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Aging Indian Point Reactor Shut Down By Bird Droppings (nypost.com)
mdsolar writes: A gloop of bird poop was responsible for shutting down the Indian Point nuclear plant for a few hours last December, according to a state-commissioned report into the incident. The Westchester power plant automatically shut down on Dec. 14, 2015 when a string of dropping from a "large bird" fell into some of the plant's electrical equipment and caused the reactor's automatic shut down to trip, according to findings by Entergy, the company that runs the plant. "Damage was caused by a bird streamer. Streamers are long streams of excrement from large birds that are often expelled as a bird takes off from a perch," company officials said in the report, ordered by Gov. Cuomo. Last December's unplanned shut down was the 13th since June 2012.
That was some serious shit..
Shh.
Because it's "aging", and it's "nucular power", which means it's scary and bad to anybody who's not an evil Rethuglican plutocrat.
Maybe you should learn to think right thoughts, friend - your bewilderment flirts along the border between lunacy and thoughtcrime.
Now hush, and just sit back to watch all the brainiacs on Slashdot who can barely manage to keep a fucking Debian server online discuss the "proper" design of nuclear power plants in great detail, and how THEY would have prevented this problem from happening, if only their evil PHBs hadn't kept them working 80 hours of overtime every week for slave wages, which only they can do, because women are genetically incapable of sussing technology.
Fucking Slashdot. Gotta love it.
It was through either extremely poor luck or possibly supernatural intervention, that the streamer entered the plant through a small, unshielded thermal exhaust port which somehow led straight to the reactor core.
It was definitely an architectural oversight; however, the automatic safeties caught the electrical overload and shut the plant down before catastrophic failure. *That* was a just matter of sound engineering practices.
Use the force, Lark.
Red bird 5 must have used protein turdpedos.
Yep. They could have put a $2 shield on top of the thermal exhaust port that led directly to the reactor core.
That's the definition of poor design. Failsafes for when something comes down the exhaust port are all well and good, but it's not good design if you plan for a solution after there's been a problem instead of simply preventing the problem in the first place with a much cheaper fix.
You are welcome on my lawn.