Nuclear Plant Taken Down In Anticipation of Snowstorm 311
mdsolar writes Pilgrim Power Plant in Plymouth was taken offline in anticipation of the weekend snowstorm. According to a statement from Entergy, the owner of Pilgrim, the plant was taken off line in preparation of "a potential loss of offsite power or the grid's inability to accept the power Pilgrim generates." This is the second time this season the plant has been shut down due to storm conditions. On January 27 the facility was taken offline after the two main power transmission lines were knocked out by blizzard conditions. Although the transmission lines were restored within a few days, the plant remained offline until February 7 at which time it was reconnected to the grid.
A precaution when done ahead of time. (Score:5, Insightful)
An emergency measure when done after the fact.
Re:A precaution when done ahead of time. (Score:5, Interesting)
Snow covered solar panels won't be very useful, that is for certain. Windmills are shut down in blizzard conditions. Thankfully other sources are available.
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Snow covered solar panels aren't an issue. Try solar panels covered by 12-18 inches of ice. I have seen many of those in Massachusetts.
Re:A precaution when done ahead of time. (Score:5, Interesting)
"Potential loss of offsite power" was listed as one of the two reasons for taking it down; the inability of the grid to accept power is only one. I would presume based on this that offsite power is part of their scenario for dealing with emergencies wherein the plant can no longer supply power for cooling its reactor, and hence the risk of loss of offsite power means an unacceptable meltdown risk should a disaster occur at the plant in the coming days.
Re:A precaution when done ahead of time. (Score:5, Informative)
Loss of offsite power is an analyzed condition and the plant's license requires it to shut down when offsite power is lost. The safety analysis shows that the plant is in a higher risk level as it becomes reliant on its emergency diesels should another severe accident occur at that time. (Even though in those situations, the plant is designed to still be able to cope with all design basis accidents)
There is no license requirement to shut down in anticipation of a loss of offsite power, and the plant is designed to handle it safely.
Plants keep running through major storms all the time. This is particular to the local grid.
Re:A precaution when done ahead of time. (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, there is a generic requirement to monitor grid reliability, and an unreliable grid determination could force a licensee to shut down. That is typically based on actual performance, not on anticipation, but I wanted to be accurate.
Re:A precaution when done ahead of time. (Score:4, Insightful)
The primary cause was the failure of backup generators that got flooded by the tsunami. Earthquake was actually not a problem - it didn't damage anything crucial even though it was a hundred times more powerful than what plant was built to withstand. Secondary cause was loss of all regional infrastructure, including loss off off-site power, loss of ability to easily access to plant to get replacement power from mobile generators and other similar problems related to logistical difficulty of trying to get cooling when entire region is devastated with over 30.000 dead and hundreds of thousands displaced due to the massive flood. They had the plans, but having no easy access to anything in the region due to the massive flood made those plans impossible to implement.
Re:A precaution when done ahead of time. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually the earthquake damaged part of the emergency cooling system and thus prevented effective cooling that would have averted a meltdown. This did not become apparent until months after the disaster when it was possible to examine the pipes and valves that make up the system. They were pumping water in with fire engines, but it was being syphoned off by a broken valve and never made it to the reactor. Even if the valve had been okay, pipes further down were leaking anyway.
Search YouTube for NHK documentaries on the subject. NHK is like the Japanese version of the BBC, pretty reliable and they have done a lot of work examining what went wrong at Fukushima. Their documentaries are available in English.
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The problem is not 'bringing it down'.
The plant needs cooling after it shut down for MONTHS!
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It is not days, it is weeks.
The Fukushima Reactors did not melt down a few days after the cooling was cut but roughly a week later.
They had also melted down if the cooling had failed 4 weeks later ...
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Sorry, bluntly: I don't grasp what you want to say. ... it is unclear to me what you want to express.
Heat increases, it does not decrease, after a power failure accounting cooling.
The reason is decay of the waste products of the original reaction.
Hydrogene explosions have no influence on melt downs.
No idea what merits your analyzis had
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No. If the cooling was fine for 4 weeks and subsequently failed, cooling requirements would be small enough the reactor would survive without a meltdown
No it would not. You can read that up in any book.
After 4 weeks decay heat is down to less than 0.1% of pre shutdown power.
The original waste products are still decaying, they decay for months until the thermal power is down.
I'm pretty sure 0.1% power levels 0.1% of what? We are talking about simple heat hot enough to melt the fuel elements, if it is not
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I guess the links are selfexplanating.
Spent fuel rods are not the same as "unspent fuel rods" that remain after a shut down.
Spent fuel rods get removed from the reactor after they have sticked there for months. So your analysis that it is safe to remove them without them melting down in minutes is correct. And I never claimed anything otherwise.
We only talked about the fact that the whole reactor, can melt down without cooling even months after shut down. And I guess this topic is settled now after we both
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Sorry,
no idea where your hate is coming from.
Removing fuel rods has nothing to do with reactor melt downs and decay heat. No idea where you get that stupid idea from.
As you explained yourself a spent fuel rod still creates about 0.2% heat (in relation to a running rod) ... so what is your problem?
The one month shutdown is exactly due to decay heat. But the shutdown itsn't 2 months. It's not even 6 weeks. It's just one month.
What has that to do with the argument? Nothing.
The argument is: what happens if the
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Again: removing rods never was an issue/topic of the discussion.
The question was: if the cooling fails after 4, 6, 8 weeks AFTER the reactor was shut down, can a melt down still happen?
Answer: YES:
If you still don't agree on that, you are beyond help.
Re:A precaution when done ahead of time. (Score:5, Informative)
Pilgrim is a reliable station still going strong after many years.
Lol @ reliable. Pilgrim has been on the NRC's worst-ten shit list for a few years now.
The same day the storm hit, the NRC sent Pilgrim a letter.
http://pbadupws.nrc.gov/docs/ML1502/ML15026A069.pdf [nrc.gov]
Overall, the NRC has determined that your act ions have not provided the assurance level to fully meet all of the inspection objectives and have correspondingly determined that Pilgrim will remain in the Degraded Cornerstone of the Action Matrix by the assignment of two parallel White PI inspection findings. [Green, White, Yellow, Red, in increasing order of severity] [...] . Additionally, for one of the
root cause evaluations, inspectors determined that Entergy failed to investigate a deficient condition in accordance with corrective action program (CAP) requirements to ensure they fully understood all of the causes of one of the [four unplanned] scram events [that happened in 2013].
Reliable != multiple unplanned SCRAMs per year.
Anyways, on January 27, while the reactor was SCRAMing, these three things happened:
The High Pressure Coolant Injection System had to be secured due to failure of the gland seal motor.
The station diesel air compressor failed to start.
One of the four safety relief valves could not be operated manually from the control room.
Those safety relief valves are the ones that get used to vent pressure after the coolant injection system fails.
Pilgrim has problems. On top of all those problems, locals are spitting mad because the disaster plans fail to include scenarios like "giant blizzard shuts down all the roads and nobody can evacuate."
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Those are pretty severe problems, likely related to the age of the plant and the lack of necessary maintenance. Strange that regulator cannot force plant overhaul to newer safety hardware.
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If you had any understanding of electrical engineering whatever - or even a layman's nodding acquaintance with electricity - you would know you can't just short circuit the output. Sheesh.
mdsolar strikes again (Score:4, Insightful)
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He probably wouldn't post something about a 'renewable' going offline, based on his posting history.
What difference does that make? You are attempting to discredit this story by maligning the submitter. That is known as playing the man, not the ball. Nothing that mdsolar wrote was untrue, and it didn't even sound judgemental.
Rest assured that if a renewable power station went offline there would be plenty of other people who would submit stories about it, and I'm sure lots of them would have similar partisan posting histories (albeit with an anti-renewable agenda). The question is, would you write a simil
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While you're right, I am guilty of attacking the submitter, he has a history of posting "facts" with no further comment or context.
Is this story relevant? Maybe. Is this story abnormal? No. What is the first thing that will happen when an uninformed person reads this story? They'll probably post something like the AC with the headline "Devil's advocate" a few posts below after having formed an unjustified negative opinion.
There's a difference between posting pure "facts" and "just posting something with min
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They will take it on face value, most likely that it's both a good idea and standard operating procedure, unless of course they have an agenda to push.
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A lot of people on Slashdot like to paint nuclear as the solution to all are problems, but as stories like this demonstrate it does have limitations. If this were a renewable energy source there would be endless comments about how people advocating its use were really advocating more coal to back it up, and how it would never work because it isn't 100% reliable, and how we can't build many more because there are only so many locations in the US and NIMBYs will lawsuit it to death etc.
In other words there ar
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Re:mdsolar strikes again (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing that mdsolar wrote was untrue, and it didn't even sound judgemental.
To be fair, the title was changed by samzenpus. mdsolar's submittal title said something like "unreliable nuclear plant shut down....". An attempt to mislead on the reason for the shutdown.
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'Capacity' factor is a word that is only used in the climate denier scene and recently by marketing droids.
A plant has no capacity factor. It has a 'load utilization' measured in hours, where 100% is ~8600 (the amount of hours in a year).
But thanx for spreading your ignorance.
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'Capacity' factor is a word that is only used in the climate denier scene and recently by marketing droids.
I know you have a massive anti-nuclear streak, but lets be real here. Solar couldnt cope with the storm either, gets awful generation during winter especially at latitutes where these types of storms are common due to insolation, and cant provide base load.
Nuclear on the other hand has caused-- past, present, and anticipated future-- FAR fewer deaths than hydro or coal. Heres a question for you: Do you protest as vigorously when a new hydro plant opens? Because a single dam event around 20 years ago kil
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What's funny mdsolar is that your last 6 posts (and counting) have been to *this* story, and every single one (except one) is rated a 0, or -1, 1/2 of them are identied as "troll".
The one exception post... the one I just replied to.
Hahaha. Sounds like you got exactly what you deserve for your ignorance.
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That is not funny, but sad reality of the /. modding 'community'.
I guess he will challenge the modding and if the supervisors figure it was abuse, the modders get deprived of their ability to mod, for ever.
Hahaha. Sounds like you got exactly what you deserve for your ignorance. :) (I doubt anyone will ever do that on your idiotic posts, though)
I guess the ignorant guy is you. Click on him and check his posting history
Relative terms. (Score:3)
Relative terms can be missleading. The slowest cheetah is still much faster than the fastest turtle. While it may be among the worst nuclear plants it is still extremely reliable. From the article you referenced
Pilgrim performed at nearly 97 percent capacity in 2014
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Reliability includes how many safety issues were identified and had to be fixed outside the normal maintenance cycle. It also includes how many times the reactor had to SCRAM unexpectedly, which is a rather expensive operation both for the plant itself and the owners who have to cover the sudden loss of hundreds of megawatts of output on the energy market.
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in all seriousness though you are spot on. this article didnt have any political tones on it, i didnt even think politically until the previous posters comment
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And there is zero chance for a nuclear holocaust when a solar array stops outputting. None of that nasty decay heat whatsoever. No emergency cooling measures necessary.
Re:mdsolar strikes again (Score:5, Informative)
You are attempting to discredit this story by maligning the submitter.
The story is FUD. That's mdsolar's MO; post transparently stupid, fear mongering stories about nuclear power. He deserves to be maligned; he's earned it.
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The problem here is infrastructure design and it's vulnerability to inclement weather. Perhaps they should consider revising infrastructure design and start putting buildings over major routes. Not only will this protect access routes, private and public (private vehicles, trucks and trains) but also energy and communications built into those structure. By distributing accommodation, residential, commercial, retail and light industrial along and above major access route leading from points of major value t
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Re:mdsolar strikes again (Score:4, Insightful)
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Exactly. That's why during this time of wind gusts over 60mph, greater Boston has seen dozens of roof collapses.
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Re:mdsolar strikes again (Score:4, Informative)
The snow is light-weight powder and we haven't had a thaw/freeze cycle, so when the wind hit makes no difference. Only about half of the roofs have been flat. There's a huge multi-building apartment complex down the street from me that evacuated because one building did have a roof collapse. The roof was nearly as pitched as my own. A number of others in other towns with similar style roofs have had the same problem.
Wind can relocate snow, but high wind doesn't mean roofs or anything else gets cleared off. It just means the snow gets put wherever nature feels like it. Get some gloppy slushy snow and that stuff will stick to anything like glue. Your panels would be doing about as good as our roofs, which isn't very good. The best part is that houses with panels would have to bear the weight of the roof, the weight of the panels, plus the weight of the snow. Not to mention the wind when it really gets ripping up here will want to tear those panels right off. Wind gets strong enough here to remove roofs if there's enough imperfection in them, or shoddy maintenance, or stuff attached to them that wasn't meant to be there.
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Re:mdsolar strikes again (Score:4, Funny)
It was windy the whole time. But what the fuck would I know, I just live in the area.
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Now you know, an
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Ever drive in a snow storm? It refreezes. Constantly.
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AK47 seems most likely. Gun nut. Possibly a libertarian.
BTW, we're seeing more snow than you. Please come get it.
If you do actually live in Alaska, you must not go outside much. The second you stop moving in traffic everything refreezes. You must have magical snow.
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Have you ever seen snow?
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Even variable pitch wind turbines have a max speed. It is called the cutout speed [gamesacorp.com];
Gamesa's wind turbines are equipped with a variable pitch technology. This technology allows for feathering the angle of the blades for each wind speed, whereby controlled extraction is made of the maximum energy in the wind flow. Thus, in below normal conditions the pitch is tailored to derive the maximum energy potential, and in above normal conditions the pitch is altered to derive a controlled amount of energy, so that the machine produces the rated power in a controlled and stable manner up to cut out wind speed.
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Windspeed variance (wind blows slower near the ground than high up to do drag) across the rotor causes twisting forces, which destroy the bearings. To prevent this, the rotor needs to be locked still in high winds.
any spin there? (Score:2, Informative)
That plant is not known for being run well.
More likely, they wanted to shut it down to cover their asses in case something bad happened, e.g. storm surge. Not a bad idea, considering.
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Storm surge? It's 4 degrees in Plymouth right now.
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That plant is not known for being run well.
A quick Google on Pilgrim Capacity Factor yields a spreadsheet that shows 6 recent years of operation with an average capacity factor of 90$. That is quite good.
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Somebody shut the snow machine off! (Score:2)
We could have a replay of this event as the Boston area is dealing with a similar weekend storm this week too.
Nuclear plants don't like sudden shutdowns (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds like this is a "preventative measure".
Normally there is some time between neutron capture and actual nuclear fission (I have heard a figure of 15 minutes). This means that even if the control rods are slammed in when the power transmission lines were cut the previous heat load would still be generated for a period of time. Often this means resorting to drastic measures to reduce the neutron flux to zero ASAP (certain salts are added to cooling loops which achieve this but requires a good flush to get rid of).
Controlled shutdown means the reactor can be restarted in "a couple of hours"
Emergency shutdown means the reactor can be restarted in "a couple of weeks"
Burnt once, twice shy...
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This means that even if the control rods are slammed in when the power transmission lines were cut the previous heat load would still be generated for a period of time.
The cooling system is designed with such considerations in mind. The plant isn't going to melt down even if you cut the transmission lines directly at the plant and have to quickly power the reactors down. The line about "a potential loss of offsite power" is perhaps more telling, they use offsite power to operate the control mechanisms and cooling systems if they have to shut the reactors down, though one would presume that they also have UPSes and diesel generators on site.
Re:Nuclear plants don't like sudden shutdowns (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd assume that the plant in question is of a similar design.
What I'd do is that because a meltdown makes more than enough power for a secondary, smaller generator to make enough power to prevent a meltdown. Sort of an active-verson of a passively cooled reactor. But cost and liability are more important than safety.
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One would assume that a snowstorm isn't going to destroy the on-site backup generations as a tsunami can. This seems like an overabundance of caution to, though IANANP, and if the grid can absorb the shutdown I suppose there's nothing wrong with excessive caution. There's a bit in TFA about them doing maintenance that required a shutdown during the last forced shutdown, so maybe they're planning to do the same here rather than do it over the summer months when energy prices and demand are higher.
Since yo
Re:Nuclear plants don't like sudden shutdowns (Score:5, Interesting)
Since you bought up Fukushima, I've long wondered how a modern first world nation-state could not manage to get generators on-site before the batteries went flat. I've read that the utility tried but could not get them there in time due to traffic jam and destroyed infrastructure on the ground. Did nobody think of picking up the phone and calling someone at the military to dispatch some bloody helicopters? I can't fathom that you need so much power to run cooling pumps as to render the required generators too heavy to fly in.
I didn't want to say, because it sounds like the "depend on the US" cliche, but I could have driven to work, chained up a generator (not sure what they needed, but I had a 40kVA that I could have sent), and driven it to a C130 (nearby military base) and gotten it on the ground in Japan well under the 12 hours battery they had (presuming the US military would give civilian aid). Then arrange some helicopter transport to the site.
My understanding is that Tepco lied to everyone. They lied about it being under control, and whether it would be "saved" and what they needed and such. An international call for generators, and I'm sure there are hundreds (or thousands) that could have come from South Korea in time, even if they couldn't find a single one in Japan. And there would have been many options to getting it there. Tanks don't mind mud so much, and you can hook a civilian trailer to one. So tow the damn thing. On the road, where you can, on the shoulder where you can, over fields and through houses where you have to. It's a fucking nuclear meltdown.
But Tepco said "it's under control". "There was an incident, but it's currently contained". At least that's how I understand it from the information I saw released. Everyone with a "C" in their job title should be in jail, or working from the reactor floor.
Re:Nuclear plants don't like sudden shutdowns (Score:4, Interesting)
See my other comments, generators were available but would not have helped. In fact they had extra pumps attached and working, but it didn't do anything.
TEPCO were confused due to the difficult situation on the ground, and didn't want to start doing press released for every bit of data that came in and creating a lot of wild speculation in the media. The surrounding area had already been evacuated and as I mentioned there was little anyone could have done to help, so there wasn't much point saying anything until they were certain.
It was still badly handled of course, but there was also a genuine belief that things were not that bad due to flawed operating procedures. Much of the monitoring equipment had failed due to lack of power and earthquake/tsunami damage, so the plan to make manual readings was put into place. That was hampered by lack of access to critical areas due to high radiation and damage to the plant. The procedures were written with the assumption that data could be relied on and that a lack of data was not a cause for action or assuming the worst. Note that TEPCO didn't write the procedures, they were standard on that type of plant.
Sticking to procedure is viewed as best practice in many industries. For example, on the bullet trains the drivers are taught to always refer to the manual. If there is any kind of fault they never rely on memory, they always open the manual and follow it step by step. They actually read out each step as they are doing it. That helps prevent mistakes, and so far they have an unblemished safety record with zero deaths or serious injuries despite constant operation since 1964. Clearly, it is less suitable for nuclear plant operation.
Basically, this is the problem with most current plants. If something goes wrong it is hard to understand what is happening, and even with experts on hand a lack of data leads to bad decisions and mistakes.
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Even if they had gotten the generators, you can't just rewire things on the spur of the moment like that, especially not when a significant section of the country has also been wiped out.
The last time I replaced the generator and UPS at the (not a real) datacenter I work at, there was about 10 seconds of downtime, and 4 hours of electrical work. Had we de-powered everything during the work, it'd have been done in under 30 minutes.
Yes, better to let the meltdown happen than take the time to wire it in the middle of a flood. But if you were right, why did they have generators on the way, stuck in traffic? The failure was they were to cheap (and afraid of people knowing how many screw ups
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There is nothing to 'rewire'. You simply connect the flown in generator to the same connections the flooded generators use.
Pretty simple.
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To be fair, you do probably have to disconnect the wiring from the flooded generators as you don't want the electricity from the temporary generators shorting to ground through the flooded generators. And, you do need to connect the temporary generators somehow and, if that contingency was not considered in the existing wiring, you probably need to do some "rewiring".
So, some rewiring may consist of bolt cutters while some may consist of clamping existing cables to the cables of the temporary generators. Ne
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Actually there was emergency cooling provided by fire engines and mobile pump vehicles, as per the emergency plan. A meltdown was by no means guaranteed. What caused it was the fact that a broken valve, which no-one knew about at the time due the fact that it was inaccessible and the monitoring equipment had failed because of earthquake and tsunami damage, was stuck in the wrong position so most of the water being pumped in never made it to the reactors. Instead it was found weeks later in storage tanks.
So
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But hell, if you put it like that, there's no controversy.
FWIW, I an a big fan of renewable power generation too, but I recognize that we're not there yet for reliable grid electricity generation. The nuclear option should not be off the table.
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>FWIW, I an a big fan of renewable power generation too
Sometimes renewable energy comes from a big fan.
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Emergency shutdown means the reactor can be restarted in "a couple of weeks"
Absolutely not true. It can restart rather quickly, it depends on the reason for shutdown.
And beside that irrelevant point, don't forget that nuclear plants all over the north-east have kept running reliably through the recent rash of heavy winter storms. The shutdown at Pilgrim is because of reliability issues with the local transmission/distribution network and expectation that it will go down.
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Emergency shutdown means the reactor can be restarted in "a couple of weeks"
When we had that massive power outage around the great lakes a few years back due to the transmission line issue. Bruce Nuclear here in Ontario did an emergency shutdown. It was back up and running in 8 hours after the initial outage.
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"Normally there is some time between neutron capture and actual nuclear fission (I have heard a figure of 15 minutes)."
The fact that you can detonate a nuclear bomb by bringing together two subcritical pieces of U-235 shows that this can't be true.
In a nuclear reactor, 7% of the heat output is from the decay of the fission products (alpha and beta decay). This 7% will continue to be generated regardless of control rods or neutron absorbers. It will last hours to weeks, depending on where you put the thresho
Re:Nuclear plants don't like sudden shutdowns (Score:4, Informative)
What you write is complete nonsense.
There is no 'neutron capture' taking 15 minutes. ...
Either it smashes an uranium atom, that is called fission, or it is captured by boron
There is absolutely no difference if a reactor is shut down by emergency or 'controlled'. If it is down longer than 30 mins, the time to reactivate it is days. The reason is neutron poisoning ... or xenon poisoning, depending how you want to call it.
That means, the decaying products of the fission reaction produce so much Xenon and Boron that the neutrons of an start attempt get captured by them. Hence a new 'controlled' fission reaction is not possible, until those elements decay further.
That takes hours, up to days. This is the main reason why nuclear plants can only be used very limited for load following (if you power it down considerably, you have to make sure you either don't need it full powered soon, or you know you will power it back up VERY soon)
MDSolar must be disappointed... (Score:5, Insightful)
...that it didn't melt down. We get it, MD, you don't like nuclear power.
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...that it didn't melt down. We get it, MD, you don't like nuclear power.
He probably lives in the Northeast where everybody is doing what they can to bring on some global warming.
Power lines (Score:2)
Maybe if they put Power lines underground they wouldn't come down every time there is a storm, which seems to be twice a week in New England
Re:The U.S.A. is now a third world country (Score:5, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Right...
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That certainly was a fun experience. I use the term "fun" loosely.
One of the trees in the front yard exploded. The trunk just... blew. Wood shards everywhere. Not to mention all the transformer lightshows to rival a 4th of July celebration!
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I guess your reading skills are not up to snuff. It did NOT take 11 days to repair the transmission lines. You even quoted it - "Although the transmission lines were restored within a few days".
I went through the ice storm of 98 - a month with no power. 25 people died of hypothermia.
Re:The U.S.A. is now a third world country (Score:4, Interesting)
I've seen a wide variety of broken components in even well run thermal power plants (I've never worked with nukes but anything after the water is heated is pretty similar). I've seen even more on the way to breaking and getting cut out before they can fail.
So to sum up I don't think there's much to take away from a single outage - if all you've got is outage times you'd have to get statistical with more info before a sensible judgement.
A month and a serious death toll, that does indeed suck. I'd wonder why they didn't truck in a pile of the container sized generators or a similar disaster plan as done by utilities after hurricanes.
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Maybe taking advantage of the shutdown to do a bit of inspection and maintainance turned up something that took a while to fix.
Entergy's Pilgrim plant has been consistently ranked by the NRC as one of the worst in the country.
It's much more likely that Entergy took advantage of the shutdown to fix things they should have taken care of a long time ago, but refused to deal with, because the plant could be unprofitable in the near future and they're trying to milk as much profit out of it as possible. It'll all show up in some NRC filing(s) sooner or later.
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I'd wonder why they didn't truck in a pile of the container sized generators or a similar disaster plan as done by utilities after hurricanes.
Because it is 'the states'. They have no 'they' there. The only 'heroes' doing anything 'active' (proactive even) are the fire fighters.
Look at the (non) evacuation of New Orleans. Hu? You could use a school bus to evacuate people? No, that is not in the competence of the majour to 'confiscate' school busses and/or to press drivers into service to rescue people.
Where
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Another area where they don't need them at the moment - just like the firefighting gear. I get your point that FEMA or whatever does not have their shit together like the fire fighters who even share their stuff between countries in the off season.
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The "national gird" is set up so they can handle the loss of a plant or two (or maybe even three) without disruption, it just causes the online plants to spin up stronger. If your power company is claiming to be National Grid, they're indicating that they're sometimes using power from outside the area they serve.
Re:Devil's advocate of the Devil's advocate? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, in this case, the customers don't lose power because the generation isn't there. Customers would lose power because the grid fails. Entergy has power from other sources or purchasing agreements to make up for this temporarily.
Similarly, it is unsafe (and illegal, technically) to run your nuclear powerplant with no access to the grid. If you have a coal plant that gets disconnected from the grid, you'd shut it down too with no way to generate revenue from burning additional fuel.
Devil's advocate to your misguided devil's advocate...The problem is the electrical grid not the source.
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The People salute you for your commonwealth's stewardship, comrade!
Please explain... (Score:2)
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You can burn little pots of diesel fuel under the power lines to melt the snow. Like they do in Florida to keep oranges warm.
Try that with nuclear!
Re:strange circumstance. (Score:5, Informative)
Nuclear plants of the design mentioned in the article must legally have offsite power to continue operation. As soon as offsite power is lost, the plant is required to shutdown. An emergency shutdown is more paperwork than a planned shutdown such as this.
The reason for this is that in an accident scenario, you would like to rely on offsite power to run your emergency coolant pumps for this particular design.
Newer reactor designs don't have this issue, but this is a pretty economic decision considering an emergency shutdown if/when the offsite power does eventually trip. The grid seems pretty unreliable based on past experience, as the article even notes.
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What i cant understand is cycling down a nuclear facility because you're worried about power supplied from external source
Does the phrase "fail safe" ring any bells?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
France seems to handle their plants fine. And wind power and solar power have capacity factors so low than it won't work for grid generation without excess generation capacity and storage to begin with.
Both the top news you posted here and your second link in the parent post are about transmission grid failures. Not nuclear power plant failures. As for graceful powering up and down it can be done. France for example has nuclear power plants with load-following mode. The US doesn't bother with this because t
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France has to shut down nuclear power plants every few years when there is a heat wave in Europe. Google is your friend.
The problem with load-following is economics. Nuclear power is already uneconomical. Load-following does not help.
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Here in Finland, the best private investment in terms of ROI are nuclear reactors at Loviisa, followed by nuclear reactors at Olkiluoto
Source? I was under the impression Olkiluoto #3 was a colossal failure and 300% over budget. Oh yes, from wikipedia,
"Unit 3, an EPR reactor, is still under construction, but various problems with workmanship and supervision have created costly delays which have been the subject of an inquiry by the Finnish nuclear regulator Säteilyturvakeskus (STUK).[1] In December 2012, Areva estimated that the full cost of building the reactor will be about €8.5 billion, or almost three times the delivery price of €3 billion.[2][3] A license for a fourth reactor to be built at the site was granted by the Finnish parliament in July 2010,[4][5][6] but discontinued by the government in September 2014. TVO has the option to reapply for the license in the future.[7]"
Are you claiming at 300% over budget it has the among the best ROI? I mean even in Finland you could build out solar energy with a better ROI than a $10/WAC nuclear plant (or gas, oil, wood, steam, wind, biomass) nothing costs this much except a nuclear boondoogle.
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It isn't a nuclear power specific problem either. It's a thermal power plant issue.
Ofc it is! Since when can a coal plant melt down?
Your wind/solar nitpicking is idiocy. Who cares about 'capacity' factors as long as a plant yields energy when it is needed or is planned for?
Actually, no one in the industry uses that term. It is only used by marketing droids after fanboys like you made it popular in the internet. The term used by power companies is load utilization, and it is not measured in % ... up to you t