In one of the cooling towers, apparently. Depending on how it affects the power station's performance, it could tip us closer to 'lights out' over the coming winter.
(How can a cooling tower catch fire? I wouldn't have thought there was much flammable material in there, and it's continuously deluged in water anyway; it's how cooling towers work)
It looks like a pair of unaffected cooling towers to the right in the BBC picture, and maybe the fire has burned through the cladding of a steel framed building to the left. (although I'm not very familiar with the design of cooling towers in GT stations).
I wondered if they had a major gas leak (although you could expect it would be possible to isolate the main some way back). Alternatively, it could be a lube oil fire, which is the usual reason for dramatic fires at power stations. There are several thousand gallons of oil in each turbo-alternator system.
The upper part isn't deluged in water; that happens near the bottom. Looking at pictures of Didcot B the towers look as though they are made from sectional parts, with a different material near the top. Perhaps they used a plastic of some sort to keep the weight down.
Does seem strange. Was it perhaps not in use at the time? Brian
Even if they can't bring that half of Didcot B into service that's only 680 MW missing and that is split across two turbines/generators so there may only be 230 MW actually out of action for the longer term.
I was wondering that as well but it the images don't show the traditional massive convective cooling tower but something that looks like a forced air cooler that one might find on a large aircon plant. I'm wondering if it was an oil cooler for the output transformer(s) or WHY. With that amount of water going in there must have been a good fuel source but why fight an oil fire with water?
Looking at the newsreel reports this AM, it would seem that what caught fire was not one of the three tall hyperbolic cooling towers that one associates with power stations, but part of one of the two banks of 15 smaller (fan powered?) coolers. See
AIUI those are the cooling towers for the power station itself, using forced convection instead of the natural convection of the hyperboloid towers.
It looks like four coolers in one of two modules have been affected by the fire, so the station is quite capable of continuing at half capacity on the other generating module and might be able to bring the other module back at reduced power when the damage has been assessed.
Seems to be a few fires around:
- Big warehouse fire off A12 at Bow this morning - big shunt too on A12 as I presume someone took their eye off the road
- Northenden golf club destroyed
- Cutty Sark - again!
Latest photos do seem to confirm it was in one of those compact forced draft cooling towers.
I'm still a bit puzzled as to what was burning so well. I suppose the fan *could* have had plain bearings with a significant lube oil system but I thought even large fans generally run on rolling element bearings with just a few gallons of oil.
Latest telegraph picture is very clear
Is the cladding timber, or perhaps aluminium? I suppose if the fault didn't trip the fan, you might get a metal fire going which can get exciting.
Should have read the rest of the article:
Although two of the cooling towers have been badly damaged, there are at least a dozen on this half of the plant that appear to have escaped unscathed. This means there could be potential to restart power generation at lower capacity using the undamaged towers. Cooling towers are constructed from wood and metal frames and should be relatively straightforward to rebuild, sources added.
Am 20.10.2014 um 15:50 schrieb newshound: [..]
What is the reason for using wood at such a warm and wet place? Aluminimum or some GFK-Compound should do the job better. IMHO.
Timber cladding would explain the fuel source. But looking at the images it's a bit more than just stripping the frames and re cladding... I doubt the fan, motor(s) or heat exchanger liked being cooked.
I guess once they have tidied up they could bring the module back up at reduced load but that probably depends on the effciency at reduced load.
On 20/10/2014 16:57, Matthias Czech wrote: ...
The design and number of cooling towers make me wonder whether they use air cooled heat exchangers, rather than evaporative cooling. If so, it would be a warm, dry place. The potential for evaporative cooling towers to be a source of Legionnaire's disease was well recognised when this power station was built.
Any ideas when Queen Vic will be next burnt down?
First, I'm glad that this has caused no loss of life.
Why the hell were the cooling towers constructed of wood? Max. life, what,
20-25 years? Perhaps specced by the green brigade. At least burning wood is carbon neutral. Would you consider fitting a wooden fume extractor above a gas cooker?I'll bet ?1 to a pinch of wotsname that this will take min. 5yrs to repair. If ever. The PTB will look at this and then look at the remaining parts of the facility. Exhaustive inquiries will ensue. I think there is a good chance they will either condemn the whole lot or put it all on standby until the whole place is bought up to the spec suggested/required by the results of those inquiries. Don't hold your breath. Of course at the end of these procedures the facility may well be beyond the use-by date. Should keep some people in very lucrative business for years to come.
The best reason I could think of was that there is lots of noise (from the airflow) and vibration (from the fan) so that metal panels on a frame will resonate in all sorts of unpleasant ways, both transmitting and magnifying the noise, and posing a risk of random failures of the fasteners through fretting. Something like shuttering ply bolted to angle iron on the other hand should help to damp the noise, as well as being relatively easy to replace. GRP (glass fibre reinforced plastic) is widely used for providing corrosion protection on the valves, ducts, and pipework of cooling water systems, but in relatively thin layers applied to substantial hardware (concrete or cast iron). Thin GRP panelling or structures would be prone to the same vibration as metal sheet.
I have to disagree. CCGT cooling towers and some of the low forced draft towers used on American "nukes" all look similar to this (I have never been close enough to see the construction, though).
I'd bet they have some of the plant back within a couple of days, and even rebuilding the towers should only take a few weeks. They will probably have lost some of the fans and motors and these might have a longer lead time, and the cabling is probably gone too but that does not take long to fix.
With the lost generation costing them getting on for £100k per hour they will *not* be hanging about. It's less than 20 years old.
These are low level forced air coolers rather than massive convective jobbies that most think of whe "cooling tower" is mentioned. The timber is just cladding and 20-25 years is pretty good outside IMHO. I also suspec t that this cladding won't be a little bit of flimsy shiplap but substanti al lumps of timber, 8 x 1 or bigger...
Didcot B is a fairly new CCGT plant (opened Jul 1997) are you mixing it up with Didcot A which *was* a coal fired station (1968 - 2013)?
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