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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."
Isn't this news from yesterday?
The transformer was a Decepticon.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
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!
The Russian men hired to do the job were drunk, so they paid homeless babushkas to assemble the turbines with embezzled money. A few parts were put in backwards.
It's a damn shame that this happened.
In soviet russia, hydroelectric damns YOU.
It isn't the volts, but the amps that will kill you. Also, the risk isn't always what you expect to be obvious. Engineering is important.
To me this 'exploding transformer' seems strange. I mean, the transformers we use where I work are filled with non-explosive mineral oil. Something seriously bad must have happened to this transformer. I mean, so bad I can't even imagine. Looking at the amount of destruction I just don't understand how it's possible. Any electrical engineers out there who can offer some insight?
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
This gets modded "Informative".
http://rutube.ru/tracks/2264709.html?page=index_top_d&v=895630c2b1f248fafd957862a037d663
The homeless get a nice raise.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
...dam breaks YOU!
Bond. James Bond.
Is it bad that my first thought was "Time to leave, Doctor Doak."?
Immolation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Now Greenpeace is going to have to protest hydroelectric dams too...
NT
From the BBC article:
From the summary:
Apparently the exchange rate between countries is so bad these days that a few months just doesn't last nearly as much as it once did.
My power just came back on.
Hikaru Sulu: An "incident."
Janice Rand: Do we report this, sir?
Hikaru Sulu: Are you kidding?
Scarce, scared, scarred, sacred... -Col. Bruce Hampton
EnglishRussia.com has some pretty stunning pictures of the damage.
Interesting that this got tagged !redstormrising. I wouldn't have though about it without that tag, it's a relatively obscure reference to something that happened in the beginning of the book (terrorists blow up an oil refinery in Russia, sparking WWIII). It is a pretty decent book though, unlike all of the later drivel that author pushed out.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Why do these mass death incidents happen to Russia? I know they drink a lot...
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
I'll say one thing for the Russians, when they have a disaster they have a really big, proper, all-out disaster. They don't do things by half there, unlike the half-assed yanks with their Three-Mile Island and whatnot.
"when Ivan has an industrial accident he doesn't fuck around" Tom Clancy - Red Storm Rising
No, I'm New Here
...SovNews reports that the explosion did not hinder the smelting plant's capability to pollute the river. The smelting plant's officials vowed to ramp up pollution production in spite of this incident, in honor of their fallen comrades.
Link
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
FreeBSD had lo8g
Price of green? What does this mean, exactly? Dams are not all that green in a lot of settings because of their substantial environmental impact. I think the slashdot editors might want to take an environmental studies class or three before making such misleading statements as... oh, wait. Slashdot. Nevermind.
Large oil filled transformers are almost always placed away from areas where they cause collateral damage to valuable assets (note, people are not considered valuable assets in this context). In addition, to cause a flood (which is apparently what happened to cause the damage) the transformer would have to be located adjacent to the turbine. It's just not done, because the layout of a power plant is not conducive to this. The only transformer it would be convenient to place here would be a generator step up transformer, which is connected to transmission lines (kinda of has to be outside). Any transformer explosion was collateral damage.
Great.... Aluminum prices just went up. Let's se... that covers cars, house wiring and oh yeah... beer cans.. Damn!
"Yes, I have a Disaster Recovery Plan. It's called my Resume"
Drunk operator at the controls?
If this had happened under the USSR, "Communism" i am sure would have been blamed on "Communism" (even though the USSR was never communist but state capitalist). However, when private corporations have a massive screw up, we dont hear people blaming capitalism and the self regulation mentality.
Time for a New World War, judging that this ties very neatly with the events in Tom Clancy's "Red Storm Rising" :P
Electrostatic devices and phenomena
A high voltage is not necessarily dangerous if it cannot deliver substantial current. The common static electric sparks seen under low-humidity conditions always involve voltage buildups well above 700 V. For example, sparks to car doors in winter can involve voltages as high as 20,000 V[3]. Also, physics demonstration devices such as Van de Graaff generators and Wimshurst machines can produce voltages approaching one million volts, yet at worst they deliver a brief sting. These devices have a limited amount of stored energy, so the current produced is low and usually for a short time.[4] During the discharge, these machines apply high voltage to the body for only a millionth of a second or less. The discharge may involve extremely high power over very short periods, but in order to produce heart fibrillation, an electric power supply must produce a significant current in the heart muscle continuing for many milliseconds, and must deposit a total energy in the range of at least millijoules or higher. Alternatively, it must deliver enough energy to damage tissue through heating. Since the duration of the discharge is brief, it generates far less heat (spread over time) than a mobile phone.
I don't want to appear off topic, but will Sayano-Shushenskaya be invoked as a reason not to build hydro-electric power anywhere in the world regardless of differences in design, technology, safety, regulations, or construction methods?
Because I seem to recall a rather famous Russian power plant disaster that gets dragged into every debate on another power source; regardless of it's relevance to the proposed power plants being debated...
What is so darn hard about putting a temperature gauge and an alarm system?? Idiots- Never a shortage of them in this world..
Dam it!
The Russian dipshit who put the transformer in a place where it could destroy a water bearing wall and kill 12 people is probably feeling pretty bad about himself right now.
Perhaps you have more information than I, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the structural failure of the water bearing wall was created by a massive turbine ripping itself apart. If you watch the video, you hear the explosion some time after the water starts spraying everywhere. So apparently the concrete was compromised before the transformer exploded.
If I had to speculate, I'd say a structural failure of the concrete allowed much more water past the turbine blades; the corresponding increase in speed overloaded the transformer, causing it to explode. After the explosion, the lack of load on the turbine allowed it to exceed its rated speed, at which point it ripped itself apart causing even further damage.
It's a well known fact that concrete cracks. Perhaps the original engineers designed the spillway so that even with a fully open sluice and no load, the turbine speed would not destroy itself. I wonder if they considered the possibility of a large concrete failure allowing an essentially unlimited amount of water past the turbines.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
If there is only one transformer for the dam and this transformer shorts, every second there is up to an equivalent energy of 0.4 tonnes of delicious steak being converted to heat in a very small space as opposed to providing useful power all over the electrical grid. If there are any butchers here, I'm sure they can clue you in to what 0.4 tonnes of ribeye will do.
It isn't the total energy of explosives that causes destruction, it's the power of the explosion and the attendant shock wave. Is there any reason to expect that a transformer explosion would progress on the same time scale as an explosive detonation?
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
Sure enough.. if it's possible to break something catastrophically, the Russians will find it.....
What was not reported but is shown in the videos is what happend when the transformer faulted and suddenly threw a short on a turbin. The torque on the generator tore it loose from the generator deck and the kinetic energy shreded the shell of the generator. The armature ripped the water turbine out as this mass flew about. This let the water into the generator deck and hydrostatic pressure blew out the generator deck wall. The transformer that shorted is outside. The light from the arc can be seen to the left of the rupture. The petcocks feeding the turbine deck were closed which shut down the fountain of water.
The water fountain is because the turbine core was ripped out by the disentigrating generator above it. This was not reported.
My father was a powerhouse operator on 2 of the hydro plant on the Columbia River Basin. As such, I have had the cooks tour of hydro operations.
The high voltage transformers to convert the generator output to the high tension line voltage are outside the powerhouse. A turbine deck in the powerhouse looks like this.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_7rnI15qf-JM/SE9LY0Qe_gI/AAAAAAAAGWw/IQ_c0S2khmY/s1600-h/DSCN3116.JPG
Now watch the videos again of the powerhouse damage. Several of the generators are simply shrededed and not present. The water turbine is pulled out of the deck on one. This is where the fountain of water entered the powerhouse. Note, there are no large transformers in the powerhouse.
The truth shall set you free!
http://www.eng.rushydro.ru/press/news/7550.html
More current reports is correctly listing this as a hydrostatic shock explosion that destroyed a generator and damaged another.
The early report of a transformer explosion is incorrect.
The truth shall set you free!
... the tree huggers here in the states won't let us build one. First Chernobyl, and now Sayano-Shushenskaya. With nuclear power exed and hydro power exed, now what do we do?? I think we should substitute tree-huggers for coal in our power plants. It'll get rid of one more whiny voice...
I was going to comment that BBC is known as Bloody Bad Coverage. But then I read the linked article. No mention there of transformer explosion. The link text "An oil-filled transformer exploded ..." is wrong. There was hydro shock and pipes ruptured.
The damage was done by the rushing water.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCUTsRigTR0
Could this be caused by transformer blast?
The summary says a transformer blew up. But in these photos, I see what appears to be a couple of generator stator poles lying loose in the rubble (second photo down). The transformers (shown lower down a ways) appear to be relatively intact) Meanwhile, this video shows what appears to be water escaping a broken penstock or turbine. Not oil (although some arcing is visible for a moment over on the left). I'm wondering of the oil leaks are secondary to the initial failure.
Have gnu, will travel.
since DHMO is the major contributor to global warming.
If we had just enacted Kyoto this tragedy could have been averted.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Of course for the non technical a Transformer and a Turbine both start with the letter 'T' When you read the reports the workers caused a pipe to fail and flood the engine room with water. The Turbine is connected to the water pipes and if they do something wrong - like causing the machine to overspeed it will cause the turbine to explode and flood the engine room with water. Look at the wreckage of the exploded generator and look at the pictures of the transformers they show damage for having the the roof of the power station fall on top of them.
Looks like the real cause has been lost in translation
the volume control on the BBC video player goes all the way to 11 - freaky!
"The transformer that shorted is outside. The light from the arc can be seen to the left of the rupture. "
You're right that there is arcing visible in the video, to the left of the plumes of water. But the entire front and rear wall of the generator hall is a curtain of windows, so it might be arcing inside the building or even behind it. It's pretty hard to tell from the video. You are right that the big transformers are usually outside (easier cooling). Some of the pictures show the main transformers are on the rear wall (the side facing the dam -- they are painted dark orange).
I was wondering if the arcing visible in the video was a later event, probably related to the water that was spewing all over the place inside the generator hall and outside after the turbine/generator were ripped out, rather than the one that supposedly initiated the problem. The timing doesn't make sense with that particular arcing being the initial trigger, unless it was still ongoing when the video started. At least 2 or 3 turbine/generator sets were ripped open and allowed water into the hall, so it is pretty clear there must have been a cascade of failures after the initial one of them occurred. Furthermore, the location of the arcing is far to the left, in a part of the building where the roof was left intact by the end of the event. As impressive as it is, I don't think that arcing was the cause of the "main event" which was happening on the right side of the building. So, it's an arc, but not "the" arc that started things.
The rest of your explanation makes a lot of sense.
Maybe we should have built more nuclear power plants instead!
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
So where's the outrage over the inherent extreme danger to the environment that a disaster at a hydro plant will cause? Why do only nukes get this bad rap?
The large generators used in hydro plants also tend to be multipole synchronous machines that run synchronously with the AC grid - eg., a 24-pole synchronous machine runs at a constant 300RPM for 60Hz generation, 250RPM for 50Hz generation.
If the turbine suddenly runs dry of water, the generator will suddenly become a motor and spin by itself using power from the AC grid. It won't run away, it'll just keep doing what it was doing.
Well, someone had to say it.
Same thing, I guess. Poor Russians.
Ayn Rand, "Atlas shrugged" describes exactly what's going on in Russia right now. Real workers are underpaid and nobody is interested in doing things properly. Most probably it's a result of gross incompetence and lack of maintenance.
Some years ago Moscow blacked out because a transformer exploded and burned out. Everything stopped. I'm a network sysadmin in a big retail chain here and I remember watching shops go black, one by one until our main office internet connection collapsed. They said it was old transformer station exploded. Now they again say that it was an explosion of the transformer station. But I believe it's not just faulty equipment, but just exactly what's described by Rand.
Here's a little story...
When wiring up my solar panels I had some communication errors w/ the inspector. (he was all over a ton of mickey mouse shit, like labels not being phenolic, etc..) Later on (it was winter, a good time to work on panels btw) I had to do some computer work in the shop side of my garage. I setup my e- heater to heat it up by plugging it into the garage door opener's outlet on the ceiling thinking "this should be strong enough for a long 12Amp load, and it's a short run too." I go and watch a movie w/ the wife. (there is a smoke alarm right next to the outlet.) 1/2 through the movie, the lights go out. Curious, I go and check the breaker. Flip it, and it flips right back to off. WTF? Why does this keep going off? I know the only real load is the heater, but why was my TV in the far back bedroom not working? I unplug the heater but the breaker still pops, unplug the outlet, and dig into the wiring. Braided wire? weird... but no black spots. So I follow the wire but it doesn't go to the panel! I was expecting it to drop right across the ceiling 10ft to the panel, but no. Instead of wiring a new circuit, he wired it to the light switch for the garage lights, which goes across the house to the back bedroom! The braided wire was EXTENSION CORD that had the plugs cut off on each end. Because it was braided wire, and he overtwisted his wirenut there was a "hotspot." The hotspot got hot enough to melt the insulative coating off the hot wire, and since it was overly twisted, that then melted the neutral braided wire's coating, and consequently they arced and fused together! Luckily for me, the hotspot was at least inside a box. So the only damage he did was to the wires. I'm lucky my breakers work! Smoke was confined inside the wall so the alarm never went off! I coulda burned at least some damage into my garage!
Since then, I've added a new circuit for the garage door opener because it's about 1hp so I didn't want it on my houshold circuits. I gratuitusly thanked the inspecter, and said I now know 1st hand why they are such pains in the ass!
My worry was that if that was jacked up, what's the rest like. Well I went through and did a full wireing inspection after that, and found only one other issue. He used extension cord to wire up a light for the back of the house.
You can do it yourself if your willing to follow the wires from the panel, to each outlet, AND BACK.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
fix your to you're at end, and inspector vs. the specter under the bed. Probably more errors, but I wendt too publick skewl.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Time to buy some RusHydro stock?
I think we all saw him blow up a dam once. In Russia no less.
Here are the transformers (orange boxes on the photos), apparently none of them has exploded. http://forums.drom.ru/attachment.php?attachmentid=610633&stc=1&d=1250749637