Florida Black Out

[sgtcluels]

Any insight our local Nuclear tech can give us on what caused the Florida power outage?

[BuckyTuba]

I guess that's me.

 

Well, as of this morning, they really didn't know what happened. My guess is that there was some disturbances on the electrical grid. This can be caused by a sudden change in usage or a drop of a power line. Anyways, there's certain limits of the frequency of the power output can be. The normal frequency is 60Hz. There's a limit on time that a plant can operate when it's a certain differential away from 60Hz. Like if it's 59.9, it can be like 5 minutes, 59.5 - Trip the plant instantly.

 

I'm guessing they find some spike of usage, and the nuclear plants HAVE to trip off, because that electrical instability can cause reactor instability which can cause more problems (we're talking reactor trips and core damage). The Turkey Point nuclear plants functioned as they were supposed to yesterday, go offline at the first sign of trouble. FYI, Turkey Point is an old plant, my good friend from UW Nuclear Engineering, Tim, works for them as a Reactor Engineer, so I'll see what really happened.

 

The crappy thing is that it affected Progress Energy's (my utility) grid in Florida. Some of our customers lost power, but it was quickly restored.

 

EDIT: Language (Caught myself, sorry mods)

[BuckyTuba]

So here's the information my friend Tim sent me:

one of the relays at a substation blew up, caught fire, then burned itself out, so it didn't trip as it was supposed to. so then the RPS (reactor protection system) tripped both units due to low voltage.

As I expected, Undervoltage/Underfrequency Trip.

[dadofandrew]

Well, for us conspiracy lovers, that's a mighty boring explanation...so I'll just make something up.

[BuckyTuba]

well, the real question is why the substation blew up, and why wasn't the relay tested and operable? someone is going to lose their job over this.

[Brian the Automator]

As I expected, Undervoltage/Underfrequency Trip.

That was my first inclination as well.

 

[bullox]

I was guessing that they were only getting about 1.17 jiggawatts to the flux capacitor.

[owbc]

One can't help but be concerned about the vulnerability of the power grid. Without electricity, we'd be sent back to 1900 in less than a week. Not to mention brewerfan.net withdrawals.

[sgtcluels]

How could you even protect a power grid? Unless people could come up with a better "recovery" (More segments, less load changes if something goes wrong?)

 

Thanks Bucky, more details then what Outages listserv has.

[BuckyTuba]

there's a lot of complicated issues with running a power grid. that's why the people downtown who run the transmission group get paid big bucks to monitor the grid. we got to visit "method", a.k.a. our transmission control center. they buy and sell power with other adjacent grids when they need it. very complicated job, but i have a more complicated job in my opinion..

 

 

i knew i would be slightly belittled with some sort of nuclear joke. thanks guys.......... it wouldn't be the same w/o the jokes.

[Brian the Automator]

We tease the ones we love.

[brewers19]

No one ever teases me.

[sgtcluels]

That's because no one loves you b19. Not even your mother!

 

Ban in

 

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[BuckyTuba]

really weird... after i post all this stuff about FP&L having an outage........ i lost power at my house for like 2 hours today. I'm hoping that it's not a big deal at the plant. I haven't seen anything on the news yet, so that's good.