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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."
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!
Isn't this news from yesterday?
No, you are caught in a temporal loop.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
In soviet russia, hydroelectric damns YOU.
Is there any chance that this transformer would have contained PCBs (i.e. Polychlorinated biphenyl)? They used to be used as dielectrics. I know that the US banned them in the early 70s- or rather, read that on WP- but the age and Soviet/Russian regulations could still make this an unpleasant possibility.
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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.
It isn't the volts, but the amps that will kill you.
Or it might have been the explosion.
I don't think this one was due to amps. There were no bands set up on stage at the time of the accident.
Most likely what happened was what's known as arc flash.
Arc flash is when metal is vaporized due to difference in potential between two objects, like phase to phase, or phase to ground. It's very dangerous to us humans because we burn easily, and because the vaporized metal tends to fly outward in a shotgun pattern.
An electrical breakdown in a large transformer can cause this internally, and as the live power works its way from the inside out, it can vaporize holes in the transformer casing. So you have boiling oil, vaporized copper/steel/etc, and a lot of live electricity trying to get back to earth ground.
This is why electrical engineering is very important. All it takes to cause this is someone disconnecting or connecting a line under the wrong load, or with no load at all.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
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"
Somewhat off topic, but...
While true and oft-repeated, the volt/amp comment ignores the fact that there is a definite relation between the two. It is easier to determine the exact effect on the body if you know how many amps went through the person's heart and/or other muscles, but ballpark figures with volts can give some idea of the danger. The body is essentially just a resistor, so there is a linear relation between volts and amps if you know where that voltage is applied and thus what the resistance of the body between those 2 points is. You know that with 12 volts it takes some ingenuity to kill someone, but 120 volts from a wall socket is dangerous if mishandled. 1200 volts will be fatal when applied directly to the skin almost anywhere. 12,000 volts will not only kill you, it will arc through small air gaps to do so (i.e. tasers, you don't get all of the claimed thousands of volts over the body, most is dissipated across the air gap or is regulated by the circuitry to keep the current low).
The way I look at it, amps give you a good idea of how dead you are. Volts gives you a measure of how bad something is trying to kill you.
The PCB is a dielectric and coolant, *not* a fuel. Oil is used in a huge number of areas as a material and not as a fuel.
There is actually a school of thought among some in the chemical industry that oil is too precious to waste as a fuel. Think about it how it is used in medicine. Disposable plastics in medicine are critical in stopping infections. Precursor chemicals, often starting as petroleum, are used in pharmaceuticals.
In other areas petroleum products are important; e.g. tires, light weight building materials, glues, paints, solvents etc.
Just FYI.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
the transformer uses oil as an insulating coolant, to move the heat out of the core and windings of the transformer to the cooling fins and radiators
usually nasty (cancer-causing) PCB stuff too. A LOT worse to the environment than 10W-40.
I would NOT be happy to be in a town whose main river is about to get a major dump of that. The fish won't be safe for months, and it's probably going to cause a fishkill all the way to the ocean/lake it empties into. Governments are well known to say "no really, it's safe, no problem, nothing to see here" when they know it's all kinds of bad news, just to avoid a PR nightmare.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
PCBs are a lot cheaper than the alternatives, and it's a lot easier to justify storing it in a transformer than using it somewhere external. Transformers that are working properly and maintained are sealed quite well and unless one blows up (like this) there's no danger or health hazards to anyone.
Pity the folk that get to work on those transformers though. I know someone that was looking for a building to move his small business into, and found a cheap place that had these rows of benches all around its inside perimiter... heavy benches, with 2-3ft holes all the way down the row. What are whose for? They didn't know what the former owner used them for. (suuuuure they didn't) Turned out to be formerly owned (several owners ago in VERY short succession) by the city's electric works. It was a building for transformer repair for the units you see up on the telephone poles. Place was loaded with PCBs, soaked into the wood of the beams, benches, and walls, even the dirt was a love canal. He almost got stuck with it too. In those games, whoever "discovers" (formally) the contamination while in ownership is left "holding the bag" and is responsible for cleanup. That "bargain" would have bankrupt him and then some. The guy that clued him in was even cleaning off his shoes after they left the building, it was baaad.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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)
PCBs have not been used in transformers in the USA for more than thirty years. Not forgetting of course that this hydro plant was built 31 years ago.
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.
TFA says the transformer exploded while being "serviced". A good wild guess would be they were welding on it and sparked some combustable gasses inside the case. (so it was probably partially drained at the time of the explosion) That air pocked inside the transformer would be an ideal condition for an explosion like that. Rapid expansion of gases inside an otherwise mostly sealed container like that would send multi-ton pieces of metal in all directions, it'd be like a giant frag grenade. You thought exploding batteries in DSLAM cabinets were bad, these are quite a bit worse.
As for age, there are PCBs in 1/4 of the trashcans on the poles today. Just because they don't manufacture with it anymore doesn't mean it's not still out there. Transformers are expensive, and I don't even know if you can change from PCB to mineral oil practically speaking. (it's gotta be hard to get PCB fluid out of saturated paper windings) BIG transformers like that are outrageously expensive and are only manufactured in a handful of places on earth, so much that price AND availability are problems when obtaining them. Odds of it being a PCB-containing unit are actually very high since big transformers are not only incredibly expensive but are also one of the longest life electronic components in existence. (they are also one of the most efficient)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
We can get by without gasoline; it will be an infinitely harder time getting by without plastics. As stated, most of modern medical practice is based on the assumption of cheap, sterile, disposable items (although I *do* hope a lot of that is recycled - biohazards melted away first, of course).
We can make plastics from corn oil. Not a problem. Most medical waste is incinerated, for obvious reasons.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
They already do.
It's been a long time.
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.
It may be the amps that kill you, but the voltage is the bus they take to work.
Nothing to say here... move along
There's a site near where I live where for 40 years, the Ward Transformer Company was contaminating the surrounding area with PCBs. They've been cleaning the dirt for over a year, with an estimated cost of $6,130,000. That's not a cost I'd want to buy. Good thing your friend was warned away from buying. Of course I think I'm paying for this $6 million cleanup with my taxes.
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.
> TFA says the transformer exploded while being "serviced". A good wild guess
> would be they were welding on it and sparked some combustable gasses inside
> the case.
That's a pretty good guess. Acetylene can form inside oil filled transformers.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
usually nasty (cancer-causing) PCB stuff
Reference please? Last I checked it was listed as a possible carcinogen, not a known carcinogen. Just about anything can be toxic in high enough concentrations, Oxygen makes the perfect example there.
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
That's because the parent is oversimplifying things. Voltage is how energetic the individual electrons are, and the amperage is how many electrons are flowing. That's why wattage, a measurement of power, is the product of the amperage and the voltage. Your electricity bill is based on wattage, or how much energy you consumed, regardless of whether it was comprised of 110 or 220 volts. You can't determine how much work the electricity can do based on only voltage or amperage. In this case, "work" is defined as the amount of electrical interference or damage to the heart to cause death. Thus there has to be a proper combination of both wattage and amperage.
Further, you can't go by just wattage alone.
A single electron with 1,000,000 volts isn't going to kill you. Nor will an astronomical number of electrons at 1 volt. The static shock you get from shuffling your feet on carpet is very energetic - thousands of volts - however there simply isn't enough of those electrons (amperage) to do real damage. Here's a really poor analogy from a college Chem 2 class (originally having nothing to do with electricity). Say you want to break a glass window, so you throw a million cotton balls at it, one after the other, until you exceeded the amount of power required to break the glass. Of course it won't break, even though you exerted enough energy, because it wasn't concentrated. Similarly, you can have a lot of amperage with low voltage and it is not dangerous, because the electrons do not have the energy to overcome the resistance of the skin. So the individual electrons have to have a minimum amount of energy to be able to traverse within the body, then you need a certain amount of them to interfere with the body's natural electrical system, or to do enough raw tissue damage that muscles, etc, are damaged in bulk.
Better known as 318230.
There have been some plastic-like substances made from biologically derived materials
Henry Ford was an early user of biologically based plastics, and I believe some of them made it to the Model T. Reference - Google books.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
12,000 volts will not only kill you,
You're totally wrong... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_coil
A person can channel huge voltages right across their heart if it's at a super high frequency and low current.
Agreed, I zapped a buddy with a 50,000v aftermarket one by accident... and while it made him jump farther than I've ever seen him move in less than 1/2 second he's still around to not laugh at it :)
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
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.
OK replying to myself, bad form I know, but anyway, it looks like they had the transformers in a row along the back of the powerhouse. Which makes sense electrically I guess, step up to a higher voltage close to the generator. but in terms of what has happened, maybe not so good, if indeed the transformer did initiate the problem.
However, looking at the videos, one shows the event from the front of the plant, eg the downstream side, and there are first some sparks and then lots of water. We wouldn't be seeing the transformer from there, those flashes must be from the generator, and then the flooding water would come from the turbine as the whole thing takes itself apart. (It seems two of the generator sets destroyed themselves.) I will go out on a limb and say that this video shows a turbine generator set which was running when things went wrong, which argues against the transformer being under repair when it happened. Although there would be spares, I suppose they might have been working on one and whatever went wrong took out the live ones, initiating the whole thing. I say that it would be running since if the set was stopped, an explosion nearby could take out the penstock and cause a lot of water to flood, but going by the videos there was also electrical effects, more like you would expect if the generator set tried to take itself apart.
There is of course a scary amount of energy stored in the rotating parts, plus of course the available energy from the head of water in the dam. Normally the turbine would be controlled by the vanes around the rotor in the snail casing, but once an accident like this has happened they would have to drop the gates at the top of the penstocks.
Hey AC, check out New Here's posting history - Nothing but that same tired old joke in the last 20-odd posts.
It hasn't been funny for a lo-o-o-o-o-ng time. But it certainly was funny then.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
Plastics can also be made from Natural Gas (mostly Methane) which can be "upgraded" to Ethane and Propane in a refinery. Natural Gas also contains some amounts of Ethane and Propane naturally. So crackiing isn't the only way to get feedstock for plastics. Also, a lot of plastic is recycled and made in to new plastics items, but some "virgin" plastic has to be added it cannot be 100% recycled for some reason.
That's what you get for drinking your beer out of cans. Proper beer comes in bottles, kegs, or better yet, is distilled and aged in a barrel.
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.
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."
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!
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.
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
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.