Posted on 04/28/2011 10:16:33 AM PDT by CedarDave
Aw jeez...even on Free Republic.
Good grief.
Loved the rest of your post, though. Two thumbs up!
The title is mis-leading as TVA is quite vast. It does actually represent a very dire situation for Alabama and Southern TN. High Voltage Towers are built to withstand the worst. Mother Nature proved she exceeded expectations. Have some heart for the 200mph winds endured by the survivors.
I know in this country it is part of the Equipment Operator training program to be able to run the diesels and also synch the generator to the station safety buses. When offsite power comes back on the generator operator has to know how to synch that to the buses now running from the emergency diesels, and then take the diesels offline. There is a fair amount of automation in the process now but the training still requires operators to know how to use a synchroscope and perform the operations manually if needed. Still a good idea to know how to do it.
That’s bad enough, but watch the shot of the ship a few seconds from the end. It suffered the fate I’m talking about: Flipped, rolled over it’s own keel and sunk in a minute.
Now, my point is this: Engineers have to design to what we know of as science at the time. Engineers don’t usually get involved in basic science research. We’re in the business of turning science into products and solutions. As such, we usually have to operate off what scientists tell us are the natural conditions and scientific evidence of what we’re dealing with. In the videos about rogue waves, you hear people repeatedly say “this was finally evidence that allowed ship captains to not be called drunkards.” The scientific community was working off what they understood to be wave theory at the time and were declaring that waves as high as what sea captains were talking about simply were not possible in theory, and then the insurance companies and lawyers, looking for a scapegoat they could sue, would go after the men crewing the ships. It isn’t possible or profitable to blame a wave, right?
So you’re a maritime engineer, responsible for designing ships. Who do you believe? The scientists, telling you that rogue waves can’t happen, or the sea captains telling you of their lost fellow sailors and merchantmen, crushed under a 90 foot wave “out of nowhere?”
Same deal with the tsunami and Fukushima. The scientists were recently pooh-poohing the idea of historical tsunamis that reached so far inland. They knew that tsunamis happened and existed, as evidenced by the sea walls and the barriers around the nuke plants. But NONE of the sea walls on the coasts or in harbors, or the barriers around Fukushima were remotely enough to hold back the sea.
What I’d like people to understand is that there is a vast over-reliance on mathematical modeling right about now. People have constructed very elaborate mathematical models for computers to crunch data without thought or reason to spit out various probabilities and likelihood distributions of various events occurring. When the SHTF, the guys who created the models get off scot-free. No one attacks them. People attack the engineers who used the data from these models to build to what was the known state of knowledge at the time.
This doesn’t happen only in physical sciences and engineering. The Wall Street idiots have created vast models of how the markets are suppose to behave. As we have now seen, those models didn’t work so well either. Google “gaussian copula” to see what I’m talking about.
I’m not talking merely running the diesels. I’m talking making like Farmer Fred and tearing into them to get them running if necessary. The best guess I can make of why the Fukushima diesels failed is fuel contamination. That’s the usual reason why diesels fail after getting water into the area.
Was there no one who could dive in there and get the fuel system cleaned out? I’ve had water and slime in diesel fuel and it has taken me anywhere from 10 minutes to two hours to get a smaller (200HP) engine up and running again. It isn’t rocket science, but if you haven’t any training as a diesel mechanic, I’m guessing that an operator isn’t going to go tearing apart the fuel system and injectors to get it going again. They’re going to keep hammering on the starting system until they’ve exhausted the batteries or compressed air. What’s needed is a guy who is about like a senior chief in a submarine here - a guy with a lot of practical experience, a large vocabulary of curses who knows how to use them to make stuff happen “right now.”
I was referring to the part about the nuclear plant shutdown, and making fun of the few we have on here who see every incident at a nuke plant as the end of the world as we know it.
Sarcasm is just another service I offer.
And I have lived through my share of natural disasters, including the entire region being without power for weeks. I do understand what those people are going through.
Fair Enough. I read some of the comments on earlier threads that tried to tie-in Fukushima to this, but if a Tsunami hits Watts Bar, radiation is the last thing on the list to worry about. If I jumped a little early, I stand corrected.
Oops, Browns Ferry.
It was basically an unprecedented event that would have been difficult or impossible to plan ahead for, given the available data. It did not result from operator error, or design flaws, or incompetence, it was just an act of misadventure resulting from a natural occurrence. In those cases about the best you can do is pick up the pieces and try to cobble things back together as best you can, circumstances allowing.
Same way that diesel exhaust is vented on a submarine - Ventilation system.
Otherwise known as the weakest link. They also had a ventilation system that was supposed to vent hydrogen gas in Fukushima to those big exhaust towers.
Yes, you are right of course. Oh, this technology stuff is just too dang hard. Lets give up and live in a cave.
My first career was as a field computer engineer and I fixed numerous problems with various computer related high tech gear. Even took some service calls on military bases. You have to assume it will all fail, eventually. That is a cogent starting point.
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