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.

Comments

Re:So what?

[msauve]

Oh, just to show how common these things are, look here. "...623 power disruptions caused by squirrels, 214 by birds, 53 by raccoons, one by a Hannah Montana balloon, and a handful of other incidents caused by everything from snakes to slugs."

Re:So what?

[JBMcB]

but bird shit from above should really not be able to affect any power generation infrastructure, and if it can, it's poorly designed.

Problem is, with electrical equipment at least, that a lot of that gear gets really hot, so it's kept exposed to the air, as insulating it would mean lots of expensive and failure-prone cooling equipment. So it's exposed to the elements, which means other possible points of failure. The other benefit is, since it's all exposed, it's really easy to work on.