Posted on 04/04/2013 3:12:05 PM PDT by higgmeister
An explosion has been reported at Georgia Power Plant Bowen. Injuries have been reported via scanner traffic, number and extent are unknown. The source of the explosion is believed to be a turbine within the powerhouse.
Read more: The Daily Tribune News - Explosion reported at Plant Bowen
Odd the other towers were not similarly “stained” with water
That was the tower I was in at the Gavin Plant in Southern Ohio. There are likely different designs for different plants, especially those built in significantly different time periods.
Bowen was at one time the largest coal powerplant in the U.S. and maybe the world.
I worked there for a quarter as a co-op engineering student ~35 years ago, and am somewhat familiar with the plant layout and equipment as a result. There are large natural draft hyperbolic cooling towers, but there is very little inside them, nothing likely to create holes if it failed.
If one of the main steam turbines failed catastrophically, the hole(s) would be in the turbine house structure, which is the long low part of the main powerplant structure. The high part houses the steam generators, AKA “the boilers”.
I will now read the thread to see what else we’ve learned about this story beyond the OP.
That is correct. They run 100-car “unit trains” of coal into the place all the time, multiple times a week. Or did when I was working there.
That’s definitely the turbine house.
Bowen is not a nuclear plant. Coal-fired.
They mixed air and H2 during a generator purge and it blew up.
Air and H2 in the generator during a purge procedure blew up. There is never, ever supposed to be a mixture of H2 and air during the purge procedure. H2 is purged with CO2 to 95%+ CO2, then the CO2 is purged with air. When regassing the generator the air is purged with CO2 to 95%+ CO2, then the CO2 is “purged” with H2.
***Air and H2 in the generator during a purge procedure blew up.***
Good grief! Don’t they have a checklist to go by for this procedure? Did the sealing oil also catch on fire?
There is no excuse for purging H2 with air!
No kidding!
http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/b0d1c9dfd78d41258a2ddd48cf209953/GA—Power-Plant-Explosion
There are other stories that say the same thing if you google “Bowen explosion purge”. We had pictures of the damaged generator at our plant, our #2 generator is a Westinghouse very similar to the one that exploded.
Wow, that’s a really basic operations screw-up.
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