Nothing works 100% of the time, even regular transmission lines fail on a regular basis.
Squirrel chews and overgrown tree limbs are particularly dangerous.
Frankly, that seems like an odd question from a pro-nuke.
It's not wise to build a grid with objects that create large National Sacrifice Areas:
Depending on circumstances, the Station Blackout reactor accident scenario can be particularly dangerous to public health and safety. The reactor core can melt on time scales comparable to the TMI accident. Unlike the limited loss of cooling event at TMI, however, the core damage scenario in a Station Blackout can be particularly severe, including a so-called “early high energy release” comprising a particularly heavy “portfolio” of fission products dispersed far and wide within a few hours.
http://www.energypulse.net/centers/article/article_display.cfm?a_id=514Squirrels cause more blackouts than lightning strikes:
Suicide squirrels driving utilities nutsBy Alan Gomez, USA TODAY
Every year, Neil Engelman carefully collects his data, stands before his company's board of directors and is asked the same question: What caused more outages? The lightning or the squirrels?
Four of the past five years, the answer has been the squirrels, says Engelman, vice president of operations for the Lincoln Electric System in Nebraska. Nebraska is not alone. Many states are grappling with a big increase in the number of power outages caused by squirrel electrocutions.
Squirrels that fry themselves on power lines and transformers cause tens of thousands of blackouts every year.
Some states have seen a massive jump in recent years in the number of such outages. In Georgia, squirrel-related outages more than tripled from 5,273 in 2005 to 16,750 in 2006.
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The entire west coast was blacked out in 1996 because of a tree:
Blackout of 1996On August 10, 1996, during a period of high temperatures and high demand for electricity, a major transmission line failure knocked out power to 4 million people in eight West Coast states. The impacts were immediate and, in areas such as the San Francisco Bay area, they lasted for hours. For the most part, the major power outage was just a major inconvenience. Planes continued to land and take off at the city’s airport, but the electrically operated jetways were grounded. Traffic lights winked out, and gridlocks ensued. Chefs at the famous Hays Street Grill in San Francisco set up barbecues in the alley in back of the restaurant, and elsewhere there were sudden markdowns of refrigerated foods.
The cause of the chaos? At 3:42 p.m., a power line sagged into filbert trees near Hillsboro, Oregon, just southwest of Portland. It was the fourth power line in Oregon to fail in less than two hours. Five minutes later, at 3:47 p.m., a line shorted out in Vancouver, Washington, across the Columbia River from the Portland/Hillsboro area. At 3:48 p.m., the 13 turbines at McNary Dam, on the Columbia about 190 miles upstream from Portland, quit operating. The combination of the power outages and the temporary loss of McNary triggered a cascade of power outages as far away as southern California.
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