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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.
Transformers pop all the time. I can't see that this had anything to do with the power generation method. Will that matter to the solar fanboys? Not a bit, apparently. Fission is the safest cleanest and most effective option we have. We should close all the current nuke plants and replace them with 5 times as many modern reactors.
As opposed to the natural radon which was in the water of my now capped well.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
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.
Ha ha! It is little use pointing out that a transformer exploded and a power plant shut down quickly and safely because it was unable to push its load into the grid. Reading between the lines, it does look like an item that floated to the top because of the word 'nuclear'. Stations trip all the time.
There is nothing comfortable and socially appealing about opposing nuclear power, unless you are shrilly terrified about full-fallout nuclear bomby Armageddon as portrayed in countless movies, or honestly believe that barely measurable traces of cesium in fish is an impending extinction event for the fish, or for us. Perhaps you fear to go down to the basement, where you will breathe in molecules of radioactive radon gas. One should be far more concerned about traces of pharmaceuticals, antibiotics, pesticide and fertilizer runoff, or (if you lived in the 60s, problem dealt with) lead from gasoline. Or even land erosion from human development!
I think people tend to be more pragmatic than that. A lot of it is just noise to be cool, like the muttered remarks heard around the schoolyard. There are folks who find it fun to drop the same nuclear zingers time after time. And I think they are some of the same folks promoting wind and solar. You have to realize that in the end the joke's on you.
Solar and wind energy solutions are like the throw-pillows of civilization. They are cuddly, come in lots of fun shapes and colors and you can hug them like little trees... but when all is said and done they will be unable to provide a meaningful level of lumbar support. Your time rearranging them is wasted. It's wasted because despite the excitement of the solar bubble, the base load generation challenge will be ultimately solved with coal, natural gas or nuclear energy. And the people who are pushing for coal and natural gas (yes they do exist but seldom post here), or are just afraid of nuclear energy, want you to be afraid of nuclear energy too. Join the club, right?
When the best ways to propagate myths are with dumb jokes, it's not funny.
To all the folks out there who rail on about nuclear: If you must fear something, fear the use of coal. Because that is what we in North America will be drawn completely into when (not if) natural gas declines. Even as she builds out coal plants China is becoming concerned about sulfuric aerosols from coal burning. We are not as much concerned because our emission controls are better and continental air circulation is better., which seems to keep the problem at a more comfortable distance.
Learn more! Read about the grid! [Gardner, dissertation] A Wide Area Perspective on Power System Operation and Dynamics is a good read on the challenges of operating a resonant grid.
Perfecting wind and solar is worthy on small scale to serve individuals and small communities. But it cannot clothe and feed them like an industrial society does. In the background the pursuit of BIG solutions (so called base load) that can power factories and water treatment plants is essential.
___
See Thorium Remix and my letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
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You may want to start a letter with something other than "I was raised on the philosophy of Ayn Rand" when discussing an engineering issue. The "Reardon Metal" thing where businessmen know so much more than engineers and scientists about materials still has us laughing, so your letters may be disposed of for baggage unrelated to your philosophy or the worth of their contents. A Russian with little understanding of the west telling us all we should run things like under the Tsar is a bit hard to swallow even if some of her points are valid.
Also I suggest you consider the current Thorium work in India and other places to get an idea that the state of the art has moved on a bit from a 1950s experiment. While civilian nuclear energy research in the USA effectively halted well over a decade ago it still continues in other places with promising results.
When the incident happened, I had an 80kVA generator I could have had in Tokyo in about 6 hours (so long as the military would have flown it out for me, which I suspect they would have with an official international distress aid request). I imagine that there would have been hundreds that could have been on site in a few hours. The pic looks like a big generator. Something locomotive sized. That'd put it in the 250-500 kVA range, maybe up to 10 MW (the biggest locomotives on the planet). The smaller size would be easy to get there. Larger would be more rare and more difficult to transport, but still possible, even with the flood. So why didn't anyone ask for help? TEPCO was too busy lying about the problem.
Learn to love Alaska
IIRC (and we have a former Homer Simpson at work that translates all of this crap for me), the problem wasn't a lack of generators - it was that all of the electrical equipment was destroyed by the salt water. They recognized that the original emergency generators were vulnerable to flooding and moved them to higher ground, but they left the original electrical in place. It was all fried, and so there was nothing to plug into.
In the US, plants are required to have some kind of mobile generator. I don't know if their electrical systems are supposed to be redundant or somehow different than the Japanese plants - but I doubt it. A tsunami could probably put a US plant in a similar situation, but in order to get to Indian Point, 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.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Actually in identifying some solar/wind promoters as anti-nuclear --- just a few but boy are they shrill --- I think I've hit the nail on the head.
Let's take a look at nuclear power in Japan, shall we. Japan is a small, energy-resource-poor country which has leveraged its technology to become a financial and industrial giant, in many areas out-producing the United States even before we outsourced to China. Some ~50 nuclear reactors were supplying ~30% of the nation's electricity in 2011. But that 30% is a misleadingly small figure in terms of estimable value, for even as rural Japan was finally being electrified those nuclear plants had been powering the factories and steel mills that put it on the world map. From being the first victim of nuclear war to putting its first reactor on-line in 1966, Japan is one of the world's greatest success stories and owes a great deal of its meteoric rise as a world power to those nuclear plants.
The Japanese are aware of this. It is why they responsibly reprocess their spent fuel, it is why they continued to expand their nuclear base even after the US Three Mile Island mishap, even after a pseudo-environmentalist sect (coal barons by proxy) in the United States began to suppress the advancement and innovation of this technology. The Fukushima Daiichi plant went on-line in 1971 and not one person in this part of the world seems to find it appropriate to recognize the many gigawatt-years of service it has contributed. We will honor a retired warship for its years of service, but if a nuclear power plant has fallen on hard times we will kick it like a dying dog and stamp the life out of it. Perhaps my allusion shocks you.
I go even further to describe as twisted and sick the way world press marginalized the unfolding tragedy of ~15,000 deaths to dwell on the minutiae of radiation release, and (worse yet) gathered anti-nuclear celebrities to continually supply worst-case scenarios, most of them absurd, scientifically deceptive and some outright dishonest. It represents a tabloid moment of which the entire human race should be ashamed. And yet? Even in the immediate aftermath of the disaster when all were in shock, merely 70% of Japanese believed that Japan should reduce its reliance on nuclear energy. There is reason to believe that this percentage is falling as the years pass, as they have re-elected a Prime Minister who vows to restore nuclear power to its previous levels. Perhaps the Japanese, for all this tragedy, are possessed of a certain clarity that is slipping away in the United States.
The second issue is nuclear weapons. One reason that the government wants nuclear power is so that it can build weapons at short notice.
Dissing conventional nuclear power on the grounds that it supports weapons manufacture is complicated. Suggesting that it is 'easy' or 'quick' or even 'feasible' (as opposed to refinement of natural uranium) is disingenuous. Rod Adams attempts to dispel this pervasive myth here and more recently here, and it is an uphill battle because politicians take their talking points from anti-nuke celebrities, not scientists or nuclear engineers. When the claim that terrorists could produce true fission weapons from nuclear plants breaks down, many seek refuge in the idea of a so-called 'dirty
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