On May 22, Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant Unit 1 was restarted after being shut down since 1985 and a massive overhaul effort.

Big yay! TVA now has 6 operating reactors, with a serious examination on completing Watts Bar Unit 2, which was never finished. Then there's the examination of putting in an advanced PWR (I think two units) on the Belefonte site.

On the down side, two days after going critical, a one-drop-per-minute leak was discovered on a hydraulic line. Workers attempted to fix it and a pipe "separated" causing a 600 gallon spill and a SCRAM of the unit. I'm quizzing some of my former coworkers to see if there was an "oops" heard right before the separation.

Well, I guess it would be a shame to let all that concrete go to waste.

You are talking about a spill of hydrulic fluid aren't you? Otherwise I might have to feed my keyboard an iodine tablet.

I donno, I know some of those people and who knows what got routed through a hydraulic line ...

Yeah, it was hydraulic fluid, the line was in the turbine building. All over their nice clean floor too. (Actually, TVA does a great job of keeping its nuclear plants clean. Especially in the Aux Buildings. It almost looks like a showroom rather than a power plant, even the floors get buffered on a regular basis.)

An appropriate environment for 5S.

Always thought Watts Bar was named with the intent of there being an electric power generating station located there one day.

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Well it's fitting as the Watts Bar Dam area is the only place in TVA, and I think the entire US, where there are the three main types of power stations: hydro, fossil, and nuclear. Although the fossil plant ceased operation in 1997.

I know this fellow who's now in Brazil who could supply enough fossil meteorites to get that plant back up and running. The only drawback would be containment and scrubbing, since those meteorites are brimming over with cosmic radiation.

BTW, what's the latest on Bellefonte?

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Donno, I'll have to do some asking. Getting laid off kinda killed my easy source of news.

I found out BFN U1 restarted from a relative asking about the scram.

How long till the reactor comes back online... again?

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Meh, donno. They've got to get the line repaired, maybe by the end of the week. According to one article, they were wanting to get it on the grid by the end of last week. I'd have thought start-up testing would take longer than that.

Ah, the NRC reactor status report says that BFN U1 is at 9% power. They've gotten it fixed. So ramp-up will take today and maybe gen-sync tonight or tomorrow.

Knock on wood, gen-sync is to happen soon.

For those wondering why this matters so much. BFN U1 is a historic event in that it's the first reactor to be brought on-line since Watts Bar Unit 1 in 1997 (which still surprises me that a new reactor came on-line so recently ... relatively).

While it hasn't been getting much press since it's technically a restart and not a new reactor, the nuclear industry has been keeping a very close eye on the restart effort. It's an economical and political litmus on bringing a brand new reactor on-line. If they've managed to complete it without massively overrunning the budget, then it'll be a good omen towards building new units. And the surrounding area has been fairly receptive of it too, so there's a political/social acceptance bonus too that the US populace is becoming more receptive to nuclear power.

you smart people, always spelling and saying things wrong..
it nuke-you-ler..

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I've heard that a South African fossil power-plant had bit of a problem years ago when they tried to bring a new generator onto the national grid. Some hairless ape (i.e. human being) made the switch when the cycle was 180° out-of-phase. The entire generator apparently took off and landed on the opposite bank of the river the station was based on!

(Another power-gen technician I spoke to said that he'd never heard of that story, but had seen generator shafts that broke under similar circumstances. So it may just be urban legend...)

It might matter a lot, but if you go around using jargon like:

I haven't a clue about what you're talking about, and can't understand what it all means anyway. "ramp-up"? There's got to be ways to say those things that non-specialists can understand. I think most people will be able to grasp things like "go critical", but anything beyond that is probably pretty tough without some explanation.

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The popular usage of "going critical" (meaning "exploding" or "meltdown") is incorrect; it just means "reaching critical mass to start an active nuclear reaction". No nuclear reactor can work without "going critical". The dangerous one is "supercritical".

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Heh, sorry I didn't mean to talk above anybody's head. "Ramp-up" might be my own moniker, I'm blanking on what the power increase term is. Gen-sync is shorthand for generator synchronization. It's when they flip the switch that connects the generator to the grid. Which, as Stuart van Onselen pointed out, you have to do at a specific time or bad things happen that typically cost a lot of money to fix.

As for supercritical, you do need the reactor to go supercritical for a short amount of time. Critical is when just enough neutrons are being generated to maintain the current power level. Less than that is subcritical, meaning the core is losing power. So to power up to 100%, the reactor goes into a tightly controlled supercritical state, generating more neutrons than needed. Those extra neutrons cause additional fission to occur, generating even more neutrons which in turn causes even more neutrons to be released. Thus, through a rather impressive juggling act, a reactor is brought to its rated 100% power level and maintained there.

Actually, I'm sorry also; I think my message came across as more critical than I was trying to be. Being a non-scientist type, I come across a lot of jargon that seems difficult to understand. Actually, I also know that some of the members of boards like this are not native English speakers, and sometimes think that a lot of what we write might seem fairly difficult for them.

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All three units on-line!

[ source: NRC Reactor Status | specifically Region 2 ]

Yeech, gonna make outage time at TVA fun. Let's see, 3 PWRs on 18 month cycles and 3 BWRs on 24 month cycles. Due to summer & winter peak demands, refueling outages happen during the spring and fall only. It'll make for a fun time. Kinda glad I'm not there anymore.

It's always good to see a nice power station producing. I might just blog this.

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Alabama is really growing. We did at least get a 3 bil Krupp steel plant.

Well, it's not looking well. BFN U1 is down yet again, this time to work on cracking in the pipes. This one was planned, but five times since May Unit 1 has automatically scrammed (unplanned shutdowns). The NRC is sending an inspector to find out why. Methinks the shortcuts they took are catching up with them.