Torness down due to green 'seaweed'

[The Natural Philosopher]

Poor old EDF, no sooner is Dungeness back up than its seaweed in the condensers at Torness.

Last time it was Heysham..

[Gib Bogle]

Soon it will be jellyfish.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Or mutant ninja turtles.

[Gib Bogle]

You apparently think I'm making a joke. I am not.

[newshound]

Indeed. It's not an uncommon problem a few days after heavy weather, this "untethers" seaweed which then drifts around in a compact mass until it blocks the rotating "drum screens" of the cooling water intakes. Something has gone wrong if it gets as far as the condensers! Although these do get blocked gradually by mussels and other such things. Also used to be a regular problem at Dounreay.

ISTR that some stations also get shut down by large shoals of sprats. Retrieving salmon, rays, sea bass etc. from drum screens is one of the "perks" of an otherwise fairly unpleasant job.

[Gefreiter Krueger]

We should be thankful the thing didn't blow up.

[Apprentice 65]

Soon it will be jellyfish?

A s I live some 10 Miles South of this establishment, I have seen jellyfish, washed up on the beech in front of my home about two months ago,

None since then?

Question?

Why did the Sea water "filters" not spot this stuff and more importantly stop its entry into a critical system ? ?

[Tim+]

How does an inanimate filter "spot" things? The big problem occurs when they are quite simply overwhelmed by the amount of jellyfish that can occur sporadically.

Tim

[Adam Aglionby]

As a filter, guess there really doing there job, now that Cockenzie has gone cold guess Torness will attract things looking for warmed water on the outlets.

As long as keep the Tornados flying a reasonagle distance fron the thing, last one they fished out the sea looked closse enough for discomfort.

[newshound]

Condensing the steam from a power station running at full power takes a

*lot* of water. Which is why it had to shut down. The decay heat removal which "got" Fukushima requires very much less, and the main issue there was not so much the loss of water supplies but rather that the tsunami took out offsite power plus *all* of their backup power systems apart from the batteries (which did the job fine for the few hours which they lasted).

[Gefreiter Krueger]

I see.

Just in case you were wondering, I'm not against nuclear power. In fact I chose the nuclear tariff with EDF which is cheaper.

[newshound]

In fact the rotating drum screens have a flushing system which removes normal amounts of debris, but as Tim says they can get overwhelmed by a huge mass.

[newshound]

No problem, there's just too much over-simplified analysis in the media.

Like the idea that "fast reactors" and "thorium systems" consume their own waste, and are therefore far preferable to the current uranium (and MOX) systems.

[newshound]

I remember when the RAF used to use Magnox power stations for dummy "bombing runs". But they did stop as soon as it was pointed out to them that the engine spool from a fast jet was quite capable of taking out a top gas duct which, while not quite the worst design basis fault, was still fairly challenging.

[The Natural Philosopher]

As with all things there is a grain of truth in it.

Its just not as simple as that.

[Gefreiter Krueger]

Do they not?

[dennis]

The real thing that got Fukeshima is that they didn't fly in the emergency generators they had 20 miles away because nobody wanted to commit themselves to saying do it. If they had done so there would have been no problem at all.

[Gefreiter Krueger]

I do not understand "nobody wanted to commit themselves to saying do it" - do you mean people were afraid to go near the plant? I hope whoever didn't go gets into shit.

[newshound]

No. All fission reactors can be used to consume plutonium which is

*sometimes* defined as waste, although I would not use that term. Plutonium from decommissioned Soviet weapons is now generating power in US civil nuclear power plants. The real waste is the fission products. To a good approximation, the amount of fission products is proportional to the amount of energy generated irrespective of the reactor type. It follows from this.

You can, potentially, transmute "inconvenient" fission products into less troublesome isotopes either with a reactor or an accelerator. But only at a substantial cost (even more than solar or windmills).

[Gefreiter Krueger]