Reactor Shutdown Darkens South Florida 356
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."
I was wondering what happened (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And what did nuclear have to do with it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:5 reactors? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Ah, the usual problem. (Score:3, Interesting)
I would want to know more about the maintenance on those switches, their rated capacity, and why enough could fail at the same time to reduce transportable capacity. Even with infinite switches, there'd be a non-zero probability of a complete across-the-board failure, but provided everything is well-maintained, you only need to guarantee that at any given point in the system, what you have spare exceeds what is likely to simultaneously fail, for an acceptable level of "likely".
Were there unnecessary single points of failure or inadequate backup mechanisms? Did so many switches fail at the same time because they were rated far too low for current usage or because poor maintenance degraded them below the ability to handle current usage? Nuclear reactors are extremely bad at handling dynamic loads, so what is going into developing mechanisms for soaking up (or burning up) power when grids do go offline? (Reactors aren't trivial things to restart.)
Re:5 reactors? (Score:3, Interesting)
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, in Florida you probably don't have to heat that much during the year(?) but its rumored that there are unfriendlier places.
Re:global warming (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:5 reactors? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 that comes with nuclear- the staffing, the regulatory issues, the security, the higher quality requirements, the safety systems- means that only the largest units are economically viable. New Nuclear power plant designs are even larger (A new GE design is on the order of 1,600MWe) for those reasons.
Now, certain large institutions may be turning toward combined heat and electricity generation. This makes perfect economic sense for those organizations, but it's not a larger trend. I won't go into the economics of it, but you're not going to have a combined heat-power generator in your basement, and neither is the walmart down the street, because the economics aren't there and won't be for the forseeable future.
Re:Glad they got things back up (Score:3, Interesting)
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 electromechanical device, yeah, it could get a little hairy to switch a generator onto the grid.
Re:global warming (Score:3, Interesting)
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 understand them shutting down the power output, if only to avoid problems when they have to resynchronize the phase of the power when the lines go hot again, but I don't see any reason that should necessarily be linked to the operation of the nuclear pile. The nuclear pile is just moving a bunch of steam around. It can do the same thing whether the turbines are under an output load or not.
At worst, I'd expect the water to move faster through the turbines because there wouldn't be as much resistance to spinning them, and maybe not even that, assuming there are governors on the turbines... unless, of course, the governors are simply insufficient to handle that situation, in which case that screams "design problem" to me.
I assume that the multi-day outage could have been avoided if the reactor were brought down slowly instead of being scrammed. If so, one would expect that a human being should be required to push the button to shut down a reactor for lack of load reasons, particularly when shutting it down completely requires a multi-day rest period for reaction byproducts to degrade. I would expect that the only time a reactor would be scrammed automatically is when there's a safety risk to its continued operation, and I don't see why a decreased load would qualify as a safety concern.
Am I missing something fundamental here?
Re:That explains that ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not surprising... it's FPL, after all... (Score:2, Interesting)
Just so you know, three weeks after Ice storm 1998 [wikipedia.org], there were still about 700k people without electricity in the middle of winter(most houses use electric heating and usual temperatures around that time of the year are below zero).
I presume they want the easement to bury long distance powerlines, not the ones for local distribution. Wikipedia seems to mention that electric power transmission lines [wikipedia.org] are very seldom underground. Of maybe they're concerned about being sued for EMF-related medical issues [wikipedia.org].
Re:global warming (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:5 reactors? (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't forget about distribution and conversion losses.