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Nuclear Plant Taken Down In Anticipation of Snowstorm
mdsolar writes Pilgrim Power Plant in Plymouth was taken offline in anticipation of the weekend snowstorm. According to a statement from Entergy, the owner of Pilgrim, the plant was taken off line in preparation of "a potential loss of offsite power or the grid's inability to accept the power Pilgrim generates." This is the second time this season the plant has been shut down due to storm conditions. On January 27 the facility was taken offline after the two main power transmission lines were knocked out by blizzard conditions. Although the transmission lines were restored within a few days, the plant remained offline until February 7 at which time it was reconnected to the grid.
While you're right, I am guilty of attacking the submitter, he has a history of posting "facts" with no further comment or context.
Is this story relevant? Maybe. Is this story abnormal? No. What is the first thing that will happen when an uninformed person reads this story? They'll probably post something like the AC with the headline "Devil's advocate" a few posts below after having formed an unjustified negative opinion.
There's a difference between posting pure "facts" and "just posting something with minimal information" with the intent to foster a negative viewpoint that supports his personally chosen cause. Borderline malicious.
The plant will be shut down in anticipation that the transmission grid will suffer problems and not be able to take the power. It has nothing to do with the plant itself or inability to run through the storm. Plants all over the northeast have kept the lights on for millions throughout that rash of harsh winter weather we have been having. Pilgrim is a reliable station still going strong after many years.
Snow covered solar panels won't be very useful, that is for certain. Windmills are shut down in blizzard conditions. Thankfully other sources are available.
"Potential loss of offsite power" was listed as one of the two reasons for taking it down; the inability of the grid to accept power is only one. I would presume based on this that offsite power is part of their scenario for dealing with emergencies wherein the plant can no longer supply power for cooling its reactor, and hence the risk of loss of offsite power means an unacceptable meltdown risk should a disaster occur at the plant in the coming days.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
I've seen a wide variety of broken components in even well run thermal power plants (I've never worked with nukes but anything after the water is heated is pretty similar). I've seen even more on the way to breaking and getting cut out before they can fail.
So to sum up I don't think there's much to take away from a single outage - if all you've got is outage times you'd have to get statistical with more info before a sensible judgement.
A month and a serious death toll, that does indeed suck. I'd wonder why they didn't truck in a pile of the container sized generators or a similar disaster plan as done by utilities after hurricanes.
France seems to handle their plants fine. And wind power and solar power have capacity factors so low than it won't work for grid generation without excess generation capacity and storage to begin with.
Both the top news you posted here and your second link in the parent post are about transmission grid failures. Not nuclear power plant failures. As for graceful powering up and down it can be done. France for example has nuclear power plants with load-following mode. The US doesn't bother with this because the faction of power generated with nuclear is low enough that it isn't worth doing the retrofits. As for the heat sink being too hot you would have the same problem with any other thermal power plant which uses a cooling tower. Coal, natural gas, whatever. It isn't a nuclear power specific problem either. It's a thermal power plant issue.
Yes, that was the problem with Fukushima. The design guaranteed a meltdown in the case of loss of power. If you lost mains power, and your generator didn't start, you have a 100% chance of a meltdown. The tsunami took out the mains and the generators. So a meltdown was guaranteed, because they didn't restore power. Nothing else matters from that point. If they had requested a generator and fuel from someone and gotten it in the 12 or so hours the batteries lasted, then we'd know for sure whether the loss of containment was guaranteed by a breach caused by the earthquake. But Japan never asked, so nobody even tried.
I'd assume that the plant in question is of a similar design.
What I'd do is that because a meltdown makes more than enough power for a secondary, smaller generator to make enough power to prevent a meltdown. Sort of an active-verson of a passively cooled reactor. But cost and liability are more important than safety.
Learn to love Alaska
That's basically the idea. Shut down now, and use grid power to bring it down in a controlled fashion... Or, shut down later, and rely on the diesel backup generators to bring it down in a controlled fashion. Either works. Either is safe. Using grid power is safer.
Since you bought up Fukushima, I've long wondered how a modern first world nation-state could not manage to get generators on-site before the batteries went flat. I've read that the utility tried but could not get them there in time due to traffic jam and destroyed infrastructure on the ground. Did nobody think of picking up the phone and calling someone at the military to dispatch some bloody helicopters? I can't fathom that you need so much power to run cooling pumps as to render the required generators too heavy to fly in.
I didn't want to say, because it sounds like the "depend on the US" cliche, but I could have driven to work, chained up a generator (not sure what they needed, but I had a 40kVA that I could have sent), and driven it to a C130 (nearby military base) and gotten it on the ground in Japan well under the 12 hours battery they had (presuming the US military would give civilian aid). Then arrange some helicopter transport to the site.
My understanding is that Tepco lied to everyone. They lied about it being under control, and whether it would be "saved" and what they needed and such. An international call for generators, and I'm sure there are hundreds (or thousands) that could have come from South Korea in time, even if they couldn't find a single one in Japan. And there would have been many options to getting it there. Tanks don't mind mud so much, and you can hook a civilian trailer to one. So tow the damn thing. On the road, where you can, on the shoulder where you can, over fields and through houses where you have to. It's a fucking nuclear meltdown.
But Tepco said "it's under control". "There was an incident, but it's currently contained". At least that's how I understand it from the information I saw released. Everyone with a "C" in their job title should be in jail, or working from the reactor floor.
Learn to love Alaska
See my other comments, generators were available but would not have helped. In fact they had extra pumps attached and working, but it didn't do anything.
TEPCO were confused due to the difficult situation on the ground, and didn't want to start doing press released for every bit of data that came in and creating a lot of wild speculation in the media. The surrounding area had already been evacuated and as I mentioned there was little anyone could have done to help, so there wasn't much point saying anything until they were certain.
It was still badly handled of course, but there was also a genuine belief that things were not that bad due to flawed operating procedures. Much of the monitoring equipment had failed due to lack of power and earthquake/tsunami damage, so the plan to make manual readings was put into place. That was hampered by lack of access to critical areas due to high radiation and damage to the plant. The procedures were written with the assumption that data could be relied on and that a lack of data was not a cause for action or assuming the worst. Note that TEPCO didn't write the procedures, they were standard on that type of plant.
Sticking to procedure is viewed as best practice in many industries. For example, on the bullet trains the drivers are taught to always refer to the manual. If there is any kind of fault they never rely on memory, they always open the manual and follow it step by step. They actually read out each step as they are doing it. That helps prevent mistakes, and so far they have an unblemished safety record with zero deaths or serious injuries despite constant operation since 1964. Clearly, it is less suitable for nuclear plant operation.
Basically, this is the problem with most current plants. If something goes wrong it is hard to understand what is happening, and even with experts on hand a lack of data leads to bad decisions and mistakes.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC