Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Kremlin on Frenchman's Bay

One month ago tomorrow, Pickering Unit 7 was shut down by an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny 'ground fault'. No, that doesn't sound serious, does it? Not something to shut a reactor for a whole month!

I've constantly searched the news for news, but to no avail. How long will it be shut down? When will our sleepy newspapers go for this story? All we are getting is how wonderful it will be to build a new nuclear plant.

Thank goodness all my friends at the old company have clammed up on this. I don't have a clue as to the real story. Perhaps they aren't even telling anyone internally?

Now I will assume the worse: The shutdown was caused by a transformer fault induced by the settling and sinking foundation. They are so afraid of this, that they won't start up Unit 8, which has an even worse foundation. Unit 6 is next.

"When people clam up for their own advantage, I just happily assume the worst." I always did this inside the company, which drove everybody nuts, but I was mostly right. Of course, all the weasels hated me, which made me so happy to leave the second my time was up!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It was a human error and procedural non-compliance. Someone left some work protection grounding straps on when they reconnected the transformer to the grid. Massive voltage drop and near tripping of the grid. Not good but not geological either.

Harold Asmis said...

Yeah! Straight shooting! I just assume the worst, but this sounds almost as bad as a settlement-related short. Maybe the transformer is blown just as bad? At least there wasn't a fire, thank god!