Posted on 02/07/2010 9:27:40 AM PST by malamute
An explosion in Middletown, Connecticut has rocked the town. Initial reports are that about a dozen people have been injured.
Middletown, United States - The Middletown Fire Department just said in a phone interview that they are in the process of putting out a second alarm. There are an unknown number of casualities. The explosion took place at NRG Power Plant on River Road. According to their web site they are the fossil-fueled electric generating plant in the state. Reports are saying that the blast could be felt as far away as Durham.
(Excerpt) Read more at digitaljournal.com ...
Glad I could get you to laugh. Have a great day. Are you planning to watch the SB?
Hear, hear!
no hydrogen has lowest heat capacity
I'd much rather be surrounded by steel than masonry. Steel has more ductility than any kind of bricks or concrete. I guess reinforced concrete has resistance to shock as a result of the steel rebar.
That’s what I figured, too.
No, some gases readily form vapor clouds that are a mixture of air and flammable gas. The mixture is often the right ratio for fast burning if the cloud finds an ignition source. The cloud can float over a plant and will create a huge pressure wave on ignition. The pressure wave will crush everything underneath.
Here is the satellite view from Google Maps: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=wellwyn+rd,+portland,+ct&sll=41.576223,-72.637138&sspn=0.013965,0.02017&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Wellwyn+Dr,+Portland,+Middlesex,+Connecticut+06480&ll=41.558548,-72.594073&spn=0.006984,0.010085&t=h&z=16
You can see powerlines crossing the river...
Santostefano said the explosion was related in some fashion to natural gas, but that the cause was still under investigation. He said the explosion appears to have occurred when operators attempted a "blow down" of natural gas pipelines, a procedure that involves the purging of gas from the pipelines.
http://www.courant.com/community/middletown/hc-middletown-ct-power-plant-explosion,0,3952195.story
How will you know when THAT is? They never start on time.
I’m just wondering who you might work for doing HP steam piping repairs? I work in a supercritical plant; just wondering if our paths may have ever crossed?
>he cloud can float over a plant and will create a huge pressure wave on ignition
Got it. Kind of like how a MOAB unleashes its fuel/air and then touches it off.
“hydrogen has lowest heat capacity”
no it’s high. see
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/spesific-heat-capacity-gases-d_159.html
H2 definitely is used to cool synchronous machines. Very successfully I might add. There are accidents, but not that often.
“The sealing oil is to keep hydrogen in the GENERATOR part of the turbine-generator”
thanks for that. Do you by any chance have a reference?
I don’t think that is THE plant. There is no construction activity, no parking lots, site prep nothing. Try
a couple of miles south. This appears to be a 16 gas turbine combined cycle, natural gas fired plant. I started one of these up, many years ago, but half the size. Looks like de-mineralized make up water tanks to the east. They could have been doing steam blowing. I had a close call myself with super-heated steam through a gasket on a flange that was not tightened properly. No way could this be an H2 explosion. There’s only a limited number of H2 bottles and it is not needed unless the plant is approaching full power.
These plants are sometime auxiliary fired to superheat and dry the steam generated from the GT’s exhaust. This is the only process I know where a large volume of combustible vapor would exist. Perhaps this process failed and blew up. Unless there was a catastrophic gas main failure that filled the entire steam cycle building and ignited before source could be shut off. That explosion could injure many persons during a construction/start-up milestone activity day.
“H2 definitely is used to cool synchronous machines”
thanks. do you by any chance have a reference?
Lotsa dead!
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