Pump Problems Indian Point
The Indian Point 2 reactor had to be shut down on Friday morning, April 3, because of a problem with the main boiler feed pump. The pump feeds water through the reactor and into the steam generator, the converted steam goes to the turbines that generate electricity.
Jerry Nappi of Entergy, the company that owns Indian Point, said the pump stopped working because there was a drop in oil pressure in a line carrying oil to the main boiler feed pump. Plant workers fixed the pump and Unit 2 was up and running next day. Neil Sheehan of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the shut down went smoothly and plant workers followed procedures.
A year ago in March, pumps pulling in water from the Hudson River malfunctioned causing another quick shut down. Two months later a broken water valve at Unit 2 forced Entergy to temporarily withdraw the plant from feeding into the state’s electrical grid.
Indian Point Reactors are Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR). PWRs keep water under pressure so that it heats, but does not boil. Water from the reactor and the water in the steam generator that is turned into steam never mix. In this way, most of the radioactivity stays in the reactor area. In the image of the reactor, the pump is located between the condenser and the reactor.
regular updates about the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plants in Buchanan,NY.
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Indian Point from the Hudson River
9 comments:
Why does doing some job "just good enough" scare the hell out of me?
Thank goodness there is still a journalist covering Indian Point!
It is worth noting that both reactors were down at the same time and there was NO impact on our supply of electricity. Most people did not even notice. So much for the we can't live without the electricity Indian Point produces crowd.
What's up with amendment to license that Entergy is requesting? My guess is that they are trying to sneak through a way to manage their spent fuel on the cheap whithout the bother of public comment. This should be part of relicensing but won't be because of the way the NRC interprets the regs.
Marilyn Elie
How long has this tug of war been going on? Since Indian Point was built. Two sides, one trying to save the Hudson Valley and New York from either catastrophe or slow death. The other cashing in millions a day, claiming they are providing clean, indispensable electricity to the region.
And yet, the most obvious solution to reducing our electric consumption is rarely if ever mentioned by all the groups opposing the new license.
Light Emitting Diodes have the potential to reduce electric consumption in New York by as much as 50% in the scope of just a few years.
In my opinion, all anti-nuclear groups, just as they have become proponents of solar and wind, should also be selling LED retrofits.
This is what our organization, Rock The Reactors, in part assisted by members of the sustainable fashion industry, has been advocating.
Hiya, Rem !!
Have you designed
that Hemp-Burning car yet?
We are all waiting !
IPEC, being a merchant (wholesale) energy provider, does not directly follow fluctuations in local power demand.
I myself worked at a fossil peaking plant for 16 years, and at such plants everybody is super-sensitive to demand/supply realities from hour to hour. If demand exceeds supply, all the bells,lights, and whistles begin to sound, as boilers are taken out of reserve status, and ramped up to full power. Lots of smoke comes out the stacks at such times, because the burn from moment to moment cannot be optimized as to its air/fuel/heatsink balance, and clear stacks only appear after hours of intermittent smoking.
When a baseload station is online nearby, the number of such plants mobilized at the occurrence of a demand spike is minimized. The energy distributors, relying on long-term contract power from the merchant baseload plants, can simply dig into their contracted power allotment for that day, and send out clean, green power to their customers,... power , I might add, bought at the lowest possible price, months in advance.
Now let's take the baseload merchant (like Indian Point) off line.
Let's have that same demand spike. The distribution wheelers will begin to call peak power providers, haggling over price on the extremely volatile spot market, and will pay top dollar for any power they get. It's a commodity exchange, and uncontrollably hectic.They take what they can get, and pay whatever is asked.This overpayment, of couse, is passed directly to their customers. That's the financial downside of not having Indian Point running.Now let's go on to the environmental cost.
With IPEC offline, the entire spike will have to be satisfied by whatever plants can be ramped up on short notice. This will include all the "dog" units that are generally kept only in cold reserve, because their equipment is faulty, old, dirty, and unreliable. This will also include all the filthy fossil peakers, who will fill the skies with mercury, NOX, CO2, soot, smog, haze, and potential lung cancer from Des Moines to Boston. But, in a pinch, the hard-nosed power wheelers have no choice but to knowingly kill a few old people with emphysema, just to keep a blackout away for one more afternoon.
But Marilyn Elie denies all this is of any importance. She leaves out all the real injuries done to countless innocent citizens, and opts to view such events only through the lens of an anti-Indian Point propagandist, saying: " Both Indian Point units were offline, and nothing happened".
But it D I D happen!
So much for Marilyn.
Now, to Bill Chestnut.
There is no such thing as "good enough" at Indian Point. Nothing is ever good enough, and that's a basic premise, written into 100 procedures, regulations, and design parameters. Engineers are ordered to routinely read failure reports from paid worldwide industry news sources, and glean from those reports, some inkling of what possible future failures of a similar nature could impact Indian Point. They are ordered to be seers, futurists, swamis if you will, and imagine ( realistically of course) future events that have not yet occurred.Anyone who refuses, is fired. Any time engineers make any adjustment, even of the most trivial nature, they are forced to exhaustively analyze whether that change has affected the overall plant safety margin. Anyone not doing so, is fired. A separate group monitors the margin, separate from the engineers, and reports on whether the engineers are being exhaustive enough. The smallest piece of maintenance work is subjected to rigorous examination by safety experts, before being done, while being done, and after completion. The maintenance crews even have a mandatory robot language they must use, called 3 point communication, and it goes like this: Mechanic 1: " I am about to pick up the screw" Mechanic 2 answers " You are about to pick up the screw, check" ( He has checked the action as being correct against the written procedure he is reading from) Mechanic #1 then replies " I have picked up the screw." And on, and on, line after line of super-rigid obedience to the most rigid behavior controls known to mankind. No monk, saint, or archbishop is ever subjected to such tight control, no airline pilot, no brain surgeon. Most people could not stand it, and those who cannot, leave. This is all within a regime where everyone is routinely tested for drugs or alcohol, and it is mandatory to watch your co-employee, for signs of abberant behavior.
Good Enough, Indeed !
How about getting some information, before opinionating?
Now please allow me to stretch out a bit, philosophically, on what I perceive to be the roots of anti-nuclearism, as we experience it in the American society of 2009 and beyond.
Mining is a hard, nasty business. If you compare the current realities of coal mining, oil mining, and uranium mining, what you find is the uranium is recovered harmlessly through an in situ liquefaction process, and the coal requires damage to the planet. Oil, of course, requires prospecting, drilling, insertion of steam or salt water as a propellant, and then refining and shipment. In China, on a coal economy, we see 5000 miner deaths yearly. This is an average. It is repeated each year. We also see, via satellite photos, the huge brown cloud emanating from China, and spreading over all east Asia, due almost entirely to China's reliance on coal. They are not apologetic about it, and claim a right created in the west, of parity with all the former atmospheric offendor nations, from U.S. Grant's USA, to Disraeli's UK, claiming they must be allowed to offend until even with "us"... "US" being every non-Chinese nation that ever had an industrial economy.
This is the world reality. China now plans the construction of 30 new nuclear plants, and does so proudly, asserting that this technologhical change (away from coal) is an altruistic "Great Leap Forward". Who are we, to gainsay this switch? We are historic offendor nations, awash in inherited wealth gleaned through planet-stripping, and poison-making on a planetary scale. China has us dead-to-rights. We have carelessly offended the entire human race, to gain a few dollars here, a few pounds there, in our scramble to total bourgeois domination.....
Now, comfortable in our bourgeois bastions, we seek allies in denial, and try to avert the condemnation already headed our way, from decades past. If we have done well in the west ( meaning a bourgeois lifestyle, as opposed to a worker lifestyle) we will have expectations of beauty, expectations of servitude, expectations of perfection. What do I mean? A worker can be happy in a row house, with no plantings. A Bourgeois will demand landscaping, a jogging track, and a Starbuck's nearby. A worker expects some disappointment , and does not feel aggrieved at sustaining a loss. A Bourgeois will struggle mightily to landscape the Hudson riverside, as an almost religious quest, demanding higher and higher standards of landscaping purity, in lieue of ever giving back the ravaged lands from which the coal, the oil, and the dollars were raped in former generations. The hyper-denial intrinsic to such bourgeois posturing is well- nigh insurmountable.
The first assumption, will be that every unfair advantage taken, is a fair advantage, a birthright. The next assumption will be that all others are to blame, not the bourgeoisie. The next, and ultimate hubris, will couch its falsehoods and its denials as mock "education", seeking to "educate" the rest of the human race in the innate justice of American upper classes owning everything, and millions dying of starvation because of it.
It's ludicrous.
Those not party to the deception are righteously disgusted by it.
The current antinuclear posturing is part & parcel of this bourgeois self-aggrandizement, and planetary-scale denial.
I pause now. Think over these concepts.
I know they are hard for you.
Try hard to understand.
The planet depends upon your effort.
Covert Roots of Antinuclearism.
The working class in general has very little to say about Indian Point. They see it (correctly, I might add) as part and parcel of our infrastructure, like any road, or bridge, or water reservoir.... an amenity built by the hard work and sacrifice of our forebears, and deeded over to us for our lucky use in this generation. They use its output as carelessly as one would ride unthinking down some highway, unmindful of the road crews that laid the pavement. This is why there is no "Pro Indian Point" movement per se. It's existence, and it's contribution are simply accepted.
The wellspring of opposition to Indian Point , (small though it is), emanates from other classes than the proletariat. We see successful media icons like Christie Brinkley agitating furiously against all the nuclear plants within helicopter range of her Easthampton estate, and RFK jr. grown both wealthy ( should I say wealthier?), and famous throwing his celebractivist soirees in Manhattan & Lake Louise, Canada, all themed smugly against the nukes. Let's look at rabid antinuclearist Kyle Rabin, who now advises wealthy land owners in Long Island how to sequester portions of their estates free from taxation, by donating part as "green preserves". Let us look at Lisa Rainwater Mele, speaking on behalf of riverkeeper for 7 years, and then marrying well, to millionaire Clearwater CEO Andy Mele, who has since taken 3 years off from environmentalism, to write a novel.
Do we detect a touch of the precious here?
I say that the eternal upward striving inherent to the bourgeois lifestyle is the very engine of all this supposed "activism", and just as a child of privilege will be taught to seek the best college, the best marriage partner, the best house, the best car, the best vacation, the best wine, the best brand, the best restaurant, and the best neighborhood.... that the "activism" itself boils down to nothing more than perfecting one's real estate position by de-industrializing the Hudson valley.... "greening" your world as a form of enforced social landscaping, making everything pretty enough to perhaps gain notice in the Sunday New York Times magazine ( as did the Rainwater-Mele wedding).... and the devil take the dispossessed, the unemployed, the unwashed, the un-pretty folks devastated by your "landscaping improvements"..... the Times doesn't see these types, so why should you?
The raising of ephemeral "threats" , like thimerosol, or undetectable rays from Indian Point, and then arousing portions the bourgeoisie to vocal opposition, is an ugly exercise in targeted social climbing, for fame and profit. The book sales, and the speaking engagements can change one's life forever, as you climb regally to the heights of "celebractivist author", in the end, helping no one and nothing.
I'm not talking about you, of course.
Thanks for such an informative.Thanks atleast there is a journalist who is covering Indian point.
Thanks,
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