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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."
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!
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.
Demented But Determined.
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?
AccountKiller
Haha!
:p
Time for this Asia (China) resident to get his own back by tagging this story as 'andnothingofvaluewaslost'.
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?
Max.
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 just aware that the probability and capabilities of terrorist groups and there infrastructure aren't as ominous as the media and government perpetuate these days.
You're right, we should keep using oil instead. That way we don't have to shut down any nuclear reactors until we run out of oil. Of course, we'll be screwed when we *do* run out of oil, but we'll not have power outages until then. Oh wait, we will. Turns out nuclear power uptime is the same or better then coal or whatever other smoke bleaching power plant you want.
But feel free to continue with the pointless fear mongering over non-existent terrors. Florida is the one that's going to be under water anyway.
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.
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?.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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 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.
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 are below 1 MW of electric power.
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 . . .
Argh, the new moderation system makes misclicking far too easy. Posting to undo moderation.
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...
The Matrix is going down for reboot now! Stopping reality: OK. The system is halted.
No, I wouldn't have killed him. I would have killed the nearest person that doesn't know that would of != would've.
Thermodynamics is like that, stone age or not. Thermal power scales up giving you more than double the power for twice the size.
What?!? Are you saying you trust the government to do it? WOW! That is naive.
"nuclear power plant operation isn't rocket science"
- and that's why we don't have regular interplanetary space flight
"wherewithal" :)
It's a shame there isn't a hydrogen electrolysis facility nearby to take the power when the normal users can't be reached.
Because then you're producing megawatts of heat in your generating plant....not a good idea.