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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."
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!
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.
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. Generally bigger things are more efficient. (Excluding future techs and unobtainium). Like a centrally planned economy? Or perhaps like a mainframe? We should ask the dinosaurs!
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.
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.