Alabama has a nuke plant event because of storms

[ensho]

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


Alabama officials have declared an emergency at a nuclear power plant in the northern part of the state and have started shutting it down in the aftermath of severe storms and tornadoes that have pounded the state. Tennessee Valley Authority began the process Wednesday afternoon, declaring an 'unusual event,' the lowest of four emergency levels as the storms damaged electricity transmissions lines powering the plant. This afternoon, the Browns Ferry plant, because of the loss of transmission declared an unusual event, which is the lowest of the four emergency classifications used by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and personnel are working to safely shut down the plant," said Tennessee Valley Authority Chief Operating Officer Bill McCollum in a video posted to the Authority's web site. The Browns Ferry plant contains three nuclear units and "is being shut down this afternoon after the transmission line damage took the plant offline," McCollum said. He
said all of the systems at the plant functioned as designed and normal procedures were being used to cool down the plant. The plant's units combine to give it 3,274 megawatts of power. A spokeswoman said backup diesel generators started and operated as designed, according to Reuters. The Brownsferry plant has the same design and age as the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, which was damaged when a tsunami in the aftermath of a 9.0 magnitude earthquake knocked out power and water damaged emergency backup units. Browns Ferry's nuclear reactors are of the Mark 1 type by General Electric, similar to those at Fukushima. Preston D. Swafford, TVA's chief nuclear officer said on a March 26 tour of that plant that Browns Ferry was ready for "a one-in-a-million-year flood, or however many zeroes you want to go out," according to the New York Times.
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[Scuba]

1. link broken

[Hubert Flottz]

5. Try this link...

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/139230/20110428/alabama-nuclear-plant-shut-down-reactors-cooled.htm

[MineralMan]

7. But, that's a real news source. I want a Hungarian disaster conspiracy site

link! Waaaaah!

[hobbit709]

2. I doubt they'll have a tsunami wrecking the generators

[SidDithers]

3. Your link doesn't work...

Here, I fixed it for you: http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index2.php

Nice to see you're back to linking (sort of) to these "alerts"

Sid

[ensho]

4. thank you

nt

[MineralMan]

6. Well, I know that when I want information about what's happening

in the United States, my first thought is to go to a site in Hungary. I'm really glad you fixed that link. I'd have been lost without it.

[Scuba]

8. This is the same problem that caused the failure in Japan...

...loss of power into the plant.


The idea that the nuke operators didn't bury the lines powering their plant strikes me as negligent. Are they OK with ice storms, tornado, and even cars crashing into telephone polls being all it takes to cripple the power suppy to the plant????

[bahrbearian]

9. If the power plants make power, why did they have to start the generators?

[badtoworse]

10. The transmission system was down and there was no electrical load to take the power

Large power plants (like nukes) can't operate at very low outputs and can't throttle back enough to satisfy just the "in-house" load. With nowhere to put the power, they had to shut down the plant. Normally, when they shut down a power plant, they take power from the grid to do it safely and satisfy the in-house load once it's offline. With the grid unavailable, they could not do that, but they still needed power to safely shut the plant down and maintain it in a safe condition. Nukes have smaller, emergency generators to do just that, if and when necessary. Starting the emergency generators was the correct response under the circumstances and does not imply that there was any problem with the plant.