2/26/08

Florida Power Outage, Nuke Plant Down?
By: Mark W Adams


MSNBC just reported on the massive power outage across Florida due to a power surge and that a nuclear power plant lost power.

Am I the only one who finds it disturbing that something designed to make power, loses the power to make that power?

And is the word "surge" the most overused descriptor of the decade?

UPDATE: Make that two nuke plants!? Reuters reports that both nuclear power facilities at Turkey Point have been shut down due to lost of "off-site" power.

CNN reported that eight power plants in South Florida in the Miami area were out of service.

The 2,196 MW Turkey Point station is located in Florida City in Miami-Dade County, about 25 miles south of Miami.

There are several units at Turkey Point: the 398 MW oil/natural gas-fired Unit 1, the 400 MW oil/gas-fired Unit 2, two 693 MW nuclear units, 3 and 4, the 1,150 MW combined-cycle gas-fired Unit 5, and a handful of 2 MW and 3 MW oil-fired turbines.

I didn't know you had to plug a nuclear power plant into something else, and you'd think one of the other plants nearby would do the trick.

But then again, I don't know enough about energy production to have been invited to Dick Cheney's lair for secret talks, so what I think doesn't really matter, does it.

2 Comments:

Anonymous said...

"I didn't know you had to plug a nuclear power plant into something else, and you'd think one of the other plants nearby would do the trick."

One of the other plants nearby does do the trick, however they lost power from the grid. They plan for loss of off-site power (LOSP), which is why they have redundant diesel generators for backup power.

Anonymous said...

Comment from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission:

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/news/2008/08-037.html