Hurricane Irma Nuclear Power Mysteries: FPL Didn’t Shutdown Second Turkey Pt. Nuclear Reactor – It Shut Itself Down; St. Lucie Nuclear Power Station Unit Has Salt Buildup On Insulators In The Switchyard

Radar showing Hurricane Irma with its eye north of Cuba and south of the Florida Keys. Turkey Point Nuclear Power Station sits just north of Key Largo on Biscayne Bay.

Turkey Point Nuclear (and non-nuclear) Generating Station on Biscayne Bay.

While Turkey Point Unit 3 started shutdown on Saturday morning ahead of tropical storm winds from Hurricane Irma, Turkey Point Unit 4 reportedly shut itself down “just before Sunday evening due to a valve issue“, according to Roger Hannah (US NRC) on the NRC blog [1]. Rather frighteningly, at “St. Lucie, also in Florida, operators are reducing power on Unit 1 due to salt buildup on insulators in the switchyard that supplies offsite power and plant employees are working to resolve this situation. St. Lucie Unit 2 remains at full power“, writes Hannah (NRC).

St. Lucie Nuclear Power Station sits on a barrier island.

The blog…

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September 12, 2017 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized

4 Comments »

Turkey Point 4 has a refueling outage (RFO) 10-31-17. They would do anything to not have to shut that reactor down, along with the increased inspections, review of all the service interval documentation, and most likely, the NRC finding that FPL was non compliant on some important issues, and would therefore not let them restart. FPL would rather save this non-compliant work items for the shutdown.

So even when they noticed the water levels dropping in the steam generator, they were trying to come up with some type of fix in order to avoid the SCRAM. While they were trying, the automatic systems initiated the SCRAM. It is much better to SCRAM from a lower output level, lower temperatures. SCRAMing from a high output puts a lot more shock on the system, again, not just putting more wear and tear on everything, but increasing the chance of something really going wrong. They SCRAMed from 88%, a high level, and curious why it was not 100%.

They claimed it was a manual SCRAM, but this is not credible for the reasons above.

RFO schedules
https://www.roadtechs.com/nukeout.htm

A reporter from World Nuclear News contacted plant operators and got the information on how the plant had auto SCRAMed itself. Whoever they talked to “did not get the memo” that the NRC was going to report that it was a “manual SCRAM” meaning that they were really in control of the situation.

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-Nuclear-units-weather-Hurricane-Irma-1109177.html
Unit 4 shut down automatically on the evening of 10 September

—————————- You see this information here first, LOL, I was working on this when I saw your story, I will also place it into my existing story on the Turkeys

http://www.nukepro.net/2017/09/turkey-point-nuclear-in-florida-dumping.html

Comment by stock | September 12, 2017 | Reply
Also St Lucie, 1 unit at ZERO power. They weren’t really lying, they just said the “were reducing power”, they did not say we are reducing power to ZERO. They just noticed the salt now eh? Kind of like Pilgrim where salt repeatedly shorted out their transformers for offsite power.

http://www.nukepro.net/2015/02/pilgrim-nuclear-in-boston-came-very.html

Comment by stock | September 12, 2017 | Reply
- Thanks. Very hard to get information, here in Australia, and probably everywhere else, too.
  
  Comment by Christina MacPherson | September 13, 2017 | Reply
  - Ya, they are getting peeved that we are pointing out their incompetence, so often
    
    Comment by stock | September 14, 2017