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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.
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!
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 . . .
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.
"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.