Alabama's Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant Forced into Emergency Shutdown After Storms Knock Out TVA Power Lines

Alabama’s Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant Forced into Emergency Shutdown After Storms Knock Out TVA Power Lines

The Lamb Slain

April 28, 2011

Storms Shut Down Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant

Dozens of tornadoes spawned by a powerful storm system wiped out neighborhoods across a wide swath of the South, killing at least 209 people in the deadliest outbreak in nearly 40 years, and officials said Thursday they expected the death toll to rise. “Including yesterday’s storm, there have been a whopping 800 reports of tornadoes in April, easily surpassing April 2003′s all-time record of 543 twisters. We rounded up videos of some of this month’s twisters here. And check out the New York Times’ map of where tornadoes hit here” [The Lookout, Watch Tuscaloosa’s terrifying tornado, April 28, 2011].

“The Browns Ferry nuclear power plant about 30 miles west of Huntsville lost offsite power. The Tennessee Valley Authority-owned plant had to use seven diesel generators to power the plant’s three units. The safety systems operated as needed, and the emergency event was classified as the lowest of four levels, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said” [Dozens of tornadoes kill 209 in 6 Southern states, Associated Press, April 28, 2011].

April 28, 2011

Russ’ Place – All 3 Browns Ferry units (identical to Fukushima’s) are knocked off-line. I recently wrote about my on-site experience with the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant. This plant is virtually a twin of Japan’s Fukushima power plant. Both use the General Electric Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) and were built between 1965 and 1974.

Yesterday, giant storms roared through the Birmingham, Alabama area and knocked out high voltage power lines that feed the Browns Ferry plant. This triggered shutdowns of all 3 reactors and probably start-up of the plant’s Diesel generators, to cool the reactors’ cores.

In a press release last night, TVA stated:

“The three units at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant in northern Alabama automatically shutdown as a result of transmission line damage from the storm. The plant is safely shutdown and is using a combination of offsite transmission lines and on-site diesel generators to provide power to the plant. At 4:36 p.m. (central time) Browns Ferry declared an “Unusual Event,” due to the automatic shutdown of the plant. An Unusual Event is the lowest level of emergency at a U.S. nuclear plant. I’d like to emphasize that the nuclear plant is performing as designed… and all systems are operating safely.“

Storms Knock Out TVA Nuclear Units, Power Lines

April 27, 2011

Reuters – Severe storms and tornadoes moving through the Southeast dealt a severe blow to the Tennessee Valley Authority on Wednesday, causing three nuclear reactors in Alabama to shut and knocking out 11 high-voltage power lines, the utility and regulators said.

All three units at TVA’s 3,274-megawatt Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama tripped about 5:30 EDT (2230 GMT) after losing outside power to the plant, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Agency said.

A TVA spokeswoman said the plant’s output had reduced power earlier due to transmission line damage from a line of severe storms that spawned a number of tornadoes as it moved through Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky and Tennessee. The NRC spokesman said early information indicated the units shut normally and the plant’s diesel generators started up to supply power for the plant’s safety system.

The government-owned corporation said crews were working to restore service, but more severe weather was forecast, TVA said in a release.

Most of the damage so far has occurred in the western part of TVA’s service territory in Mississippi, Alabama and western Tennessee and Kentucky.

Cullman Electric Cooperative in Cullman, Alabama, is the only power company directly affected by TVA’s transmission outage, TVA said in a statement.

Rainfall amounts between four and seven inches have fallen since Tuesday in the area. Eight of the nine dams on the Tennessee River were generating at full power to move water through the river system to help control flooding, TVA said.

Details of the transmission outages and co-op power outages were immediately available.

TVA Loses All Power Transmission Lines in Alabama and Mississippi, Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant Forced into Emergency Shutdown

April 28, 2011

Chattanooga Times Free Press – Wednesday’s storms took out all of TVA’s electric power transmission lines in Mississippi and North Alabama, and forced Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant unto diesel backup power and into emergency and automatic cold shutdown.

Bill McCollum, the chief operating officer of Tennessee Valley Authority, said it may be weeks before power can be restored to all of the 300,000 customers whose power is supplied by the federal utility.

“With the level of damage we have, it will be — we hope it will be days until we get most of the customers back on, but it will be weeks before we’ve fully repaired all of the damage,” he said.

McCollum said the reactors, now being cooled by backup diesel power, are safe.

He said the spent fuel pools also are being cooled by backup diesel power and are safe.

The transmission lines are the monster power lines that carry electricity from TVA power plants to power distributors such as EPB and Huntsville Utilities.

Now those utilities, along with a number of large industries that are wired directly to TVA transmission lines, will not have power until the lines are repaired, McCollum said.

The loss of those transmission lines also caused Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant to lose power.

When the plant generates power, it uses some of that power and the excess is sent out on the transmission lines. When those transmission lines can’t take power, it causes the reactors to trip, according to TVA officials.

Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant

NuclearTourist.com – Tennessee Valley Authority’s 3 unit Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant is located on the Tennessee River at Athens, Alabama approximately 30 minutes from Huntsville. Each unit is an 1100 MWe General Electric Boiling Water Reactor. Browns Ferry was TVA’s first nuclear plant and the first in the world rated at more than 1000 MWe. Construction of Browns Ferry began in 1967. Commercial operation for each unit occurred: Unit 1 – 1974 ; Unit 2 – 1975; Unit 3 – 1977.

In 1985, the facility was shutdown during a review of TVA’s nuclear power program. Units 2 and 3 are currently operational. Unit 1 was shutdown after a fire in the 1970′s. The unit is now in the process of being upgraded so that it can be returned to service.

Courtesy TVA

In the photo, the substation is on the left side of the plant. The tall stack is used to exhaust gases from the offgas system, which controls the discharges from the plant’s air ejector system. The mechanical draft cooling towers in the foreground can be used to reduce the thermal discharge to the river by transferring some of the heat to the air.

The following illustrate the Browns Ferry plant (courtesy TVA):

• Browns Ferry at night (20K)
• Three plant cooling cycles with explanation (193K)
• Close-up view of Browns Ferry (162K)
• Emergency planning zones around the plant (157K)
• Boiling Water Reactor building layout graphic (106K) Courtesy GE
• Turbine deck at Browns Ferry (20K)
• Substation (19K)

TVA also operates the 2-unit Sequoyah PWR plant at Soddy-Daisy near Chattanooga, Tennessee and the Watts Bar PWR facility. Watts Bar is the most recently completed nuclear reactor in the United States. Click the link for other inside and outside photos of BWR plants.

See the US plant address, plants, and map pages for more information.

Flashback: Browns Ferry Nuclear Facility Operates at Half Power Because of River Temperature

August 23, 2010

Chattanooga Times Free Press – The Tennessee Valley Authority has lost nearly $50 million in power generation from its biggest nuclear plant because the Tennessee River in Alabama is too hot. Unless the summer cools down, TVA could lose millions of dollars more, pushing up fuel costs and consumer electric bills even after seven consecutive monthly increases. The Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant near Athens, Ala., has operated at only about half power for most of the past month and could remain at reduced power through September, TVA officials said. The three-reactor plant — TVA’s biggest nuclear facility — has been the hardest hit of any of the nation’s 104 nuclear plants by thermal concerns over river water, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute and TVA.

“All the radiant heat gets in the river when you have a summer as hot as this has been,” TVA President Tom Kilgore said.

Today is expected to be the 40th day since July 8 that TVA has reduced power production at Browns Ferry because of hot water in the river. Last week, TVA violated its permit with the Alabama Department of Environmental Management when the river temperature topped 90 degrees. The cutback means TVA is losing 1,500 megawatts of power generation just when it’s needed most. For each day of 50 percent power at Browns Ferry, the utility spends more than $1 million extra to pay for replacement power, officials said. The extra cost is added to ratepayer bills in the monthly fuel cost adjustment, which is up by more than 25 percent since March. When the Tennessee River flows into the Guntersville Reservoir around Browns Ferry, the river widens, slows and gets shallower. TVA uses mechanical draft cooling towers to help pull heat out of the cooling water. Most U.S. nuclear plants are on an ocean or one of the Great Lakes or have closed-loop cooling systems that don’t rely as much upon water from nearby rivers or lakes.

TVA’s Watts Bar Nuclear Plant in Spring City, Tenn., has a closed-loop system. The Sequoyah plant near Soddy-Daisy uses less river water than Browns Ferry and has two cooling towers. TVA also plans a closed-loop system with twin cooling towers at the Bellefonte plant planned in Hollywood, Ala. Two coal-fired TVA plants — Cumberland, west of Nashville, and Colbert, near Muscle Shoals, Ala. — also are thermal-limited and have had to cut production this summer, although not as much as Browns Ferry. But during a public hearing before the TVA board last week, anti-nuclear activist Margaret Klein, of Knoxville, said nuclear plants are bound to encounter more thermal problems on the Tennessee River as global warming raises river temperatures.

“This is a serious problem and will only get worse if we add more reactors,” she said.

Ashok Bhatnagar, a TVA senior vice president, said the utility considered adding more cooling towers or a closed-loop cooling system when Browns Ferry was refurbished in the 1990s. At the time, TVA estimated that the chance of exceeding the 90-degree temperature limit in the Tennessee River was very rare, he said. Browns Ferry did get some added cooling capacity in the last decade but still has had to cut production in two of the last five years because of water temperatures. The utility now is looking at new options to cool Browns Ferry without heating the river.

“Our study just got started, and there are multiple options,” Bhatnagar said. “They really are looking at different ways we can address this issue.”

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