (ze power company) and he told me that a massive transmission cable went down by aligator alley (I75 stretch that crosses the everglades). This created some load issues and a plant (non nuke) had to shut down to protect itself. This in turn routed more power to the rest of the grid creating the same effect we saw in California and in the NE in the past. Turkey Point, the nuke, was merely one of the plants that shut down to protect itself. Only reason we are talking about that one and not the others is that talking about nuclear power is sexy.

Re:global warming

[delvsional (745684)]

First off, There are not 5 nuclear reactors at turkey point. there are 5 units. units 1 and 2 are oil and natural gas(fossil) units 3 and 4 are nuclear and unit 5 is a gas turbine unit. The shutdown of the reactors DID NOT cause the blackout contrary to what the slashdot summary says. A failed switch and fire at an electrical substation outside Miami(read: not at the power plant) caused the grid to go into an imbalanced state at which time the plant experianced a loop(loss of offsite power) and did what they are supposed to do. There was no place for the power to go, so they shutdown to stop making it. All the power plants did what they were supposed to do. The fossils were presumably shut down. I'll find out more when I get to work. great, now i'm gonna be late.

Re:global warming

[by Anonymous Coward]

It was due to a distribution line that failed [nrc.gov]. For those not familiar with how nuclear reactors work, two of the fission products of concern are I-135 and Xe-135. I-135 will decay into Xe-135 and Xe-135 is a very strong neutron poison (absorbs neutrons). During normal operations Xe-135 is produced from fission or I-135 decay and it is removed by neutron absorption of Xe-135 or by beta decay of Xe-135. If you are operating at high power and have a significant amount of Xe-135 in the core and you suddenly drop power the neutron flux that is removing a significant fraction of your Xe-135 from neutron absorption is gone. But the I-135 in the core still remains and more than compensate the reduction of Xe-135 from direct fission. The result is a Xe-135 spike that will overwhelm certain types of reactors forcing a shutdown and a waiting period for the Xe-135 to decay. For those familiar with the Chernobyl disaster, the reason that the control rods in that core were fully withdrawn was because they were trying to compensate for a xenon transient (since they were operating at high power before they dropped to low power for the test). The Turkey Point reactors don't suffer from the flaws that the RBMKs had, but they will still be shutdown due to xenon transients.

Re:global warming

[by Anonymous Coward]

More information Here [energy.gov] (pg 34) and here [wikipedia.org]

Re:global warming

[jbr439 (214107)]

I'm afraid that can't be correct. He was "imprisoned forever by a force field powered by an eternal battery" and is thus incapable of making visits to Earth, even transiently.

Oh ... wait ... xeon transients - never mind

Re:global warming

[Phanatic1a (413374)]

What the hell are you on about? This had nothing to do with the reactor, or fission fragment poisons accumulating in the fuel, or xenon transients. Says right in the FA that

"We understand the initiating event was a malfunctioning disconnect switch" at a substation near Miami, the head of the local utility company Florida Power and Light (FPL), Armando Olivera, said Tuesday evening. ...

"There is no evacuation plan taking place around the area because it's a power problem caused from mechanical failure in the Florida Power and Light system," Mike Stone from the state's emergency department told AFP.

A substation. Not the reactor. Then the reactor went offline because of the undervoltage condition caused by that power outage. Neutron-absorbers in the fuel had *nothing* to do with this.

Re:global warming

[by Anonymous Coward]

The reactor shut down due to the no load condition. And they can't start it up for several hours due to xenon preclusion. If they didn't shut down the reactor it would have shut itself down due to the large xenon transient. This is common knowledge for nuclear engineers. If you lose your load on a nuclear reactor, you must shut down due to the massive xenon transient. If you are not familiar with this then you should read the reactor fundamentals handbook link above. This isn't rocket science.

Re:global warming

[TheSync (5291)]

"the large and rapid build-up of additional Xenon reactivity load following a reactor trip can cause an extended (approximately 40 hours) reactor shutdown"

http://www.nuceng.ca/ep6p3/class/Module3D_XenonJun21.pdf [nuceng.ca]

Re:global warming

[agingell (931397)]

The fundamental thing that is missing is the amount of power being generated.
You have to cool the steam down somehow, normally it looses energy by turning the generators but if that is not the case the energy needs to go somewhere.
The steam is normally re-condensed and then reused in a closed or semi closed loop depending on whether there are cooling towers. There is no way that the
cooling capacity would be able to dissipate the full load and hence the need to rapidly shut-down. This is the same for coal and gas plants as well.

Re:global warming

[radtea (464814)]

This is the same for coal and gas plants as well.

This is the key point that the idiot with the +5 mods above is missing.

This shutdown has nothing to do with neutron poisoning, and everything to do with load loss, the same as any conventional power plant. Negative reactivity from 135Xe typically doesn't prevent restart for an hour or so, and as the news is reporting the reactors are running again they must have had then back on line fairly quickly.

And yes, I am a nuclear physicist, and my undergraduate education as an engineer included reactor design.

Re:global warming

[waferbuster (580266)]

The AC had his facts in order. Even your quote backs him up. "The initiating event was a malfunctioning disconnect switch." The reactor shutdown was an (expected) response to the initiating event.
Fission products in the fuel have everything to do with why the plant was shut down. Operating nuclear plants run at a significant percentage of their capacity for reasons of economy. A sudden loss of load (as in the disconnect opening) results in the rapid rise in primary coolant temperature due to noplace for the energy to be dissipated. This will result in a reactor shutdown shortly after the load is lost (either by overtemperature or by turbine overspeed trip).
Heck, a sudden loss of turbine load can cause the turbine to overspeed, causing a turbine trip which in turn causes an automatic scram. Since every good discussion needs a car analogy, imagine driving up a steep hill and then knocking the transmission into neutral while keeping the accelerator mashed. RPM goes up, eh?
Even inserting control rods doesn't drop power fast enough to prevent heating up. After shutdown the fission products in the core continue to decay, releasing significant amounts of heat which must be dissipated.

That's what I love about slashdot... folks argue with experts without having a background to do so.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[hxnwix (652290)]

Why? The AC is totally, completely full of shit.

Your comment is at 1, his is at 5. You could explain why he wrong, provided that you aren't full of shit. Right now the consensus is that, being full of shit, you should fuck off at the earliest available opportunity. Thanks for your input, though. Better luck next time.

Re:Glad they got things back up

[Dun Malg (230075)]

This is kind of a blow to the pro-nuclear power constituency

Except that it isn't. If you, the submitter, or the Slashdot "editors" had RTFA, you'd have realized that the reactors shut down because of the blackout, not the other way around. The blackout was caused by switching equipment. The circuit being broken, the reactors had no place to dump their power output, so they automatically shut off. That's what is supposed to happen. Nothing nuclear to see here, move along.

Re:Bad editorializing.

[Stanislav_J (947290)]

Perhaps people should 2 seconds of research before they begin jumping to conclusions about things.

You're obviously new here...