Nuclear Reactor Shut Down in Florida

AP) ^ | Mar 31, 6:56 PM EST

[BenLurkin]

FLORIDA CITY, Fla. (AP) -- One of two reactors at the Turkey Point nuclear plant was shut down Friday after damaged equipment was discovered during a routine inspection, officials said.

Florida Power & Light, the state's largest electric utility, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission declined to elaborate on what was damaged or how bad the damage was, citing security reasons.

The reactor had been shut down for a routine refueling, utility spokeswoman Rachel Scott said.

The damage was discovered late Thursday during tests and inspection that had to be performed before bringing the reactor back online, Scott said.

An NRC inspection team was investigating, but it was too early to determine whether the damage was intentional or accidental, NRC spokesman Roger Hannah said.

Florida City is about 30 miles southwest of Miami.

[wolfpat]

Why is this news? Why do we not hear about coal fired plants that shut down because of problems? A power plant is a big, complicated thing. Sometimes things break. When they break in a nuclear plant, they just use one of the other things that performs the same function as they shut down to fix the problem.
The testing programs in nuclear plants finds problems before they become big problems.
/rant

[ThreePuttinDude]

To put the location of the plant in relation to Miami,
Florida City is at the intersection of S. Dixie Hwy and Card Sound Rd.

[EBH]

BKMK

[EBH]

The reactor had been shut down for a routine refueling, utility spokeswoman Rachel Scott said.

It was already shut down and inspection is part of the routine...unless the issue was a pineapple size whole in the containment vessel...(Davis-Besse).

[guinness4strength]

Maybe it's because if a coal plant breaks down or has a glitch, there's no chance of nuclear clouds floating out into the general population. Same reason coal plants don't need sirens miles away to warn if "something went wrong."

[browardchad]

The key here for me is not the nuclear angle -- it's the fact that the plant is run by FPL, who decided to abandon its maintenance program of power poles and towers as too costly in 1991, then started a limited program confined to only two geographical areas in 2000. According to testimony before the FL PSC yesterday, FPL knew in 1998 that at least one of the towers supporting high-voltage transmission lines in West Palm Beach had loose and missing brace bolts. They did nothing, and during Wilma, 30 of the towers went down.

Now FPL wants to pass on its recovery costs -- of rotted, neglected wood power poles and towers that collapsed during Wilma -- to consumers, after getting a whopping rate hike from their pals at the PSC -- more than they requested, in fact, less than a month after the storm.

My question is, what else hasn't FPL been maintaining adequately? Turkey Point? And will they be claiming they need another rate hike to fix problems there?

FPL was, not too many years ago, a well-run company. Not today.

[BenLurkin]

Interesting information. FPL is a poplar utility nationally for investors -- maybe time to reassess.

Question though from the West Coast: with the certainty of hurricanes in Florida, why haven't the utilities gone to underground distribution or even underground transmission lines?

[browardchad]

Question though from the West Coast: with the certainty of hurricanes in Florida, why haven't the utilities gone to underground distribution or even underground transmission lines?

I'm not an engineer, but my guess is the coral rock foundation that South Florida's built on, in addition to the high water table. If FPL doesn't consider it cost-effective to maintain above-ground lines, they sure as heck aren't going to invest in the major undertaking of burying them. They're buried in my immediate neighborhood, but those lines feed to power poles on the main artery, so we don't have a threat of falling poles that older neighborhoods do, but the grid we draw from depends on them. And it's shaky, at best -- at least one or more short power outages a week, brownouts, and major flickering in thunder storms, both before and after Wilma.

Millions of South Floridians bought generators after Wilma, and I doubt it was Wilma alone that made them spend the bucks.

[sefarkas]

Maybe it's because if a coal plant breaks down or has a glitch, there's no chance of nuclear clouds floating out into the general population. Same reason coal plants don't need sirens miles away to warn if "something went wrong."

Maybe because anti-nukes zealots like you foment fear in the great unwashed causing government to foist regulations on business to give the appearance that something was done. These stories get into the news because there is a collection of reports made to the NRC every day readily available at www.nrc.gov. If the government were so onerous with coal plants as with nukes, the agency would need a terra-server to handle the load of reports coming in from the coal burners.

[usmcobra]

The Cooling Canals are where Turkey point is.