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]

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

Nothing to see here...

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Move along. Before we call in the assistance of our Blackwater contractors to ensure that you do.

I wonder what Dave Barry will write about this one?

Re:

[ResidntGeek]

I bet he'll write "". Same as he has almost every day since he retired.

Well, crap...

[Penguinisto]

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

/P

Re:

[kd5ujz]

Yup, just east of Panama City, Florida.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield,_Florida [wikipedia.org]




(Simpsons Joke)


(my head)

Re:Well, crap...

[milsoRgen]

Alaska

Some background information.

[palegray.net]

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]

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

Oh, great....

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we're going to have yet another round of computer scientists and other pseudo-engineers telling us how they would have done it better.

5 reactors?

[drachenfyre]

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

Re:5 reactors?

[Anonymous Coward]

I demand a recount!

MOD PARENT UP

[Gertlex]

In fact, I don't believe any US nuclear power plant has more than three reactors on one site.

Re:5 reactors?

[johnny maxwell]

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]

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]

"wherewithal" :)

Re:5 reactors?

[Gertlex]

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:

[Ihlosi]

So you'd rather have the thermodynamic inefficiency of distributed generation than the bureaucratic inefficiency of centralized generation?

Don't forget about distribution and conversion losses.

Re:5 reactors?

[AlvinTheNerd]

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.

Re:

[dfenstrate]

In fact they come from some technological stone-age where the idea of giant-gigawatt-city-plants was considered the best solution imaginable.

Or the technological stone age where scaling up the volume you use to generate electricity cuts down on the ratio of volume to surface area, where you lose heat and efficiency.

Good thing we've gotten around that old Length^3 = volume = power production and Length^2 = area = ambient losses stone age philosophy.

Sarcasm about thermal efficiency aside, the added expense th

Re:

[dbIII]

In fact they come from some technological stone-age where the idea of giant-gigawatt-city-plants was considered the best solution imaginable.

Thermodynamics is like that, stone age or not. Thermal power scales up giving you more than double the power for twice the size.

Re:

[johnny maxwell]

You really think a tiny little turbine is going to be as efficient as a huge one in a powerplant?

Yes, I do.
Of course the great turbine in the power plant is more efficient as my tiny little local one, but the power from the large, centralised and thereby far-off power plant has to come to me first. The biggest consumer on the net is the net itself. Most of the power is just lost traveling to my home!

But that's not even the worst part: what about all the heat? In a big power plant it is usually just blown in the air (or at most used locally). With village-sized plant most of it could be harnessed.

Ok, i

Reactors shut down because nowhere to send power

[AJWM]

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]

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]

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:

[pereric]

Yes, and still they fail. We had a somwhat interesting event at one of our sites in Sweden, Forsmark [wikipedia.org]: When a fault in the outbound net triggered a shutdown in a similiar way, a power spike at the internal system forced all of the backup generators down, stopping power to the pumps. Fortunately, they were able to be restarted manually.

There is some debate about whether we had a risk of meltdown (our reactors *do* have some shielding if that would happend), but still the lack of safety culture was heavily

Re:Reactors shut down because nowhere to send powe

[chris mazuc]

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.

Ah, the usual problem.

[jd]

This would put it in the same category as the massive northeast US seaboard blackout and the London blackout of a few years back then. I'm impressed it only cascaded over such a small region - these sorts of failures (and subsequent surges elsewhere on the grid) have a tendancy to ripple across vast areas very quickly. In the northeast US case, it took out several US States and a large chunk of Canada. This incident merely took out five generators and one small part of one State, which - relatively speaking

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

[Channard]

... 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]

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:

[caluml]

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!

What they need is a really big lightbulb that they light up if there's nowhere else for the power to go.

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

[xaxa]

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.

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

[HiddenCamper]

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:

[bill76]

U.S. power reactors generally do not have any problems starting up after a shutdown due to a buildup of poisons (neutron absorbers) in the reactor. Yes, xenon-135, a strong absorber, increases after shutdown, peaking about 10-15 hours after the scram. It decays to zero in about 72 hours. No, the xenon transient is not the reason why the plant owners don't start the reactors back up immediately. They evaluate the cause of the shutdown and the response of plant systems and make any necessary repairs befor

Its a good thing

[Dr. Eggman]

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.

Bad editorializing.

[Vellmont]

just what technical problems could shut down five reactors?

If the article submitter had actually read the article, he might have noted the nuclear plants shut down because of an under voltage in the rest of the system (caused by a breakdown elsewhere). My guess is this is some kind of safety measure, otherwise why would you have the system shut down?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. I found the NRC press release in about 2 seconds by simply going to their website. Perhaps people should 2 seconds of research before they begin jumping to conclusions about things.

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/news/2008/08-037.html [nrc.gov]

Re:Bad editorializing.

[Stanislav_J]

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

You're obviously new here...

Re:

[QuantumRiff]

But the problem is, the reactors should not shut down in that situation. If they just ramped up a little harder, the electrons could simply jump (some might say arc) the gaps in the broken transmission cables! Not to mention, they could fix that pesky little problem of Pensions and Medical benefits for the linemen!

andnothingofvaluewaslost

[dwater]

Haha!

Time for this Asia (China) resident to get his own back by tagging this story as 'andnothingofvaluewaslost'. :p

For those of you who don't know, a lot of the stories about Asian countries losing connectivity to large parts of the rest of the world were tagged as 'andnothingofvaluewas lost'. Of course, it could be argued that it is the countries that lost the connectivity that didn't lose anything of value, but hey.

I wonder why it is often stated that such places have lost their 'connection to the internet' when at least some of them probably don't much notice (China wouldn't notice much more than MSN not working, for example) - do people think that 'the internet' lives in the USA or something?

Re:

[Dr. Eggman]

Not to be an elitist American, but... [haydur.com] I couldn't find a substantive content map (well there's xkcd's [xkcd.com]) but I figure Fiber is illustrative enough.

At any rate, I also think the tagging system is garbage. I think the best fix would be to let the submitters specify the article tags. Yes, give me the POWER! I mean us! Us the article submitters!

Glad they got things back up

[JRGhaddar]

This is kind of a blow to the pro-nuclear power constituency, but outages are always a possibility. Safety nets and first response triggers are essential and this problem was corrected rather quickly so I still have confidence in the system.

On a side note:
I really hate how every problem requires a clarification that it wasn't Terrorists.
We live in a state of fear, and not a state of freedom. Are there people that really freak out and cry "Terrorists!" when something goes wrong these days. I'm not complacent

Re:Glad they got things back up

[Dun Malg]

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:

[Detritus]

It isn't that hard. You watch the phasing meters and tweak the generator speed until it's in phase with the grid, then close the breakers.

Re:

[grapeshot]

Exactly. The FIRST time you sync a new generator to the grid, that can get a little hairy, because you've got to get the phases checked to make sure their rotation matches with the phase rotation on the rest of the grid. But once you've got phase match, with modern sync check relays and automatic syncing and switching it's pretty routine.

Now...back in the day, before modern digital relays, when you had to watch a rotating needle on a dial and the three blinking lights, and the sync check relay was an el

Hurricane preparedness test.

[robkill]

FPL just wanted to make sure everyone tested their backup generators prior to hurricane season.

Dear God where are the facts?

[Bryansix]

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]

(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]

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]

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.

Re:

[hairykrishna]

'Control rods' are not graphite; they are made from something which is a neutron absorber. This is most usually a boron or cadmium containing material. Graphite is used as a neutron moderator. I'd be surprised if the shutdown in this case was automated. Automated shutdowns are rare; the operators normally have plenty of time to shut down before the things become potentially dangerous and a automated shutdown is triggered.

I was wondering what happened

[evolvearth]

I was on campus completely oblivious that anything happened. My girlfriend called me six times in a row, and while I had the phone on vibrate as to not to disturb the interesting lecture on the horribly long lab I'm going to have next week, I was irritated and concerned. I called her after class to see what's up, and that's when I found out there was an outage. The science and engineering side have nice generators, hence my ignorance. The building my girlfriend, Cooper Hall, is a death trap. Apparently, the idiots at USF made sure that when the electricity is out, people are actually locked inside the building. All of the doors were locked from the inside. What the hell would happen if there's a fire? I understand that's the inferior side of campus, but there are people in my phonebook over there and therefore I'm concerned!

Not surprising... it's FPL, after all...

[Miamicanes]

It's sad, but thanks to FPL and our largely-complicit state legislature, Florida has the power grid of a minor rural village in a POOR third-world country. Name ANY other place in the developed world with the size, population, and average wealth of Florida where it would EVER be considered acceptable to have more than a hundred thousand customers without power for more than TWO WEEKS after a hurricane that barely left a dent in anything besides the power grid itself (Hurricane Wilma... 15 days, 17 hours wit

Arghh! Media Feeds Nuclear Power Panic!

[ashitaka]

The account I read stressed that two nuclear reactors had shut down in a way that implied they were the cause. They interviewed a plant supervisor who said things had shut down as they were supposed to and everything was OK, as they are supposed to say.

Right at the end the article also mentions that two coal-burning plants shut down as well.

Same thing, so why the emphasis on the nuclear plants?

Five undersea cables! Five reactors!

[A nonymous Coward]

I smell something fivey .... the Pentagon!

Re:

[LearnToSpell]

FIVE! Five glowing cores! AH AH AH AH AHHHHHH!

Nothing to see here...it was a ships anchor....

[refactored]

..broke the cable, same as the other five 'net cables.

Happens all the time....

There is a fleet of ships...ah.. trucks repairing these things round the clock.

Why the power plants shut down

[iabervon]

The electrical grid is a really tricky system. You've got generators putting in energy at a bunch of points. And the whole thing is AC, which means that, if you look at any particular point, you see the voltage (and current) going in a sine wave. If you drive the system at the correct phase, you're supplying power; if you're slow by 1/120 second, you're turning twice your capacity into waste heat, and you start blowing up substations. Furthermore, since electricity moves at a finite speed along the wires, you can't just have a really good clock and have everybody agree; the difference in phase you need depends on the distance between the power plants along the wires. The solution is to have the power plant measure the phase of the lines they're on, and generate with a matching phase.

Now, if something goes wrong somewhere down the lines, the power plant may not be able to get a good read of the phase. At that point, you just shut down the power plant, shut down the substations (so there isn't customer load on the lines), get the switching stations fixed, start the power plant up again in phase, and reconnect the customers. It's only if the switching stations are really destroyed that they'd actually run a power plant for local customers disconnected from the national grid, and they'd have to shut it down again in order to rejoin the grid.

What happened today is actually how it's supposed to work in case of an equipment failure: a regional blackout, some time to repair the malfunctioning equipment or swap in replacements, and then restoring power. When the grid doesn't handle the failure correctly, power lines melt down and power company manholes and buildings blow up and service isn't restored for days to some customers.

Re:Why the power plants shut down

[Technician]

The solution is to have the power plant measure the phase of the lines they're on, and generate with a matching phase.


ROLFLAMO Power into and out of the electrical grid is not by the phase of the generator. Power into and out of the grid is by the prime mover, eg throttle and nothing else. Once a plant is online, the throttle doesn't change the phase, just the power. (infinate grid calcultions) Matching phase while connected is not monitored as the electrical locks it to the grid. Power factor is controlled by the voltage regulator. Over voltage produces a leading power factor and under excited generators produce a lagging power pactor. Excitation is used for correcting power factor with some voltage regulation/correction.

Matching phase is only something you do just before closing the breaker and it is almost always closed slightly out of phase by about 5-10 degrees leading while advancing (running slightly fast) so it can connect with little bounce. After that, it's in phase, even if the prime mover is shut down. (reverse power protection should relay it out at this point to allow it to stop rotating)

Disclaimer, I am not a powerhouse operator, but I am the son of a retired one.

Argh! Quit the terrorism angle already!

[achurch]

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]

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.

Overtaxed power system?

[PPH]

According to various reports, the outage began with equipment failure and the loss of a distribution substation. Unlike major transmission links, distribution substations feed local loads and are not a part of the transmission system critical to the movement of power between alternate sources. The loss of a distribution system results only in the loss of loads, not generating or transmission capacity.

Two things may have happened here. Neither bode well for the system's condition.

It is possible that, following a fault at the distribution substation, the primary protection relays failed to operate. There are (or should be) backup relays. But these typically take longer to operate and allow the fault transient to push the system into an unstable condition. This is bad design. System stability should be maintained even if one station's protection fails.

It is also possible that, in spite of the proper design of primary and backup protection, the regional grid is being run too to its stability limits. A fault condition properly considered in the system design which should not have caused stability problems did so because the system was being run beyond prescribed limits.

Both of these possibilities suggest that, in spite of the big midwest outage we had several years ago, lessons have not been learned.

I'm from Florida and have no power or internet

[Anonymous Coward]

good thing I backup IP over carrier pigeon.

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

[tattood]

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

Vaporware

[CODiNE]

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:

[nevillethedevil]

Secondly: What is the average delay on DNS resolution?

African or European pidgeon?

Re:Vaporware

[Gordonjcp]

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.

Sorry to burst your belief bubble... [linux.no]

Re:

[IdleTime]

LOL! I live in the Orlando area and we got the power back on after approx 40 min.. Slight chaos outside to say the least, people lose all their common sense when the traffic lights go out and start doing all kinds of smart things. Quite a few crumpled cars in the closest intersection.

Re:

[nuzak]

Yeah we never had power outages before.

Idiot. No, not strong enough. Epic thinking fail.

Re:global warming

[hamburger lady]

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

Re:global warming

[funwithBSD]

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

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[account_deleted]

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Re:global warming

[MightyMartian]

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.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:

[wizardforce]

wait what? so what you're pretty much implying is that the global warming "nut cases" as you call them advocate for alternative energy sources like nuclear power and it's all their fault this happened? wow...

Re:global warming

[armada]

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:

[scottv67]

and he told me that a massive transmission cable went down by aligator alley

The real story is that a bunch of electrons were pulled-over by a cop in Waldo for going c in a 25mph zone.
http://www.city-data.com/forum/florida/5365-moved-waldo-florida-speed-trap.html [city-data.com]

Re:global warming

[Guysmiley777]

If they were going c through aluminum transmission wires, they damn sure had better be pulled over. Violating the laws of physics is no laughing matter, son.

Re:global warming

[delvsional]

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

[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

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:global warming

[jbr439]

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]

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:

[HornWumpus]

Neutron-absorbers have something to do with minimum down times for nuke plants.

I'd have to guess the reactors generators were over-voltage due to lack of load and that triggered the shutdown. I can't imagine they ran the reactors control systems off the Miami substation.

Re:

[sjames]

Actually, nuclear plants ARE dependant on grid power for operations. It may seem odd that a plant generating many megawatts to a gigawatt of power needs an external supply, but it's a matter of safety. Were the plant to run exclusively on it's own power, a single malfunction could leave it in a state where it has no power for coolant pumps yet the reactor is at full power. So, if grid power to the plant drops, the reactor shuts down immediatly as a precaution.

The Chernobyl plant was carrying out an experi

Re:global warming

[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:

[andy_t_roo]

"nuclear power plant operation isn't rocket science"
- and that's why we don't have regular interplanetary space flight

Re:

[dgatwood]

I am not a nuclear engineer, so maybe I'm missing something obvious. That said, I don't understand why the system would automatically shut down due to a no load condition.

I understand why a backup generator for a house does this. It's to prevent linemen from getting killed touching lines that they assume are not hot while repairing a downed power line. One would not expect a lineman to assume a nuclear plant's output lines are not hot, however, so that reasoning doesn't apply.

I might be able to under

Re:global warming

[agingell]

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]

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:

[Chirs]

Because then you're producing megawatts of heat in your generating plant....not a good idea.

Re:global warming

[TheSync]

"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:

[bobbozzo]

If you lose your load on a nuclear reactor

LOL

Re:global warming

[BlueParrot]

Neutron-absorbers in the fuel had *nothing* to do with this.

The Xenon is what prevents you from starting the reactor once the grid problem has been fixed. Thus while the reactors had nothing to do with the cause of the shutdown, they can't simply be restarted the moment the problem is gone, you have to wait for several hours or even a day. The time period depends a bit on the precise reactor type, and some can be safely restarted without waiting for Xenon to decay. I don't know about the specific reactors in question, so I can't tell if this was an issue or not.

Re:global warming

[waferbuster]

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.

missed opportunity

[reedjjjr]

It's a shame there isn't a hydrogen electrolysis facility nearby to take the power when the normal users can't be reached.

Re:

[a_nonamiss]

It's pronounced NEWK-yoo-lurr honey, NEWK-yoo-lurr.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[hxnwix]

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:

[Anonymous Coward]

that THIS is exactly how we will end up if we allow it to happen.

And THIS is exactly how we will end up if we don't. Newsflash, buddy, but the nuclear plant had nothing to do with it other than "being there", the problem was in a distribution switch [youtube.com] that failed. These failures will happen no matter how many tree hugging hippies there are or are not, but I'm sure you won't let that stop you.

No, we will not run out of oil

[WindBourne]

Long before then we will run out of money to pay to OPEC and China.

Re:

[Farmer Tim]

Hey, there is a fate worse than death!