Posted on 04/28/2011 10:16:33 AM PDT by CedarDave
Wednesday’s storms took out all of TVA’s electric power transmission lines in Mississippi and North Alabama, and forced Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant unto diesel backup power and into emergency and automatic cold shutdown.
Bill McCollum, the chief operating officer of Tennessee Valley Authority, said it may be weeks before power can be restored to all of the 300,000 customers whose power is supplied by the federal utility.
“With the level of damage we have, it will be — we hope it will be days until we get most of the customers back on, but it will be weeks before we’ve fully repaired all of the damage,” he said.
McCollum said the reactors, now being cooled by backup diesel power, are safe.
He said the spent fuel pools also are being cooled by backup diesel power and are safe.
The transmission lines are the monster power lines that carry electricity from TVA power plants to power distributors such as EPB and Huntsville Utilities.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesfreepress.com ...
Spent a couple years as a kid in Huntsville. Nice place.
So how do they vent the gases ? Thought you were not supposed to run gas or diesel generators inside a building.
The short answer is nothing. Been there, saw that.
“Guess we have to hope no plant takes a direct hit knocking out the generators.”
Sorry to disappoint you, but the diesel generators are in tornado proof concrete buildings. That’s a requirement in the United States. The fuel tanks are also protected.
They have a protected intake system. Venting the exhaust isn’t a big deal.
Ouch...friend who lives there claimed she’d been told 4 days, I think she’s going to be verrrrrry annoyed someone fudged by that much.
Making inquiries about nuclear power plant safety means you want destruction ? A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
And the Japanese thought their nuclear plants would survive a direct Tsunami hit with no problems.
Based on the design criteria they had at the time, yes, they were designed for a tsunami. They weren’t designed to hold or withstand a tsunami of the size they just saw - the likes of which hasn’t been seen for at least 100 years, and closer to 600 years if some accounts are accurate.
There were lots of people who didn’t believe the old signs. There were rocks with inscriptions chiseled into them in some of the worst hit prefectures that said “Do not build homes past this point.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/world/asia/21stones.html
Plenty of homes, farms and businesses were built below stones warning of past disasters. Ironically enough, this tsunami came within only a few hundred feet of that rock again. Seems like the folks centuries ago had a clue. The problem today is that scientists and engineers put HUGE bias on recently developed data. They want everything quantified out to the third decimal point. You can see this “bias of recent data” in the AGW debate writ large, as well as economic modeling, etc. It isn’t just one field. There’s a huge bias for recently developed and recorded data in most all fields of study with quantification of data.
Now, as to “they should have designed X.”
Most people who aren’t engineers have NO idea what it takes to hold back a wall of water such as they just took in this tsunami. Zippo. “Just build a wall to hold the sea out...”
Yea, right. Here’s a little engineering tip: It takes one level of construction to hold back a wall of calm water, such as a dam.
It takes quite another level of construction to hold back a surge of water such as this tsunami.
Let me just put this out there: The Japanese could have saved a total of three lives by putting up a huge concrete wall around those plants. They could have saved 20K+ people’s lives by following the warning carved on some rocks. Where should they have put their efforts? Millions of tons of concrete and rebar.... or saying “Let’s think about this a second... get me the surveyors and their instruments and let’s figure out how far the water would come inland if a wave X meters high came in on us...? The areas surrounding the nuclear plants never thought about the consequences of a wave the height of which the plants were designed to withstand. ie, if the wall of water had been within the plants’ design parameters, probably at least 5K people would still be dead. Who failed here? Not the engineers who designed the plants. They planned for a tsunami. They didin’t plan for *this* tsunami. The surrounding areas? They didn’t plan for even a tsunami of the height the nuke plant engineers planned for. Who is incompetent again?
I’d remind you that it is only recently (within the last 10 years) that scientists finally believed mariners and their accounts of “rogue waves” far out at sea - waves 60+ feet tall that come “out of nowhere” that can (and sometimes do) literally flip a ship over. Never mind just sinking it. Take a seaworthy vessel, crewed and captained by competent men, roll it upside down or break the keel and just sink it in a minute.
All the terribly smart PhD’s in the world thought that this was another mariner’s tall tale... and finally video evidence, coupled with the huge increase in computational power, synthetic apature radar and sea monitoring networks made the terribly smart, but non-sea-faring scientists say “Golly, guess the sea dogs were not just telling us landlubbers a bunch of tall stories....”
Some are saying that a couple of these Tornadoes may have been the strongest we have ever seen here in modern times. If so, then our nuclear plants were not built to withstand them.
OK, you could have a point there. We have, in recent times, been able to generate a lot more data on twisters than we’ve had to make designs from in the past.
Again, there’s a bias for data that we have recently. We’ve certainly had some ferocious twisters in the past, but we didn’t have the level of analysis on the results of those storms we have today.
I would add, however, of all the threats a plant operator has to design for, flooding is the worst. You could have a twister make a mess of the switchyard and infrastructure at a plant and be able to get back to some semblance of normal operation much faster than with flooding.
With a tsunami, you not only have flooding, you have vast, vast quantities of wreckage pushed inland into areas people never thought to protect. Just getting new equipment into Fukushima was no doubt a week-long process. Take a look at more of the pictures of the mountains of stuff piled up along the roadways there. All that had to be moved out of the way before you could get heavy equipment into the coast.
With a twister, that level of damage is fairly localized, and there’s not a huge amount of water left laying around to complicate things.
Browns Ferry going into an emergency like Japan isn't impossible I suppose but with all the available assets highly unlikely. They can truck in generators and even Chill Water coiling systems on tractor trailer flatbeds if needed. Getting the transmission lines back up won't take near as long as rebuilding several thousand miles of the power grid and that is the local utilities job.
Browns Ferry IIRC sits on the lake so there's plenty of usable water if needed and the lakes right now from the Tennessee River headwaters on down are flowing.
The last real crisis to hit TVA's reactors was a few years back if I remember right they had to shut a few down due to the water temps on the lakes caused by a severe drought. That's not an issue now though.
There’s also an issue which I’m coming to appreciate more and more is the reason why we wouldn’t have the same issues:
I was familiar with Japanese culture before, but I had no appreciation for how their culture would prevail in the face of an emergency that required rapid, out-of-the-box, cross-hierarchy thinking and action.
Even in the face of life threatening emergent issues, their cultural tendencies remained in place, to their detriment I now believe.
Here in the US, if it becomes clear that the higher-ups really don’t care or know what is going on, we have a culture of “Screw it. We’re going to FIX this situation, and the higher-ups and go pound sand.” Americans just don’t put up with the idea that we’re supposed to obey someone just because of their lineage, position, etc. They’d better evidence some competence, or they’re going to first get an earful, then they’ll be overridden, then they’ll be replaced, forced out of the way or ultimately ignored.
Look at how things happened during Katrina. Blanco was effectively done at the end of the first week of non-response. People were taking action on their own pretty quickly a week into the flooding, even tho their fearless governor was catatonic from all reports.
Not so in Japan. We’re a month in, and both the political leadership and TEPCO management are still seeming to be out of the loop.
TVA and the utilities have had long standing protocols about handling natural disaster responses. Usually utilities had crews on the road to help another stricken region within 24 hours. Even Ma Bell for that matter had pretty much the same policy. Ma Bell will be the one hurting in the long run because AT&T has laid off about three fourths of the crew it had just two decades ago.
In Katrina the first thing should have happened was some politicians relieved of duty from mayor to governor. Most people responding to disasters know their jobs and sometimes it's best just to stay out of their way. The true testimony to stupidity was the full school bus parking lot picture in New Orleans. The governor had the legal authority to say use them to move people as likely did the mayor. No one should have died from Katrina except possibly emergency service members who had to stay behind.
With all the destruction in the states hit this week the system worked. By that I mean the word {warnings} got out and most people listened. But you can't hide from a mile wide killer tornado though. If they hadn't got the word out the death toll would have been in the thousands.
Looks like McGraw Eddison is going to have some huge short term profits coming it's way too. I used to haul their transformers out of southeastern Texas and Mississippi plants to points north at a trucking company I once worked for.
Thanks for the info.
Monman62: Troll
Moonbat sounds more like it
Given the level of wave damage in that video, I’d have to say the power plant operators have done pretty well thus far. They took a pretty heavy hit, square in the face.
The green stuff they’re spraying on the embankment appears to be a binding agent, probably used to trap hot particles in place on the ground until they can get to long term cleanup.
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