TVA Sequoyah twin-reactors automatic shutdown
March 29, 2009
Ho hum, just another day at the old nuclear power plant over at Sequoyah; not much happens around there. Oh yes, there was one small “event” that just happened. Unit 1 and Unit 2 shut down all by themselves!
Okay, okay, they put out an awful lot of electricity and when something goes wrong at the other end that electricity backs up in those power lines very fast. We humans can’t react fast enough so it was all automatic.
That’s the kind of attitude that comes out of the TVA when something big happens. Minimize it, minimize it, and minimize it until that bad news goes away. That’s been TVA’s modus operandi for decades.
They tried that on the Kingston disaster, it was only an “ash slide” TVA reported. Weeks later CEO Tom Kilgore admitted it was a “catastrophe”; they even held a U.S. senate hearing about it in January.
So you can count on the early reports about a multiple shutdown of nuclear reactors at Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee to be minimal, a “ho hum” event.
When the dam breaks or major power sources immediately shut down there can be a huge ripple effect (in many ways) as was the case at the Kingston coal-fired plant.
There are some questions that should have been answered in TVA’s first “ho hum” report of the two nuclear reactors that simultaneously shut down, a total of 2,320 megawatts of electricity off-line all at once. Enough electricity for 1.3 million homes.
The usage of TVA electricity has dropped; has it dropped so much that 2,320 megawatts taken down suddenly has no effect on electricity production in TVA’s 80,000 square-mile territory? Talk about reducing consumption, TVA cut a third of its total nuclear power plant output instantly, did it all by itself. But could this mean higher rates if TVA must rely on “outside the fence” sources and if users do not cut their own consumption?
Supply and demand says if the demand is greater than the supply, prices will rise and to the contrary, prices will fall if there is an abundance of supply.
Really, there should be a thorough investigation of this “incident” to be sure there is no attempt to manipulate the supply of electricity in the marketplace even within TVA’s monopoly.
I have a number of questions; I hope you do too.
An automatic shutdown is “exorbitantly more expensive” says a supplier of materials to TVA. Their solution to a severe pump vibration problem “Resulted in maximizing the uptime of TVA’s assets…and will prevent …unscheduled shut downs, which are exorbitantly more expensive than scheduled shut downs”. Also claiming, “Anytime we continue or extend a customer’s uptime - not shutting down- we are saving any plant an incredible amount of money,”
TVA does not say anything about the extra costs of the two units alluded to by one of their suppliers. It must depend, I suppose, on what “exorbitant” means.
The twin-reactors at Sequoyah have a history of fits and starts since 1985. Two years ago it could not pass the safety siren test perhaps indicative of the necessary close care of the equivalent of a colossal atomic bomb.
There is nothing ho hum about nuclear reactors.
Ernest Norsworthy
emnorsworthy@earthlink.net