Slashdot Mirror
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!
Frankly, who cares?
Achille Talon
Hop!
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
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.
Hopefully not Optimus Prime. The world needs him.
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.
stop spreading FUD AC, I also live right here, and there are no radiation alerts in the area.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Sure. Just take the worlds largest solar farm: Topaz Solar and multiply it by 16. Then some more and build battery backup for even more to supply during the night and bad weather
Ideology will power nothing.
Hydro have an astronomical death toll compared to nuclear.
You can count the bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki as deaths due to nuclear power and hydro still have a lead.
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.
You do know that hydroelectric power plants also have large, oil-cooled transformers, of similar design, which have exactly the same chance of exploding as this unit, right? Of course, it doesn't actually matter, since this transformer explosion had the same chance of causing a nuclear accident as an explosion at Niagara Falls does of flooding upstate New York.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Those are some impressive detectors, especially since electrical transformers are a standard part of all power distribution networks and have absolutely nothing to do with radiation.
When the electrical substation providing external power to your nuclear power reactor fails, you shut down the reactor because your principal source of constant backup power has failed. Your secondary source, generators, are not intended to allow the plant to continue to operate, but to shut down cleanly.
When a tranformer blows, your risks are fire and, if it's an old transformer, PCB contamination from the old-generation transformer oils. Certainly not radiation.
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
Pretty sure "blew up and failed safe" is an oxymoron.
Not at all, rockets being launched into space (or as ICBMs) are blown up with explosives carried on board in order to insure the safety of those on the ground. In this case, NOT blowing up and being out of control means a missile is about to hit something and make a big boom on the ground!
Oh, and transformers blowing up, yes they are spectacular--haven't been there myself, but I've seen the aftermath. Might have something to do with up to hundreds of gallons of oil inside to cool the thing combined with banning of PCBs to keep that oil from catching fire in these situations.
In any case: tens to hundreds of kilovolts (near a megavolt in the highest voltage systems) combined with thousands of amperes is a whole lot of power waiting to burst out in a gigantic arc that will set fire or melt everything in a spectacular way! Oh, and it would probably generate X-rays, so I guess you would get some ionizing radiation, at least until the safety tripped.
One unfortunate problem with nuke plants is that IIRC you have to have a continuous connection to the grid. If that connection fails, the plant has to scram to avoid damage to the generators (overspeed). So when that transformer goes, it means a multi-day restart of the reactor. This is the sort of situation where a hot-swap spare transformer would be a really good idea (TM)....
But as for safety, no, it is no more dangerous than any other scram, which while way less than ideal, is something that the plants are designed to handle.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The guy in 7G F* up again if only I can remember his name.
This guy did some math that came up with a square area 44 miles on a side to fulfill peak load
http://modernsurvivalblog.com/...
Of course this did not include cover night and low-light times like cloudy days or when the sun is not 90 degrees to the panel
So, you would probably need three times that amount with batteries to store and forward power as needed
and there is that pesky 'aging power transmission system' that needs to be replaced
Don't get me wrong, solar would be an excellent distributed power generation capability and Musk's idea of supplying localized batteries to handle night time use sounds like a smart idea, but we will need large power generation facilities for the next few decades and I would argue that Nuclear is the leas environmentally damaging of the lot
Wherever You Go, There You Are
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).
This guy did some math that came up with a square area 44 miles on a side to fulfill peak load
http://modernsurvivalblog.com/...
Thanks - that led to some interesting links.
So it's actually 1600 square miles of solar panels, at an estimated cost of about $1T.
The reason I did the calculation was a result of wondering: suppose we had an automated robotic factory that made and installed solar panels. At what point is the system self-sustaining?
In other words, could we have a self-assembling system that kept building ever more solar panels, and after a time allocate a portion of the output to the rest of the country?
If you could do that, you could have a huge self-sustaining automated factory and allocate a monthly allowance of the production to every person in the country. Each month everyone gets to order $1000 worth of the factory goods.
Over time, the system ramps up production to cover all the consumption in the country, and do recycling as well.
It's an interesting concept.
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.
Actually, it is more dangerous than any other scram, as it means that you don't have a grid connection to power your cooling pumps. You have to rely on your backup generators. If they fail, you're in serious trouble.
As to the GP, nuclear's biggest problem is a "negative learning curve". We make a generation of nuclear reactors, but over time instead of getting cheaper to make and operate - as in most technologies - it gets more expensive as we discover all sorts of new things wrong and try to patch them. Some can be fixed, some are fundamental design problems. We try to work around this with a new generation of reactors - but that then starts the learning curve over from scratch, and often with an even more complex system.
It's been a real problem.
Sigur RÃs: I didn't know that Heaven had a rock band.
Right, because generators the size needed to operate nuclear power plants are the sort of thing that you just pick up at any corner hardware store and "drive up and plug in"?
here's what one of those generators looks like. A nuclear power power plant may have a dozen or more in their generator building. Even replacing just one is not some sort of couple day task. These things take prep work and a lot of labour to acquire, move, install and set up. Weeks to months. That's all assuming that the generator building itself is still usable; a failure in such a large generator, or the sort of external event that can take out such a large generator, is not exactly some sort of low energy event.
Back before Fukushima people like you were all over Slashdot harping about how major nuclear disasters couldn't happen again, that it's only possible with old Soviet designs like Chernobyl that are horribly misused. Quit being so damned short sighted. Unforseen events and cascading failures do happen. You can't just act like "the list of causes of major that have already happened is the entire comprehensive list of what could cause major failures".
If you scram, lose your grid connection and lose your generators, you will likely get a Fukushima-like event. Two of the three happened here. Let's not pretend that the concept of something taking out the generator room, or otherwise preventing its power from working the pumps - generators which are only rarely tested - is such a preposterous concept. And let's not be silly and act like massive pieces of industrial equipment can just be plopped down and hooked up like a little Honda generator.
Sigur RÃs: I didn't know that Heaven had a rock band.
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.
A nuclear power power plant may have a dozen or more [back-up generators] in their generator building. Even replacing just one is not some sort of couple day task.
Quite right. But the reason there are so many is to provide redundancy - they are not all needed at once - and by having a "dozen or more" they are not all going to fail at the same time because of a transformer explosion. The power stations I am familiar with (I am a nuclear engineer in the UK) do not put them all in the same generator building either. Nor are they sited in locations prone to tsunamis and it does not look like Indian Point is either.
generators which are only rarely tested
On the power stations I deal with they are tested frequently. It is hard to judge the size of the generators in your linked picture because it is obviously taken with a very wide-angle lens. The ones I deal with are the same type as used in railway locomotives, and there are mobile trailers available with such generators.
A transformer blew, they do do that.
It is not uncommon for a large transformer to blow. I am a power station engineer and know of two events over 10 years at UK nuclear power stations. It is not a big safety deal apart from the possiblility of injuring people within say 50 yards, and I have been within sight of one (yet someone was worried about NYC 40 miles away!). These transformers tend to be in bays shielded from each other by thick masonery walls.
"Actually, it is more dangerous than any other scram, as it means that you don't have a grid connection to power your cooling pumps. You have to rely on your backup generators. If they fail, you're in serious trouble."
Just because the transformer to the outside world is down, doesn't stop you generating local power from the decay heat. At shutdown you can still have 7% of the output just from decay heat, which is enough to power the facility. Many modern designs use this as plan A during a shutdown.
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
One unfortunate problem with nuke plants is that IIRC you have to have a continuous connection to the grid. If that connection fails, the plant has to scram to avoid damage to the generators (overspeed).
BS
Power stations (even non-nuclear) always have back-up generators that kick in on loss of grid to allow control of the plant to be maintained and for cooling pumps to take the heat out of the system in a controlled way. Generators will not overspeed if cut off the grid - their speeds are controlled by sophisticated control systems, and if they even fail then an old-fashioned back-up mechanical governor will cause the main steam supply valve to slam shut.
The plant would not be "scrammed" on loss of grid. Scramming means hitting a big red panic button. The plant would be kept spinning at first, obviously with the reactor power reduced to near zero, with residual heat being dumped through purposed heat exchangers and possibly releasing steam to atmosphere (unless it is a BWR - Indian Point is not), while the cause of the loss-of-grid was investigated - like getting the grid company on the phone. Many losses-of-grid are quite brief, but if it looked like it was going to be a while then the plant would be shut down in a controlled way, not by a scram button.
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
This transformer explosion, why would this be more of an issue at a nuclear plant then at any other place?
We have transformers explode along power lines too. They also create fire, damage property...
Let's not confuse the regular damage of power generation with the nuclear is bad narrative.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
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.
Indeed, I do say that about Fukushima. In isolation, it looks like a disaster. In perspective, it was a very small element of a much larger disaster. The part that makes it "special" is that the people are displaced by an invisible hazard and they have to deal with a government that seems to alternate between lies and incompetence. Or maybe just delusion.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
[The problem] was that all of the electrical equipment was destroyed by the salt water.
The electrical power was being delivered by a battery room that was undamaged (until the batteries ran out). Matching the output of the battery room and wiring into the same line would be easy, with the right parts and equipment.
But nobody asked, and lots of lies were given as to the state of the reactor.
Learn to love Alaska
Fly in replacement parts?? You don't realy know what is going on.
I'll let you be the guy that closes the 4KV switchgear that still have moisture inside, don't be surprised if I stand back quite a distance.
You've clearly never seen the cabling and electrical distribution & control infrastructure of a nuclear facility, and from your response I'd guess even an industrial one.
YOu can't replace any of that in hours. You might string one cable to one pump in that time, but you have to be able to get to it among the damage and debris from the tsunami and flooding. The fact that you think there was an easy solution is quite telling.
You have no real insight into a power plant electrical design and construction, that I am 100% certain of by your responses. I can guess you'll say something else ignorant in response.
Don't be so sure, there's always more than meets the eye with Transformers.
But nobody asked, and lots of lies were given as to the state of the reactor.
The behavior bordered on criminal, when you assess it in hindsight. It has been revealed that the government agencies involved, including the office of the prime minister, were not keeping formal records so that they could cover their asses. This has denied all governments, who operate nuclear reactors, the ability to make systemic improvements in responding to nuclear accidents. Essentially the criminal negligence extended beyond TEPCO and the regulator, into the government itself.
One prime example of this is that the Japanese government did have a fallout predictions system that worked. When assessed later it was found to have located the key and highest areas subject to fallout. It was important because the government should have been able to tell people when to move and when to stay put while the fallout settled.
However, they weren't prepared to accept the recommendations of the very system they paid for (due to liability issues - IIRC) and evacuated many people, including an entire town through active fallout zones. We still have about 2-3 years before the direct exposure cases begin to become apparent. Even if they don't die, many lives have been destroyed and will be a burden on the healthcare system, if they are not simply ignored.
There are many other examples throughout the disaster and the Japanese government has effectively destroyed any possibility of introspection and because they were worried about their liabilities as individuals the world has lost a significant opportunity to capture knowledge that would improve response planning and lessen the impact of any potential nuclear disaster.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
You sound like my coworker when we planned a 20 kVA to 120 kVA UPS swap/upgrade. He wanted the whole building de-powered for 2 days (and guided the engineers into that design). I grabbed the EEs and went into a meeting room, and 30 minutes later we came out with a plan that had two sub-second outages, 24 hours apart, and about 24 hours of pre-work on de-powered portions.
His was more linear and easy to understand, but my solution was faster, cheaper, and worked. You do the last things first, then when you are at the middle, you flip, and then build the first things last, then, when everything's done, you flip back to the final circuit. But for a de-powered building, wiring in power isn't hard. There's a zero chance of a problem while wiring, though powering up the circuit could cause a problem.
It's not hard to match voltage. they are usually in the same multiples, even in Japan. So all you need is multiple smaller ones. The last generators I worked with were auto phase syncing, so if you hooked up two 240V to get 480V, they would sense a phase alignment issue, and adjust to be in phase with each other.
Learn to love Alaska