Sunday, March 31, 2013

A Fatal Rigging Accident at ANO1

Two very sad things happened today.

1) A fatal accident at ANO1 today. ANO1 is on a refueling outage. They were moving a generator stator out of the turbine building. It fell, killing one person and injuring others.  I am sure there will be more news later.  Here's the Entergy press release.  In terms of industrial accidents, nuclear energy is one of the safest technologies around.  That generic fact is very little comfort when someone dies.  My thoughts and prayers are with the families.

2) This just in, and no links on it yet.  Ted Rockwell, nuclear pioneer and author of the book, The Rickover Effect, passed away today. I will update this post when I know more.

In other news, Will Davis assembled a fine Carnival of Nuclear Energy Bloggers #150 and posted it this morning.  Reading the Carnival might be a small, upbeat partial-antidote to this day of sad news.  (I wasn't even sure I should post this link, but Davis did a lot of work, and I hope people will read it.)


5 comments:

jimwg said...

My heart and sympathies go out to the families concerned. Unfortunately, this non-nuclear accident is already making the rounds of (anti Indian Point) NYC-metro TV stations as a heart-stopping "nuclear plant accident", with very brief situation mention that a workman was "crushed" or "was struck" by a piece of equipment, leaving it to the jittery public's imagination as to what; i.e.. in a nuclear plant, what else could be the well-known dangerous cause of a "nuclear plant accident" than the reactor? It doesn't help when the facility shuts down a perfectly running unit as a "safety procedure" -- but the media asks/baits a wondering public, would a gas or oil or coal facility shut down a running unit from a "totally uninvolved" incident as this? Most all likely not. Yes, it might be NRC rules, but is it really a logical and sensible rule in light that the seeming illogical purpose of it (as pushed by antis) could only generate more puzzlement and FUD and a harder hill for nuclear acceptance to climb, especially with no nuclear advocacy voices clearly explaining the situation in the media or YouTube.

James Greenidge
Queens NY

Mike Mulligan said...

"At this time, the full extent of structural damage on Unit 1 is not known. There was one known fatality and 4 known serious injuries to workers."

Yea, the only question left, is how many floors did the stator crash though.

Tom Clegg said...

Meredth I hate to get off of the subject but there was an indecent that happened over at Fukusima about 2 weeks ago. A rat got electrocuted in a cubical that supplied power to the spent fuel pool in one of their fuel pools. I found this out by reading it in an newspaper articular in my local newspaper. Of course they have the anti nuke spin on it. What makes it worse as usual the nuclear industry does NOT come out with anything to help the supporters defend and tell the truth about what happened. Meredth what ever you can find out to help me would be appreciated.

Meredith Angwin said...

Thank you all for your comments!

James, I agree and I wish there had been more information. The rumors I hear say the second unit shut down as an automatic scram when the stator shook the building, which was read by the sensors as an earthquake.

Mike. Perhaps you would like to read Nuke Roadie's post about, well, about compassion. Fun to bash an accident where someone died? Only question is how much damage was done?
http://nukeroadie-nuclearlife.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-sad-end-of-human-empathy.html

Tom. I find that the best references about the fuel pools are recent posts from Les Corrice at Hiroshima Syndrome. I encourage you to read his posts from March 19 and March 21:
http://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/fukushima-commentary.html

Frankly, his blog is not well arranged for finding things, but I hope my link will get you close to the two posts. Corrice also provided a link to this TEPCO handout about the power supply glitch.

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/fukushima-np/handouts/2013/images/handouts_130322_03-e.pdf

Basically, one pool had a temperature rise of 5 degree C (from 25 to 30) before cooling was restored. If you have more questions, contact Corrice. There's a contact form on the blog. http://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/contact.html

Mike Mulligan said...

Oops, we dropped 400 tons...

That is like dropping 10 fully loaded tractor trailers, but in a extremely concentrated volume.

Human compassion means, not letting the preventable event to occur. Entergy was in total control of this facility and they allowed it to happen...

And the employees didn't have the guts to stop Entergy from killing and injuring their buddies!