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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.
Indian Point is a disater waiting to hapen. They need to wreck the whole mess and replace it with solar.
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!
if it leaks, it leads.
This kind of thing has happened before It's a huge technical achievement that it doesn't happen often enough to really remember the last time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
That I don't have a Nuclear Power Plant within 100 miles of where I live. Hydro power is all I need.
Hopefully not Optimus Prime. The world needs him.
And his radiation detectors are going crazy. Government hasn't issued any statement so far.
I happened to hear a small one (about the size of a backyard grill) near my house pop, and when I looked over in that direction, the bigger one across the street (about the size of a VW Beetle) blew up in a serious way.
It sent up a huge fire and smoke ball and set the grass on fire for about 12 feet in every direction. If I had been in a car driving by it when it blew, I sure would have wrecked the car thinkin I had been hit by a mortar shell already.
I'd imagine in the grand scheme of things, these two transformers were little tiny ones, but they were sure cool to watch at the time.
Glad they blew up and failed safe instead of something WORSE happening.
the power plant. With all that radiation leaking everywhere, they must be suffering like Jesus Christ in 'Passion of the Christ'. I suppose it's possible that He suffered in real life, too, during that whole crucifixion thing, but it couldn't have been anywhere near as unpleasant as in that movie. All that blood and gore... it's not family friendly. Unlike the Bible, which is good for Christians of all ages.
http://www.lohud.com/story/news/local/indian-point/2015/05/10/indian-point-tritium-leak-ongoing/10968169/
Radioactive tritium in the groundwater beneath the Indian Point nuclear power plant could be part of an ongoing leak and not a momentary spike as first thought, federal regulators said Thursday.
Elevated levels of tritium — a low-energy radioactive form of hydrogen — were found in two monitoring wells in late March near Indian Point Unit 2. Samples in April and May showed decreasing levels, suggesting the contamination might have been related to the movement of used nuclear fuel during a maintenance shutdown.
But samples collected this month showed the concentration rising again and then decreasing. There is no health threat to either the public or Indian Point workers, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said.
"Is it accurate to describe these increases as 'spikes' if there are several significant variations in tritium levels in monitoring wells?" NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said in an e-mail. "(Plant owner) Entergy acknowledges that it could be indicative of an ongoing source of leakage rather than one attributable to the most recent Indian Point 2 refueling and maintenance outage."
A byproduct of nuclear power, the Environmental Protection Agency characterizes tritium as "one of the least dangerous" radioactive particles because it emits very low radiation and, if ingested, leaves the body relatively quickly.
Entergy is testing drains, pipes and tanks for damage and making sure there were no unidentified spills during the March shutdown, company spokesman Jerry Nappi said. Such fluctuations aren't uncommon and could be due to the bedrock's formation beneath the plant and how rainwater filters through the rock, he said.
"While the overall trend in this instance is still a downward one, we have not ruled any source out and continue to aggressively investigate to find the cause of the elevated tritium," Nappi said in an email, adding the company's inquiry was still pointing toward a one-time event.
The monitoring wells were installed after sampling in 2005 found tritium in the groundwater, a leak traced to a failed weld in a canal leading to Unit 2's spent fuel pool.
The current problem might not have been detected without those wells, said Dave Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists. But until the source is found, he said, the leak's seriousness can't be fully assessed.
"I think the good news is at least the flag has been raised," Lochbaum said.
Indian Point isn't the only U.S. nuclear plant with tritium-groundwater issues. A list maintained by the NRC shows 44 other plants with tritium leaks or spills, as far back as 1979.
A large explosion at a nuclear power plant should be a concern to all. Large transformers do not blow up all of the time. And the incident should be investigated thoroughly. The Indian Point reactors are getting old. It might be time to think about shutting them down.
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.
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. "
As a man made of straw, I resent the gross stereotyping. We are not simply props for you to project your opponents weakness onto to then subsequently knock down. We are sentient, dancing, singing people of hay with a noble and intricate ethnic history. We have dreams-- to scare away grain-eating scavengers, to escort little girls to wizards, to somehow fuse a meat-based thought-organ to our straw-based bodies... We must be respected.
Please in future use some other analogy to personify your "fall guy". Perhaps an axe-swinging man of tin or some gutless panther could better suit your purposes.
Namelessly yours,
the straw man
The guy in 7G F* up again if only I can remember his name.
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"
I live near Indian point and do not have a problem with nuclear power in the hands of competent people but they have proven to be irresponsible in managing this plant. They were leaking strontium for many years into the Hudson River before finally discovering it and remediating the issue after it was too late. In addition to only a few years back releasing 600,000 gallons of tritium steam across the the lower Hudson Valley and failing to report it until days later. I am only touching the surface of inexcusable incompetence. If it is just a transformer is one thing but these lying pieces of shit cannot be trusted. They consistently lie and are caught in their lies after the news cycle is finished when no one give a damn, You clueless scumbags defending them without knowing their horrendous track and lies disgust me. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
quit acting like it's a nuclear bomb. Transfomers blow all the time, creating temporary blackouts until they can be repaired.
This was a transformer that failed. ALL power plants that make AC power use those. Nuclear, coal, hydro, wind, doesn't matter, they all use transformers. So even if nuclear went away, transformers would be all over the place. They are how we change AC voltages from one to another.
MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE!
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
That smell of burnt transformer.
Was this a transformers with toxic levels of PCBs?
All you nuke apologist can STFU and go suck on your momma teat.
Sun or no sun that's beside the point
The point is, can't they make a transformer that won't go *** !!KABOOM!! *** ?
The national peak is not equal to all the local peaks added together due to the peaks occurring at different times with respect to UTC. So the answer is probably significantly smaller since the California and East coast peaks won't overlap, and there's a lot less consumption in between.
Reality is sort of going that way - HVDC has resulted in incredibly long runs with very low losses so there's been a fair bit rolled out over the last couple of decades.
> Transformers pop all the time
Oh, really? Then you should perhaps fix your transformers?
Hopefully, the containers of your nuclear stations are made to a better standard. Just sayin'
The headline is: noooklear boogity boogity boogity.
It should be: large steam units have forced outages, and the grid is designed to handle them.
My point is this: we hear all the time "what good is solar power at night? Wind turbines when it's not windy?" I ask you: what good is a nuclear power station when the transformer blows up and it safely disengages from the grid for hours, days, or weeks? Think of this incident next time folks talk about how some renewable generator is unreliable. No generating unit is 100% reliable, and because big ones break, the grid must have substantial capacity available as backup. Far more than is necessary when it's unexpectedly cloudy or not windy.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
I used to work as a power engineer. A transformer fire has nothing to do with the nuclear reactions per se. When a transformer catches on fire, relays detect a fault (either overcurrent, differential, sudden pressure, overtemperature, etc), and circuit breakers isolate the transformer from the system. I don't know this particular plant's design, but generally there are multiple transformers running in parallel and the loss of a transformer wouldn't necessarily require any nuclear unit to shut down. However, if a unit depended on that transformer to output power, then the turbine and nuclear unit must be shut down immediately. This is a fairly routine operation. The reason the unit must be shut down really has more to do with the turbine. Turbines are rated for a particular frequency and if you have a tremendous amount of mechanical energy being dumped into the turbine but no electrical loading since the transformer is toast, you will in a very short period of time experience a turbine frequency excursion which can rip it apart. The quickest way to reject mechanical input power is to dump steam from the nuclear unit to the atmosphere. It is not, I repeat, not, radioactive. The radioactive heat transfer fluid (steam, liquid sodium, whatever) is always isolated from the turbine steam via heat exchangers. It sounds like a bomb going off, but it's simply extremely high pressure steam being vented to atmosphere.
thank you very much
What do you do now that the nuclear power station is down, huh?
No, don't come back with "There are others, the network is fine" because that's the same for renewables too. When the wind stops? There are others, the network is fine.
And the network is only fine because nuclear has backup generation. Just like you say about renewables. And for renewables, that requirement for redundancy or backup generation is why that isn't going to work, so it's proof nuclear isn't working.
Oh, looks like nuclear doesn't cut it either, since it can't produce high power (why that? A huge wind farm produces massive amounts of power) at a steady rate either, since they break down.
And unlike the fairly predictable wind or sun power, such a failure can't be predicted ahead of time to get more sources up and running.
Tepco lied and pretended there was no real problem. For ages. Therefore one reason why they had no fix was because they were telling everyone else on the planet it was OK.
They lied.
Why?
Same reason the operators here would lie: avoid blame, avoid scares, avoid expense, leave time to abandon ship before the shit hits the fan.
Until you've seen a pole pig aka power transformer explode on a pole. All I saw was this huge flash of light and then could see the transformer itself launched through the sky.
That was immediately followed by watching the connections arc until the circuit breakers kicked in.
Its about time...
Stop reading the tabloids and get your information straight. The "600,000 gallons of tritium steam" is pure crap. The steam that was released was steam from the secondary water loop which run the steam turbines. You should learn a little about how these nuclear plants actually work if you are so worried about them. You see, there are 2 main water loops, the primary water loop which goes into the reaction chamber and is heated by the nuclear reaction, and the secondary loop which is heated by the hot water from the primary loop (think like a car radiator where there are pipes running back and forth to disperse the heat to all the metal fins and into the air, but instead of there being just one long tube in the radiator, there are 2 separate tubes, one with the highly heated water from the reaction, the other with cool water that just came from the cooling tower).
So in other words, water that doesn't touch the reactor was vented as steam. So instead of reading tabloids and other such sources that simply are trying to sell a paper or generate a click on an article, you might want to read the real information like an official report or given how bad the reporting on the incident was, a official corrections release by the government showing how bad the reporting was in certain "press" coverage of the incident:
Official NRC Letter of Corrections to Editor of New York Daily News
Again, since you live there, you should know that there is a history of New York not liking nuclear plants. In fact, New York hates them so much that the state of New York refused to sign any evacuation plans for a plant, causing the operator to not be able to turn it on. Approx 16% of every dollar Long Island Electric collects is being used to pay for that plant still to this day, along with a 5% rate increase every year for 10 years straight that happened all because of how anti-nuclear New York had become.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Surely this is Michael Bay's fault?
Failed because it was shot. Terrorist dun? a couple of months ago another transformer "failed." But this time there was a report of a bullet hole.
Terrorist Run. Maybe.
which part of the normal operation of a nukaplant involve a transformer explosion ? And, why should transformer explosion go unreported when they are inside a nukaplant ? I mean, any failure inpowerstation is of interest. Be it nuke, solar or fart powered. But suddenly, if it's nukular, then it's forbidden to talk aboot like muslim fobid to draw the prophet...