Nuke Plant Closure Birds' Doing? CBS/AP

[Endangered Specie]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/21/tech/main630908.shtml

{

AP) Birds droppings may have short circuited a unit at the largest nuclear power complex in the United States, causing the plant to shut down last month, investigators said.

"There were eyewitnesses," said Kwin Peterson, a spokesman for the Western Electricity Coordinating Council, which is looking into the incident at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station that caused outages all the way to Canada. "There was a bird on a 230 kilovolt power line west of Phoenix, and as the bird took off, it let loose as birds often do."

Investigators said they think excrement contaminated an insulator, and electricity flashed to the tower, creating a short.

At the time, utility officials said all three units at Palo Verde, plus the natural gas-fired Red Hawk power plant, turned themselves off because of a disturbance in the transmission system. But they did not know the cause at the time.

There was no radioactivity leakage or danger to plant workers or nearby residents, plant officials said. However, the loss of the 5,000 megawatts caused short power outages across Arizona to New Mexico, central California and as far as the Canadian province of Alberta.

}

[truthisfreedom]

1. bird droppings. our entire infrastructure is at risk because of bird doo.

why am i not surprised?

[mom cat]

2. No shit!

[TahitiNut]

7. No. No rain.

:shrug:

[Moderator]

3. Title

Please change the title of your post. The Latest Breaking News forum has strict rules about matching the true title with the post. The title should read: Nuke Plant Closure Birds' Doing?

[Endangered Specie]

4. Ok, just be glad I didnt use the original idea that came to mind

;)

[kodi]

5. Attack of the Talibirds!

.

[amazona]

6. not sure I buy this at all

I spend a lot of time watching birds, and I can assure you that birds spend a great deal of time sitting on telephone wires, considering the landscape, and pooping. I don't doubt that a bird was sitting on a wife when the shutdown occurred. It would have been more amazing if no bird had been sitting on a wire at the time. What I do doubt is that bird poop was the cause of the plant going down. This just smells like they don't really know what happened so they're grasping for straws.

[TahitiNut]

8. Whose wife was the bird sitting on?

:silly: (I could suggest one.)

[Syncronaut Seven]

9. Ummm, Birdcrap is pretty conductive.

And can string and drip like mucous. The explanation is quite plausible.

The miracle is that the shutdown worked. Heat and pressure build PDQ when you unload a reactor suddenly.