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Transformer Explosion Closes Nuclear Plant Unit North of NYC
Reuters reports that a transformer failure and related fire have forced the closure of a generating unit of the Indian Point nuclear plant, about 40 miles north of New York City; another generator at the same facility was unaffected. Witnesses reported seeing an explosion, as well as (according to NBC News) a "huge ball of black smoke" when the transformer exploded, which led to the shut-down of the site's Unit 3. The Reuters article says the plant "has long been controversial because of its proximity to the United States' largest city.
Indian Point is one of 99 nuclear power plants licensed to operate in the United States and which generate about 20 percent of U.S. electricity use, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission website.
Normal safety measures effective, loss of transformer handled in professional manner
Instead we get vague hand waving and reference to controversies generated by people wanting to shut down all nuclear power plants
Thank you /. for supporting the luddite agenda
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Nothing to see here. Generating stations, nuclear or otherwise, trip off line when major changes in load occur.
Oh, but right.., it's NOOCOOLAR POWAH! It must mean a near-miss meltdown and a cover up! I'll get my potassium iodide pills and my tinfoil hat and make some popcorn.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
I guess you don't know what is a transformer.
Achille Talon
Hop!
no, indian point is in rockland county NY in southern NY. but its not a ticking time bomb, AC has no idea what hes talking about. this is a normal function of the electrical system. it worked as intended, there is no scare here.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
How long is the time on that bomb?
Because we have to create a new generation of solar manufacturing plants to build the panels, multiple giga-factories for batteries and a whole now power transmission system to move that much energy around the continent.
Unless of course you have some alternate plan of how the tens of millions of people who are currently dependent on nuclear energy are going to function in the mean time
These things take time to plan and execute, knee-jerk reactions and shutting off major building blocks of getting away from fossil fuels to some clean energy future does not help at all. We would be a more environmentally clean society NOW if environmentalists had not spent the last forty years fighting an emotional battle against nuclear power and had focused on the emissions of the fossil fuel industry
Instead we get constant lawsuits to prevent the building of a long term nuclear waste storage facilities and new nuclear plants while the coal plants dump CO2 that is heating the planet as well as mercury and uranium that is more damaging than any imagined nuclear accident
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Are you willing to donate your property to the 10s/100s/1000s of square miles it would take to compensate the grid for the loss of the nuclear plant?
This wasn't a failure of the reactor, but a failure of a transformer. Your solar panels will still feed those.
You need to build a better grid.
Then again If you want to replace nukes with renewables, you need to build a better grid.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This is just crazy. Yet more anti-nuclear spin on a non-event. The unit is turned off because of loss or risk of loss of off site power. Pure and simply, nothing to see here, move along, kind of stuff. You see coal fired plants shutdown when they create too much heat, or the steam powered turbines spin too fast (which by the way can happen to just about every power plant type out there since almost all designs use them, nuclear, gas, coal, oil, high temp thermo, molten salt solar, etc). These things happen all the time. Yet, somehow everyone goes crazy when it happens at a nuclear plant.
/. itself). This isn't a safety problem. It is safety protocol. This is like screaming that metal detectors don't help at security checkpoints because you now see an increase in people with weapons compared to when you didn't have metal detectors, so obviously the addition of metal detectors caused that increase in people with weapons at that location...
What gets me even more is that the slant that is put on these stories (sometimes even by
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
AC has no idea what hes talking about. this is a normal function of the electrical system. it worked as intended, there is no scare here.
A transformer blew, they do do that.
There were at least two other power supplies to feed the system, one being commercial, and in reality a non event. Being a nuke plant any thing out of the ordinary must be reported and scrutinized; as quoted "These events happen occasionally. They are not unheard of and the plant responded as designed," in this case the auto sprinkler system took care of it.
Wanna bet what the people working at the plant did? My guess is whenever they could went to look at it, no cares at all just curiosity.
If it's power was being utilized at the time, it was switched so fast the computers never knew; well maybe a stretch (but they are on UPS systems).
As a general rule for Nuclear plants there are three systems for each function, one goes down another takes it's place, another goes down which is providing the same function it's time for concern (dependent only upon it's function). Fukushima used the fourth option (firetrucks).
What you're describing is true of any power plant, disconnect the load and you have to stop feeding the turbine and dump the steam or you'll destroy the generator and turbine. This is a standard capability built into any plant, coal, gas, or nuclear. The gotcha is in shutting down the reactor, which can take longer to bring up than a coal plant -- which takes 1/2 day instead of several days.
About 12 hours, not multiple days was how long it would took for the batteries to run out at Fukushima, and start a meltdown.
The massive wall of water wasn't the problem. It was the TEPCO lies about the damage. If Japan had said "we need a 120kVA generator plugged in and working in in 8 hours" there would have been one there. I used 120kVA as a rough guess. I couldn't find the exact size of the ones that were at Fukushima. If they needed 250kVA instead, then get two.
But the point is TEPCO lied about the damage, and didn't ask for help. There are hundreds of generators in range. China or South Korea could have flown one in in a few hours, and helicopter them out and set them up well before the batteries ran out.
The fixes were easy and available. Yes, even after a tsunami. But no help is possible if nobody asks for it, and nobody offers because we are being lied to about the damage. That's all on TEPCO.
Learn to love Alaska
it would have to kill a million or so people on the way, so the meltdown wouldn't be that big of a deal in the larger disaster.
You could say that about Fukushima. Nearly 20,000 killed in the 2011 Tsunami, none by radiation.