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

Obligatory..

[headkase]

That was some serious shit..

Re:Obligatory..

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Forget the Hellfire missiles . . . arm your drones with bird poop. Imagine a drone pooping on Osama bin Laden . . . right in the face!

Priceless!

If the US military would adopt this strategy, our troubles in the Islamic State would soon be over!

So what?

[msauve]

Seems like things worked as they should, if anything with an error on the side of safety. In a similar vein, power substations often shut down because squirrels short out the lines, tripping safety systems.

Where's the news in things working as they should?

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?

[drinkypoo]

Seems like things worked as they should

That depends somewhat on what was shit upon, but bird shit from above should really not be able to affect any power generation infrastructure, and if it can, it's poorly designed. The infrastructure, that is. Clearly the shit is top-grade.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:So what?

[Krishnoid]

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.

Re:So what?

[msauve]

"it's poorly designed"

Nope. It's designed to trip on when a sudden and significant overload is detected. Whether that's from a humorous bird dropping, or a more serious cause doesn't really matter - it detected a significant anomaly and took safe action. The system is reacting to measurements/inputs, not causes.

And, it's not simply "bird shit from above" as you so blithely put it, it was a "streamer" from a large bird, as mentioned in the summary. That's a continuous stream, which to a high voltage circuit is little different than a wire shorting two conductors.

Re:So what?

[sjames]

Use the force, Lark.

Re: So what?

[wasteoid]

Red bird 5 must have used protein turdpedos.

Re:So what?

[110010001000]

Because mdsolar REALLY doesn't like Indian River. He is against nuclear in general, but Indian River in particular. Probably lives in the area.

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.

Re:So what?

[PopeRatzo]

"it's poorly designed"

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.

Re:So what?

[Aaden42]

Indeed. I hate how science ignorant anti-nukes pile onto reactor SCRAMs as if they’re evidence of how dangerous a nuclear plant is. OH LOOK!!! IT SHUT DOWN!! OH KNOWS!!11! SO DANGEROUS!!!!11

Yes, it shutdown. Like it was designed to do in the event that anything happened that its control systems didn’t know to be safe. That’s evidence for how safe & well designed the plant is, not how dangerous.

If you want evidence of nuclear plants being un-safe, find reports where reactors didn’t SCRAM. I believe you’ll find a good example of one of those in Pripyat, Ukraine. (Which, BTW was a case where the reactor control system tried to do the right thing, but some highly evolved apes thought they knew better and overrode the safety systems, but anywho)

Re:So what?

[tlhIngan]

And that's the point. The biggest weakness of nuclear, and some other technologies, is that a single failure can knock 1GW+ off the grid instantly. You need a lot of spinning backup ready to take over at a moment's notice to cover that eventuality.

We need to develop more storage. Not just for renewables, but for nuclear and pretty much every form of production, so that we don't have to keep spare generating capacity online just in case. If storage can cover us long enough to spin up alternatives then we can save a great deal of energy. It's also useful for allowing the output of a hybrid nuclear/storage plant to load follow.

The challenge of the grid is that supply must equal demand - if people are consuming 100GW of power, you have to generate 100GW. If you generate 99GW, people notice as motors slow and lights dim, and if you do 101GW, people notice when their electrical devices burn out.

It's why we have grids because the supply and demand gets averaged out as the number of generation and consumers increase so imbalances cause much smaller changes - 1GW on and off makes a lot less problems if you're dealing with 10,000GW demand than if you're dealing with 100GW.

But then you get instability as currents start going where you don't quite expect and this can cause oscillations and ripples that cause safety systems to break links.

Utility level storage systems are available - either flywheel or standard batteries. The purpose of which is to provide some robustness - smaller grids use it so sudden changes in load or generation can be tided over by the battery bank. The only problem is obviously the amount of storage is tiny and lifetimes are limited - they really are to help tide over until other generation can be brought online.

Re:So what?

[torkus]

This is one of the better played trolls I've see as of late.

Re:For not so bright ones here

[ChunderDownunder]

Yeah thanks.

India sounds half a world away, while Westchester sounds positively British.

Alternate title

[CMU_Ken]

"Aging Indian Point Reactor Shit Down By Bird Droppings "