Transformer Explosion Closes Nuclear Plant Unit North of NYC 213
Reuters reports that a transformer failure and related fire have forced the closure of a generating unit of the Indian Point nuclear plant, about 40 miles north of New York City; another generator at the same facility was unaffected. Witnesses reported seeing an explosion, as well as (according to NBC News) a "huge ball of black smoke" when the transformer exploded, which led to the shut-down of the site's Unit 3. The Reuters article says the plant "has long been controversial because of its proximity to the United States' largest city.
Indian Point is one of 99 nuclear power plants licensed to operate in the United States and which generate about 20 percent of U.S. electricity use, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission website.
Non story, headline should read (Score:5, Insightful)
Normal safety measures effective, loss of transformer handled in professional manner
Instead we get vague hand waving and reference to controversies generated by people wanting to shut down all nuclear power plants
Thank you /. for supporting the luddite agenda
Re:Non story, headline should read (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a non story simple as that. now lets wait for the anti nuke people to roll in and tell us how wind and solar will save us all
What's more (Score:2)
This was a transformer that failed. ALL power plants that make AC power use those. Nuclear, coal, hydro, wind, doesn't matter, they all use transformers. So even if nuclear went away, transformers would be all over the place. They are how we change AC voltages from one to another.
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Don't be so sure, there's always more than meets the eye with Transformers.
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You never think about it till they get a hold of your home town and you go, "Wait, that's not at all what we think! We're not all southern slobs / rapists or tech/woman/man/cop-hating hippies / etc."
Re:Non story, headline should read (Score:5, Insightful)
Im pro renewables, but im pro nuke for when renewables dont cut it.
Enough is enough! (Score:5, Funny)
As a man made of straw, I resent the gross stereotyping. We are not simply props for you to project your opponents weakness onto to then subsequently knock down. We are sentient, dancing, singing people of hay with a noble and intricate ethnic history. We have dreams-- to scare away grain-eating scavengers, to escort little girls to wizards, to somehow fuse a meat-based thought-organ to our straw-based bodies... We must be respected.
Please in future use some other analogy to personify your "fall guy". Perhaps an axe-swinging man of tin or some gutless panther could better suit your purposes.
Namelessly yours,
the straw man
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The anti-nuke crowd didn't write the headline, a journalist did.
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Yes, but journalists have agendas at times
In the final line of the article they are just echoing the anti-nuke crowd without any representation of an opposing view
"Several environmental groups have called for the plant to be permanently shut down."
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These "some environmental groups" include the governor of New York, who is trying to get the plant permanently shut down.
It's not fringe radicals who think it's a bad idea to have a nuclear plant right next to the largest population center in the United States.
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Could you, so that we know where you're coming from, elaborate on where renewables "dont cut it"?
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steady rate of high power for one. except for hydro and geothermal, but those doesn't fit or scale everywhere.
solar and wind are great to supply additional power, to cover spikes, and a large residential setup will stabilize the old grid. however they don't have a constant high power output and have to be built at 30-50% over capacity to get to the minimum useful outputs.
that said most homes should have a 3-5 kw solar setup that feed right back into the grid. The power generated would be enough to run the
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Well, there is a story, but it's more about a single point of failure between the generating plant and the customer. No failover transformer? No spare on site? Did the old one give up the ghost of old age when it should have been rotated out and rebuilt a long while ago?
Simply, sometimes said transformers can/are difficult to get. Here's an example: In the city of Woodstock, Ontario about 10 years ago at Substation 72 there was a blowout of one of the main feeder transformers for the city. Now you'd think this would be a trivial fix, repair, or something else. Much further from the truth, in fact the only replacement for the transformer was in North Bay, Ontario. That's around a 10 hour drive, so what did we have? A city of ~25k people without no power for the better
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Yeah. I was kind of surprised when I saw it wasn't mdsolar as usual.
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Thank you /. for supporting the luddite agenda
Quite true.
This is a headline, but not for those reasons (Score:3)
The headline is: noooklear boogity boogity boogity.
It should be: large steam units have forced outages, and the grid is designed to handle them.
My point is this: we hear all the time "what good is solar power at night? Wind turbines when it's not windy?" I ask you: what good is a nuclear power station when the transformer blows up and it safely disengages from the grid for hours, days, or weeks? Think of this incident next time folks talk about how some renewable generator is unreliable. No generating unit
Nuclear Generating Station Shuts Down Safely (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing to see here. Generating stations, nuclear or otherwise, trip off line when major changes in load occur.
Oh, but right.., it's NOOCOOLAR POWAH! It must mean a near-miss meltdown and a cover up! I'll get my potassium iodide pills and my tinfoil hat and make some popcorn.
Re:Nuclear Generating Station Shuts Down Safely (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, but right.., it's NOOCOOLAR POWAH! It must mean a near-miss meltdown and a cover up! I'll get my potassium iodide pills and my tinfoil hat and make some popcorn.
Ha ha! It is little use pointing out that a transformer exploded and a power plant shut down quickly and safely because it was unable to push its load into the grid. Reading between the lines, it does look like an item that floated to the top because of the word 'nuclear'. Stations trip all the time.
There is nothing comfortable and socially appealing about opposing nuclear power, unless you are shrilly terrified about full-fallout nuclear bomby Armageddon as portrayed in countless movies, or honestly believe that barely measurable traces of cesium in fish is an impending extinction event for the fish, or for us. Perhaps you fear to go down to the basement, where you will breathe in molecules of radioactive radon gas. One should be far more concerned about traces of pharmaceuticals, antibiotics, pesticide and fertilizer runoff, or (if you lived in the 60s, problem dealt with) lead from gasoline. Or even land erosion from human development!
I think people tend to be more pragmatic than that. A lot of it is just noise to be cool, like the muttered remarks heard around the schoolyard. There are folks who find it fun to drop the same nuclear zingers time after time. And I think they are some of the same folks promoting wind and solar. You have to realize that in the end the joke's on you.
Solar and wind energy solutions are like the throw-pillows of civilization. They are cuddly, come in lots of fun shapes and colors and you can hug them like little trees... but when all is said and done they will be unable to provide a meaningful level of lumbar support. Your time rearranging them is wasted. It's wasted because despite the excitement of the solar bubble, the base load generation challenge will be ultimately solved with coal, natural gas or nuclear energy. And the people who are pushing for coal and natural gas (yes they do exist but seldom post here), or are just afraid of nuclear energy, want you to be afraid of nuclear energy too. Join the club, right?
When the best ways to propagate myths are with dumb jokes, it's not funny.
To all the folks out there who rail on about nuclear: If you must fear something, fear the use of coal. Because that is what we in North America will be drawn completely into when (not if) natural gas declines. Even as she builds out coal plants China is becoming concerned about sulfuric aerosols from coal burning [youtube.com]. We are not as much concerned because our emission controls are better and continental air circulation is better., which seems to keep the problem at a more comfortable distance.
Learn more! Read about the grid! [Gardner, dissertation] A Wide Area Perspective on Power System Operation and Dynamics [vt.edu] is a good read on the challenges of operating a resonant grid.
Perfecting wind and solar is worthy on small scale to serve individuals and small communities. But it cannot clothe and feed them like an industrial society does. In the background the pursuit of BIG solutions (so called base load) that can power factories and water treatment plants is essential.
___
See Thorium Remix [youtube.com] and my letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate [scribd.com]
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate [scribd.com]
Re:Nuclear Generating Station Shuts Down Safely (Score:5, Interesting)
Also I suggest you consider the current Thorium work in India and other places to get an idea that the state of the art has moved on a bit from a 1950s experiment. While civilian nuclear energy research in the USA effectively halted well over a decade ago it still continues in other places with promising results.
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IMHO alternative energies should
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Actually in identifying some solar/wind promoters as anti-nuclear --- just a few but boy are they shrill --- I think I've hit the nail on the head.
Let's take a look at nuclear power in Japan, shall we [world-nuclear.org]. Japan is a small, energy-resource-poor country which has leveraged its technology to become a financial and industrial giant, in many areas out-producing the United States even before we outsourced to China. Some ~50 nuclear reactors were supplying ~30% of the nation's electricity in 2011. But that 30% is a
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Be honest. How much of that did you copy/paste? Substantial parts read exactly like industry shill talking point rubbish.
Address the issues directly, don't just attack the sources and link to stuff.
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Oh, but right.., it's NOOCOOLAR POWAH! It must mean a near-miss meltdown and a cover up! I'll get my potassium iodide pills and my tinfoil hat and make some popcorn.
I sure hope it's not microwave popcorn since microwaves create radiation! Also popcorn is made from GMOs aka Monsanto Death Kernels!
first on Fark and/or Drudge (Score:2)
Which Transformer exploded? (Score:5, Funny)
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Small upgrades, this already happens.
Large upgrades, by phasing out old units and building new ones. The complex as a whole remains.
Taking down an old unit is BTW a very large task ("decommissioning"), can take decades and comes at extreme expense. Which is part of why plant operators try to keep their old units going as long as possible, even when they've become expensive to operate.
Well, if you don't like your nukes so close. (Score:5, Insightful)
You need to build a better grid.
Then again If you want to replace nukes with renewables, you need to build a better grid.
The guy in 7G F* up again (Score:3)
The guy in 7G F* up again if only I can remember his name.
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Joe Dragon: Simpson, eh? New man?
Smithers: He thwarted your campaign for governor, you ran over his son, he saved the plant from meltdown, his wife painted you in the nude...
Joe Dragon: Doesn't ring a bell.
Standard Safety Protocol Followed... (Score:4, Insightful)
What gets me even more is that the slant that is put on these stories (sometimes even by
Transformer explosion? (Score:2)
MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE!
Re:I'm just glad (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I'm just glad (Score:5, Informative)
Hydro have an astronomical death toll compared to nuclear.
You can count the bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki as deaths due to nuclear power and hydro still have a lead.
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Didn't Superman have to break the laws of physics and fly back in time to stop hydro?
Re:I'm just glad (Score:5, Informative)
You do know that hydroelectric power plants also have large, oil-cooled transformers, of similar design, which have exactly the same chance of exploding as this unit, right? Of course, it doesn't actually matter, since this transformer explosion had the same chance of causing a nuclear accident as an explosion at Niagara Falls does of flooding upstate New York.
Re:Indian Point == Ticking Timb Bomb (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Indian Point == Ticking Timb Bomb (Score:5, Interesting)
Transformers pop all the time. I can't see that this had anything to do with the power generation method. Will that matter to the solar fanboys? Not a bit, apparently. Fission is the safest cleanest and most effective option we have. We should close all the current nuke plants and replace them with 5 times as many modern reactors.
Re:Indian Point == Ticking Timb Bomb (Score:4, Informative)
One unfortunate problem with nuke plants is that IIRC you have to have a continuous connection to the grid. If that connection fails, the plant has to scram to avoid damage to the generators (overspeed). So when that transformer goes, it means a multi-day restart of the reactor. This is the sort of situation where a hot-swap spare transformer would be a really good idea (TM)....
But as for safety, no, it is no more dangerous than any other scram, which while way less than ideal, is something that the plants are designed to handle.
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Pull your electrical for heating (use a MSRE) from the grid. Have a mechanical (gravity operated) backup to kill the heaters if you lose the grid connection, just in case. No more heat, no more power generation. You can come up with something else for dumping the excess load in the short term (pump water, spin a flywheel, doesn't matter).
Re:Indian Point == Ticking Timb Bomb (Score:4, Insightful)
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Actually, it is more dangerous than any other scram, as it means that you don't have a grid connection to power your cooling pumps. You have to rely on your backup generators. If they fail, you're in serious trouble.
As to the GP, nuclear's biggest problem is a "negative learning curve". We make a generation of nuclear reactors, but over time instead of getting cheaper to make and operate - as in most technologies - it gets more expensive as we discover all sorts of new things wrong and try to patch them. S
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"Actually, it is more dangerous than any other scram, as it means that you don't have a grid connection to power your cooling pumps. You have to rely on your backup generators. If they fail, you're in serious trouble."
Just because the transformer to the outside world is down, doesn't stop you generating local power from the decay heat. At shutdown you can still have 7% of the output just from decay heat, which is enough to power the facility. Many modern designs use this as plan A during a shutdown.
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There's no guarantee that ECCS are independent and can operate in the vent of station blackout. The HPCI used in Fukishima, for example, is a steam turbine-driven pump but not a generator, and it has electrical components that require operation. Which is why it didn't prevent meltdown.
The primary turbines are not designed to operate on the amount of power generated from decay heat alone.
Re:Indian Point == Ticking Timb Bomb (Score:5, Informative)
One unfortunate problem with nuke plants is that IIRC you have to have a continuous connection to the grid. If that connection fails, the plant has to scram to avoid damage to the generators (overspeed).
BS
Power stations (even non-nuclear) always have back-up generators that kick in on loss of grid to allow control of the plant to be maintained and for cooling pumps to take the heat out of the system in a controlled way. Generators will not overspeed if cut off the grid - their speeds are controlled by sophisticated control systems, and if they even fail then an old-fashioned back-up mechanical governor will cause the main steam supply valve to slam shut.
The plant would not be "scrammed" on loss of grid. Scramming means hitting a big red panic button. The plant would be kept spinning at first, obviously with the reactor power reduced to near zero, with residual heat being dumped through purposed heat exchangers and possibly releasing steam to atmosphere (unless it is a BWR - Indian Point is not), while the cause of the loss-of-grid was investigated - like getting the grid company on the phone. Many losses-of-grid are quite brief, but if it looked like it was going to be a while then the plant would be shut down in a controlled way, not by a scram button.
Re:Indian Point == Ticking Timb Bomb (Score:5, Insightful)
How long is the time on that bomb?
Because we have to create a new generation of solar manufacturing plants to build the panels, multiple giga-factories for batteries and a whole now power transmission system to move that much energy around the continent.
Unless of course you have some alternate plan of how the tens of millions of people who are currently dependent on nuclear energy are going to function in the mean time
These things take time to plan and execute, knee-jerk reactions and shutting off major building blocks of getting away from fossil fuels to some clean energy future does not help at all. We would be a more environmentally clean society NOW if environmentalists had not spent the last forty years fighting an emotional battle against nuclear power and had focused on the emissions of the fossil fuel industry
Instead we get constant lawsuits to prevent the building of a long term nuclear waste storage facilities and new nuclear plants while the coal plants dump CO2 that is heating the planet as well as mercury and uranium that is more damaging than any imagined nuclear accident
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The Chinese have already done that and they'll happily delay their rollout to fill much smaller orders from the USA - at a premium of course.
Someone is not thinking about networks.
Oh - someone thinks there isn't already networks in place or is thinking in terms of water with upstream and downstream pipes.
Re:Indian Point == Ticking Timb Bomb (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you willing to donate your property to the 10s/100s/1000s of square miles it would take to compensate the grid for the loss of the nuclear plant?
This wasn't a failure of the reactor, but a failure of a transformer. Your solar panels will still feed those.
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Are you willing to donate your property to the 10s/100s/1000s of square miles it would take to compensate the grid for the loss of the nuclear plant?
I once tried to calculate the total solar panel area needed to supply the entire US, and decided that it would fix comfortably in a square 20 miles on a side. Hence, 400 square miles. For the entire country.
Was my calculation off? I'm pretty sure that 1000s of square miles is an exaggeration.
(This was a "back of the envelope" calculation, so didn't take into consideration transmission lines. And as to "where to put it", I'll note that there's lots of area in Nevada East of Reno and the west side of Utah (va
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This guy did some math that came up with a square area 44 miles on a side to fulfill peak load
http://modernsurvivalblog.com/... [modernsurvivalblog.com]
Of course this did not include cover night and low-light times like cloudy days or when the sun is not 90 degrees to the panel
So, you would probably need three times that amount with batteries to store and forward power as needed
and there is that pesky 'aging power transmission system' that needs to be replaced
Don't get me wrong, solar would be an excellent distributed power generat
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This guy did some math that came up with a square area 44 miles on a side to fulfill peak load
http://modernsurvivalblog.com/... [modernsurvivalblog.com]
Thanks - that led to some interesting links.
So it's actually 1600 square miles of solar panels, at an estimated cost of about $1T.
The reason I did the calculation was a result of wondering: suppose we had an automated robotic factory that made and installed solar panels. At what point is the system self-sustaining?
In other words, could we have a self-assembling system that kept building ever more solar panels, and after a time allocate a portion of the output to the rest of the country?
If you could do that,
Timezones cut down the peak (Score:2)
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Musk's idea is much simpler - he just wants to offload his excessive battery cell inventory from the low Tesla sales to the stupid fans, not save the world.
Stupid fans? I thought those [dyson.com] were a Dyson invention, not Tesla?
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Sort-of. He is building a giant battery factory in order to get battery prices down. He needs to sell that capacity. Tesla has other constraints on the number of cars that they produce, but I think mainly there is a recognition that battery is where his competitive advantage lies. There are dozens of companies capable of building high-quality automobiles, but only a handful of companies who can make automotive-sized batteries. Tesla has no chance in hell at selling cars if they are the smallest player in a
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Typically early 1970s cells are used for the calculation - you cheated and used something available now! Shame on you :)
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So your suggestion is what, that we just stop using electricity? You don't like nuclear, you don't like solar, you probably hate wind and hydro too.
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I am not a republican.
So what is the answer then?
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Kill off 99% of the human race, or let them die of starvation while they scrabble through the transition to an agrarian lifestyle, with all of the resulting mayhem as they fight over remaining stores and sit around in piles of their dung dreaming of bygone days of magic and lore when humans tried to challenge the gods and walk on the sky
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Sometimes I think that is what greenpeace envisions
Re:Indian Point == Ticking Timb Bomb (Score:4, Informative)
Sure. Just take the worlds largest solar farm: Topaz Solar and multiply it by 16. Then some more and build battery backup for even more to supply during the night and bad weather
Ideology will power nothing.
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This transformer explosion, why would this be more of an issue at a nuclear plant then at any other place?
We have transformers explode along power lines too. They also create fire, damage property...
Let's not confuse the regular damage of power generation with the nuclear is bad narrative.
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just more liberal media bullshit.
Re:Indian Point == Ticking Timb Bomb (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Indian Point == Ticking Timb Bomb (Score:5, Insightful)
AC has no idea what hes talking about. this is a normal function of the electrical system. it worked as intended, there is no scare here.
A transformer blew, they do do that.
There were at least two other power supplies to feed the system, one being commercial, and in reality a non event. Being a nuke plant any thing out of the ordinary must be reported and scrutinized; as quoted "These events happen occasionally. They are not unheard of and the plant responded as designed," in this case the auto sprinkler system took care of it.
Wanna bet what the people working at the plant did? My guess is whenever they could went to look at it, no cares at all just curiosity.
If it's power was being utilized at the time, it was switched so fast the computers never knew; well maybe a stretch (but they are on UPS systems).
As a general rule for Nuclear plants there are three systems for each function, one goes down another takes it's place, another goes down which is providing the same function it's time for concern (dependent only upon it's function). Fukushima used the fourth option (firetrucks).
Re:Indian Point == Ticking Timb Bomb (Score:5, Informative)
A transformer blew, they do do that.
It is not uncommon for a large transformer to blow. I am a power station engineer and know of two events over 10 years at UK nuclear power stations. It is not a big safety deal apart from the possiblility of injuring people within say 50 yards, and I have been within sight of one (yet someone was worried about NYC 40 miles away!). These transformers tend to be in bays shielded from each other by thick masonery walls.
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A transformer blowing up at a plant is actually a pretty big issue. An "off" PWR or BWR still needs power for quite a while for cooling. See Fukushima for the consequences of losing both mains power and backup generators at the same time. Clearly the backup generators worked - yeay! But what if they hadn't?
Indian Point, even in the event of a major accident, is not too much of a health threat to the people of New York City. Nuclear disasters are disasters in slow motion; you can run away from them, you don
Re:Indian Point == Ticking Timb Bomb (Score:5, Informative)
Right, because generators the size needed to operate nuclear power plants are the sort of thing that you just pick up at any corner hardware store and "drive up and plug in"?
here's [tepco.co.jp] what one of those generators looks like. A nuclear power power plant may have a dozen or more in their generator building. Even replacing just one is not some sort of couple day task. These things take prep work and a lot of labour to acquire, move, install and set up. Weeks to months. That's all assuming that the generator building itself is still usable; a failure in such a large generator, or the sort of external event that can take out such a large generator, is not exactly some sort of low energy event.
Back before Fukushima people like you were all over Slashdot harping about how major nuclear disasters couldn't happen again, that it's only possible with old Soviet designs like Chernobyl that are horribly misused. Quit being so damned short sighted. Unforseen events and cascading failures do happen. You can't just act like "the list of causes of major that have already happened is the entire comprehensive list of what could cause major failures".
If you scram, lose your grid connection and lose your generators, you will likely get a Fukushima-like event. Two of the three happened here. Let's not pretend that the concept of something taking out the generator room, or otherwise preventing its power from working the pumps - generators which are only rarely tested - is such a preposterous concept. And let's not be silly and act like massive pieces of industrial equipment can just be plopped down and hooked up like a little Honda generator.
Re:Indian Point == Ticking Timb Bomb (Score:5, Informative)
A nuclear power power plant may have a dozen or more [back-up generators] in their generator building. Even replacing just one is not some sort of couple day task.
Quite right. But the reason there are so many is to provide redundancy - they are not all needed at once - and by having a "dozen or more" they are not all going to fail at the same time because of a transformer explosion. The power stations I am familiar with (I am a nuclear engineer in the UK) do not put them all in the same generator building either. Nor are they sited in locations prone to tsunamis and it does not look like Indian Point is either.
generators which are only rarely tested
On the power stations I deal with they are tested frequently. It is hard to judge the size of the generators in your linked picture because it is obviously taken with a very wide-angle lens. The ones I deal with are the same type as used in railway locomotives, and there are mobile trailers available with such generators.
Re:Indian Point == Ticking Timb Bomb (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Indian Point == Ticking Timb Bomb (Score:4, Interesting)
IIRC (and we have a former Homer Simpson at work that translates all of this crap for me), the problem wasn't a lack of generators - it was that all of the electrical equipment was destroyed by the salt water. They recognized that the original emergency generators were vulnerable to flooding and moved them to higher ground, but they left the original electrical in place. It was all fried, and so there was nothing to plug into.
In the US, plants are required to have some kind of mobile generator. I don't know if their electrical systems are supposed to be redundant or somehow different than the Japanese plants - but I doubt it. A tsunami could probably put a US plant in a similar situation, but in order to get to Indian Point, it would have to kill a million or so people on the way, so the meltdown wouldn't be that big of a deal in the larger disaster.
Re:Indian Point == Ticking Timb Bomb (Score:4, Insightful)
it would have to kill a million or so people on the way, so the meltdown wouldn't be that big of a deal in the larger disaster.
You could say that about Fukushima. Nearly 20,000 killed in the 2011 Tsunami, none by radiation.
Re:Indian Point == Ticking Timb Bomb (Score:4)
[The problem] was that all of the electrical equipment was destroyed by the salt water.
The electrical power was being delivered by a battery room that was undamaged (until the batteries ran out). Matching the output of the battery room and wiring into the same line would be easy, with the right parts and equipment.
But nobody asked, and lots of lies were given as to the state of the reactor.
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Indeed, I do say that about Fukushima. In isolation, it looks like a disaster. In perspective, it was a very small element of a much larger disaster. The part that makes it "special" is that the people are displaced by an invisible hazard and they have to deal with a government that seems to alternate between lies and incompetence. Or maybe just delusion.
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But nobody asked, and lots of lies were given as to the state of the reactor.
The behavior bordered on criminal, when you assess it in hindsight. It has been revealed that the government agencies involved, including the office of the prime minister, were not keeping formal records so that they could cover their asses. This has denied all governments, who operate nuclear reactors, the ability to make systemic improvements in responding to nuclear accidents. Essentially the criminal negligence extended beyond TEPCO and the regulator, into the government itself.
One prime example of thi
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The massive wall of water wasn't the problem. It was the TEPCO lies about the damage. If Japan had said "we need a 120kVA generator plugged in and working in in 8 hours" there would have been one there. I used 120kVA as a rough guess. I couldn't find the exact size of the ones that were at Fukushima. If they needed 250kVA instead, then get two.
But the point is TEPCO lied about
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I'll let you be the guy that closes the 4KV switchgear that still have moisture inside, don't be surprised if I stand back quite a distance.
You've clearly never seen the cabling and electrical distribution & control infrastructure of a nuclear facility, and from your response I'd guess even an industrial one.
YOu can't replace any of that in hours. You might string one cable to one pump in that time, but you have to be able to get
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His was more linear and easy to understand, but my solution was faster, cheaper, and worked. You do the last things first, then when yo
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Buffalo is a six hour drive from this nuke plant.
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That's actually fairly easily solved, at least in the grand scheme of things. Just build giant solar farms right at the north and south poles. At any given time, one pole or the other will always be lit. (If that ever ceases to be the case, then the sun is no longer burning, and we're all in trouble.) Then use huge superconducting transmission lines to bring the power to the U.S.
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That's absolute genius! 6000 mile long superconducting transmission lines from the North pole. Of course, it only needs to be about a 24 gauge wire, since there is no resistance.
Still, I think my "unicorn treadmill" idea is more practical.
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I didn't say it was cheaply solved. And it will be a lot bigger than 24 gauge, because you have to wrap the superconductor in a tube to carry the liquid nitrogen that keeps it cold... but it is likely possible, today, using current technology.
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That's absolute genius! 6000 mile long superconducting transmission lines from the North pole. Of course, it only needs to be about a 24 gauge wire, since there is no resistance.
Superconductors have a critical current density, above which they cease to superconduct. While I don't know the actual numbers for common superconductors, I suspect that supporting the world's current draw through a 24 ga wire would exceed the current density limit :)
Reality is sort of going that way (Score:2)
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I also live right here, and there are no radiation alerts in the area.
Do you have radiation detectors [wikipedia.org], or do you rely on government issued alerts? Because the AC specifically stated:
And his radiation detectors are going crazy. Government hasn't issued any statement so far.
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Re:My Frind Lives near that plant (Score:5, Informative)
Those are some impressive detectors, especially since electrical transformers are a standard part of all power distribution networks [howstuffworks.com] and have absolutely nothing to do with radiation.
When the electrical substation providing external power to your nuclear power reactor fails, you shut down the reactor because your principal source of constant backup power has failed. Your secondary source, generators, are not intended to allow the plant to continue to operate, but to shut down cleanly.
When a tranformer blows, your risks are fire and, if it's an old transformer, PCB contamination from the old-generation transformer oils. Certainly not radiation.
Re:Indian Point leaking tritium - Gov. orders evac (Score:4, Interesting)
As opposed to the natural radon which was in the water of my now capped well.
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Pretty sure "blew up and failed safe" is an oxymoron.
Not at all, rockets being launched into space (or as ICBMs) are blown up with explosives carried on board in order to insure the safety of those on the ground. In this case, NOT blowing up and being out of control means a missile is about to hit something and make a big boom on the ground!
Oh, and transformers blowing up, yes they are spectacular--haven't been there myself, but I've seen the aftermath. Might have something to do with up to hundreds of gallons of oil inside to cool the thing combined with b
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This kind of thing has happened before It's a huge technical achievement that it doesn't happen often enough to really remember the last time. LINK to Natalie/Nat King Cole duet, Unforgettable [youtube.com]
Now THAT was an unforgettable performance. Natalie Cole breaking her long reluctance to cover her father's (Nat King Cole) songs... and going on tour with a standard that has her singing a duet with her deceased father. Technology at its finest. Good stuff, thanks.