Minnesota has a nuke plant event

[ensho]

http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index2.php


Xcel Energy today said its Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant shut down over the weekend due to low oil pressure in its turbines. The 600-megawatt plant shut down at 11:12 p.m. Saturday when four pressure switches sensed low oil pressure in its turbines, Xcel spokeswoman Mary Sandok said today. The switches activated relays that triggered the reactor protection system, causing the turbine oil valve to close to protect the equipment. The valve closure resulted in an automatic plant shutdown, Sandok said. There was no radiation release and no danger to the public or plant workers, Sandok said. Xcel officials said the outage is not expected to be lengthy but declined to specify how long. Estimating the length of the outage could affect the price of energy that Xcel will buy on the open market to make up for the loss of Monticello, Sandok said. The single-reactor plant, located about 40 miles northwest of Minneapolis, generates enough electricity to power nearly 500,000 homes. This is
the third non-scheduled outage reported at the nuclear power plant this year. "While we are still investigating the cause of the weekend outage, the causes of the first two were unrelated," Sandok said. On Oct. 21, the plant had a 10-day outage when a cable failure caused a transformer to lock out, interrupting non-safety related electricity from reaching the plant from the grid. In June, Xcel shut down the plant to replace a faulty safety valve that had been installed on the plant's main steam line just a few months previously during a scheduled refueling outage.
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[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. I'm very glad it shut itself down...

... seeing as how I'm downwind of the thing.

[Ed Suspicious]

2. Alright, I'm about 150 miles downwind of that. This shit isn't funny! n/t

[Old and In the Way]

3. Glad the shutdown went as expected.

But it is scary to think how a bad relay, faulty power supply, or a frozen pump could make the difference between a normal shutdown and a real nuclear event.

[jwirr]

4. Low oil pressure? What are we going to use when oil runs out? nt

[snooper2]

6. My body is producing oil as I type this

lol

[jwirr]

7. We could also use goose fat.

[snooper2]

8. or duck, when smoking a duck you should always poke about 5 holes on each side

to let the fat drain as it smokes...

YUUUUUUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMYYYYYYYYYY

maybe I'll do one on Thursday for fun :)

[jwirr]

10. My father raised geese and I would love to have one for Thanksgiving.

[Sirveri]

9. It's engine oil, not gasoline or fuel oil. It's for lubrication.

It happens every once in a while, filter gets plugged up, or most commonly they shift oil strainers too quickly and cause a low pressure alarm. I almost did it myself once.

[snooper2]

5. So everything worked just as it should

:)

On edit...

Does "nuke plant event" really seem that more onerous to you? I'm sure if we worked on it together we could find something better. Maybe, "circumstance within nuclear plant"?

[SidDithers]

11. Thank you for your continuing series highlighting effective safety systems...

at America's nuclear generating facilities.

:thumbsup:

Sid

[MineralMan]

12. Your Hungarian disaster site is a day late on this, as usual.

This was in the papers here on Sunday. It's a good thing to know that the safety measures in the plant are operating as designed.

Nuclear power generation is unsafe. It has never been safe and cannot be made to be safe.

That said, safety systems in plants operate properly almost all the time, so radiation releases from such plants are extremely rare.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

13. "Safety systems in plants operate properly almost all the time."

True. And therein lies the sticky wicket: almost. As you said, nuclear power can't be made safe, not completely safe, because there can be no such thing as a 100% safe system - especially one as complex as nuclear power generation.

So the risk analysis people look at a kind of matrix of the likelihood of failure and the severity of the harm if failure occurs. It is very, very, unlikely that this plant will have an uncontained, Fukushima/Chernobyl sort of failure. But it is not far upwind of a metropolitan area of 3 million people (where you and I live). It probably won't fail. But it could.

Have a look at Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies by Charles Perrow. Perrow's thesis is that some systems (and he specifically considers nuclear power plants) are so complex and tightly-coupled that accidents are inevitable. He says a "normal" accident is one that occurs in a system that has so many parts that it is likely something is wrong with more than one part at any given time. A complex system, if well-designed, has redundancies and fail-safe mechanisms so that the failure of any single part will not cause failure of the entire system. However, unexpected interactions of failures within the system can cause it to fail in a way that was not anticipated.

Interesting, and scary.

[MineralMan]

14. I oppose nuclear power generation. It is, however, a reality, and

doesn't seem likely to go away. Close monitoring and regulation is the only thing that keeps it from failing more often. And the, there are unexpected situations, like the massive earthquakes and tsunamis at Fukushima. Infrequent, but devastating, they spell disaster for any nuclear power plant, no matter how it is designed. That is the reason I oppose such plants.

However, reporting on normal malfunctions that are caught by built-in safety systems and repaired doesn't do much good. Systems that operate as designed only give credence to the beliefs of many that nuclear power generation can be safe. It cannot. It is that simple.

[Codeine]

15. Minnesota nuclear power plant has proper safety equipment event. nt