No Power to the People
From the Miami Herald: Alvarez: No ‘criminal activity’ in power failure
Power outages cascaded through much of South Florida and many other parts of Florida Tuesday, causing major disruptions for millions of people around the region and the state.
…Both nuclear reactors at FPL’s Turkey Point’s tripped off unexpectedly Tuesday — taking a plant that supplies power to more than 450,000 homes almost instantly off-line — though it wasn’t immediately clear what triggered the automatic shutdowns.
“We have reports that the nuclear unit scrammed [experienced unexpected shut downs], but we do not why at this point,” said Ken Clark, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s regional office in Atlanta.
Clark said the NRC, which was discussing the incident with its inspectors on site, had not yet determined whether the Turkey Point shutdown caused the massive outage or was the consequence of a problem elsewhere in FPL’s production or transmission system.
There may have been a problem at Turkey Point, or there may have been a problem elsewhere that put a surge on the system and caused the reactors to shut down for protection. The electrical grid is in rotten shape even with all of the “pruning” and replacement that was done as a result of the 2005 hurricane season.
Local renewable energy sources are a better choice than large, centralized systems. An obscene amount of energy is wasted just pushing the electricity through the grid.
Update: It’s probably Castro’s fault. Everything that goes wrong in South Florida is Castro’s fault.
4 comments
I blame Ralph Nader.
Hmm, the outage does include Palm Beach county, home of hanging chads, so that certainly is a valid alternative theory.
Ya! It’s all Raul’s fault! It’s what he gets for taking over for Fidel.
Oh, glad you’re okay.
It was in the other Florida, the one in the Eastern Time Zone that is at the mercy of Florida Power and Light. Up here we have the Southern Companies subsidiary, Gulf Power, and lines running East and West, as well as North. We also have large military bases that don’t appreciate being without power.