Cascading blackouts in Florida
Published 2/26/08
The Miami Herald says the outages are “cascading” across the region. They’ve been reported in Miami, Doral, Westchester, Pembroke Pines, Miramar and Boca Raton.
WFTV-TV reports that outages are also being reported in the central part of the state, including Brevard, Orange and Osceola counties.
But here’s your money quote: “A spokesman for the power company tells AP that the outages began after they shut down a nuclear reactor for ’safety reasons’.”
gnomic says:
NPR reported that the safety reason was that safety systems use external power. When the external power dropped, the plany shut down because the safety systems would not run properly. It worked exactly as it was supposed to.
In a past life, I worked for emergency management and got to play in the simulator that they train operators at an actual plant. We had an hour to kill and I asked them to help me simulate a meltdown. After 50 minutes of shutting down and overriding every safety system, the tempature in the cooling loop rose 1 degree. It turns out that they are damn hard to intentionally cause a failure even when trying.
I’m less worried about the plant than all the waste they have laying around each site.