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Fatal Explosion At Russian Hydroelectric Dam
stadium writes "An oil-filled transformer exploded at the Sayano-Shushenskaya power plant in Siberia, destroying three turbines and bringing down the ceiling of the turbine hall, which then violently flooded. The dam itself did not sustain any damage. It is unclear how many people were killed, but with 12 confirmed deaths and as many as 64 still missing (all presumed dead), this is a serious incident. The huge transformer had enough oil in it to produce a three-mile-long oil spill slowly moving downriver. BBC News reports with three separate videos. The dam produces a quarter of the total energy of RusHydro (whose stock thus took a steep dive at London Stock Exchange) and also feeds the world's largest aluminum smelter. The damages will take years to repair."
So now we need stop hydroelectric power until it can be proven safe. We have no idea how much water has been released to contaminate the environment! If we continue to build and operate hydroelectric plants, the world will be doomed. How many more lives need be lost in our unquenchable thirst for power? Hydroelectric power is unsafe and this proves it!
Yeah, people love to say that. Except they forget that V = IR, or I = V/R. Since in a given accidental electrocution scenario your body's resistance isn't really a variable, it may be the amps that kill you, but it's the volts that cause them.
Yes, that is indeed what they say...however I wonder a bit, because in my experience the transformers are not located in the power house, they are located in the switch yard. The usual process is that the power is generated at a convenient voltage for the generator to work at, then stepped up in the switchyard to a higher voltage for transmission. But the pictures we see are of extensive damage to the power house, and the flooding implies damage to the turbine or penstocks. The pictures seem to show considerable damage to at least one of the turbine generator sets.
That is not to say that a transformer failure might not have initiated it, if the transformer fails and dumps a hard short across the generator then things will get very exciting very quickly. This sort of thing can wrench a generator off its foundations, which would lead to the damage to the turbine side and hence the flooding.
Of course, this early in the piece it is kind of hard to get reliable information, and at that they have done better than with Chernobyl as far as announcing things is concerned.
>12,000 volts will not only kill you,
I gotta call a little bullshit on this one. Back in my high school days, I used to mess around under the hoods of crappy cars to keep them running. I got zapped by "leaky" spark plug wires more than a few times. Automotive ignition systems (even 25 years ago) ran hotter than 12,000v and I am still alive to tell the tale.
Afaict most plastics are made from small unsaturated hydrocarbons like ethene and propene which are then polymerised. Theese hydrocarbons are made by cracking bits off the less valuable hydrocarbons in crude oil (e.g. you take stuff that's a bit too heavy to be petrol, crack bits off and get petrol and ethene/propene).
There have been some plastic-like substances made from biologically derived materials and i'm pretty sure other sources for unsaturated short chain hydrocarbons could be found too (they'd probablly just be a lot more expensive than cracking crude)
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
"when Ivan has an industrial accident he doesn't fuck around" Tom Clancy - Red Storm Rising
And for you libertarian-minded folks, *this* is called a negative externality, and is why government regulations are, in fact, sometimes a good thing.
They already do.
Of course. Some hydro stations are arguably bad ("bad" meaning having a sizable impact) for the environment in the immediate area around the dammed river. But that is not why they are protesting them.
Hydro power is too easy. It is not horribly expensive and delivers clean energy in abundance. In other words, it does not ask us to make any sacrifices, and that means that it holds no appeal for environmentalists who (and I don't have any nicer way to put this) get a hard-on from telling us how to live.
Watch for the day when large-scale solar, wind or tidal power becomes practical and economical. That is the day the environmentalists will find fault with these types of energy generators. "Solar panels screw up the desert ecosystem". "Birds fly into the rotors". "Changing tides mess up the clam colonies". Like true Calvinists they think that everything should carry either guilt or sacrifice.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Autoclaving for sterilizing medical tools is old tech. Disposable plastics are ubiquitous because that's how the device manufacturers make money (I used to do work related to medical devices). If you don't have either have a disposable bit or a per-unit cost of over $10M, your business plan will never be funded — the return on investment is too small for the venture folks to even bother reading your proposal.
-JS
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity...
Not if you have a legal system that supports property rights. You know the kind of legal system we are supposed to have but don't. In that kind of system the threat of a law suit keeps everyone honest. In out system chances of losing a suit and being actually held responsible for the damage are a joke.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I don't think this is correct. The Penstocks are always water filled and the wickets control the amount of water that passes over the turbine and spins the generator. Closing these gates fast wouldn't cause the effect you mention. What I can see is all a sudden the friction from the water is gone, the inertia of the huge spining masses causes the turbine to over-rev and it tears itself apart. That looks to me like what happened as you see large blocks of concrete thrown about and the top of the generator enclosure is gone. That would also explain the flooding. Then again someone mentioned if you throw a huge dead short load across the generator it would tear itself apart and the transformer explosion could do that. So, it could be a transformer explosion. Another story says "Instruments indicated that it was not a hydraulic impact but a broken turbine cover in the machine hall," said RusHydro board member Alexander Toloshinov according to the Interfax news agency." Knowing the Russians, it's likely we will never know. It's quite possible there was an unlikely chain of events that any one of would not cause a disaster but two together and all hell comes loose.
It isn't the volts, but the amps that will kill you.
People say something similar when talking about falling to one's death. "It's not the fall that kills you, but the sudden stop at the end."
While technically accurate, I don't expect many people to go around saying "Yeah, poor Bob died of rapid deceleration after his chute didn't open."
Was that really necessary? Why the insistence on bringing up imaginary racism where there is none? George Washington Carver's contributions to American agriculture and agricultural science are regularly taught in American schools. I know I learned about him in 10th grade History class (a good 22 years ago!) while covering the Reconstruction period.
Carver is widely regarded as one of the great (and possibly the greatest of his time) American intellectuals. He is not forgotten at all, and his legacy of scientific discovery lives on to this day. George Washington Carver Day is still celebrated on January 5th, the day of his death.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
No. A synchronous motor will not spin faster than the line frequency allows it to.
A mineral oil filled transformer could easily produce a pretty good fuel-air explosion. In the confined space of the turbine hall this could be devastating.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.