Mother nature has definitely been hard on nuclear power the last few weeks. First a 9.0 magnitude earthquake followed by a 30 foot tsunami cripples the Fukushima Daiichi plant, and now a tornado shuts down a nuclear power plant in Virginia. If you didn't hear about this, you can check it out here. It doesn't seem that the major news networks covered this one too much in depth...not that I am complaining.
Last Saturday, a series of nasty storms went through the south eastern United States. There were reports of several tornadoes from the storm, including one which managed to touch down in the middle of Virginia's Surry nuclear power plant. It didn't hit either of the two reactors at the site, but it did manage to destroy the switchgear for the plant. When I say switchgear, I am talking about those fenced off areas you see next to the road that look like a mad scientist should live there. These are the places where power flow is controlled. They are responsible for directing where power goes as well as for cutting off power when necessary. In other words, when the switchgear was taken out at the Surry nuclear power plant, it cut off the outside power.
It seems that people got a little nervous hearing that Surry had lost external power. I mean, we are still going to the effects of Fukushima Daiichi not being able to restore outside power. There is a major difference though. The backup generators at Surry were not washed away by a tsunami. After the tornado took out the switchgear, the plant lost power and the reactors shut down as designed. The backup generators then came online and kept the reactors cool. This is how the safety systems are supposed to work. There were designed this way.
Some are saying that we were lucky that the tornado didn't hit the reactor buildings themselves. I think this again is just a product of nerves resulting from the recent incident. We must remember that when the reactors were built, they were designed to withstand such natural occurrences. A magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 30 foot tsunami wasn't really believed to be a possibility. That was a mistake looking back in hindsight. In Virginia though, the risk of tornado is believed to be a possibility. Actually, the containment vessels are designed for much worse than even a tornado, such as an airplane crashing into it. It would have most likely been a less significant nuclear accident had the tornado hit the reactor itself. The switchgear is much more vulnerable, yet we still have safety systems to account for failure there.
Power has been restored to one of the reactors at Surry and the other reactor is expected to have power within another couple days. After power has been fully restored, the plant will assume operating at full power again. The take away message...A tornado hit one of the more vulnerable parts of a nuclear power plant and there was no disaster. The plant shut down for about a week and then will continue to operate as normal. If that is not a testament to the stability of nuclear power, I really don't know what is!
1 comments:
THis makes me think of the TVA reactor that was shut down last summer because the river used to cool it was too warm to use as coolant. I wonder if we are going to see more reactors stressed as a result of increasing temperatures and bizarre weather events. They may be able to withstand the events from a structural perspective, but frequent shutdowns would certainly impact our baseload power. Wonder what you think of this?
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