Monstrous Cat 4 Hurricane Florence Heading To The East Coast

Update Sept 12

This is going to severely test our southern breakaway states. The extremist conservative republicans who hate the federal government and national codes and laws. These guy's road map is minimal taxation, terribly underfund their state government and beg for the feds to bail them out. In other words, everyone else picks up the tab for their crisis.      

NOAA says for a Cat 4 hurricane, the site is going to be inundated by 3 feet water. A cat 3 might not get inundated but it will be a close call.

Should the site now be in a anticipatory site area emergency in preparation for a two plant meltdown. They would absolutely change the nation. 

It will be like Fukushima where the meltdown overwhelms the recovery actions.

Wrightsville Beach might get a 13 feet surge. Multiple tide surges. Cape Fear river. The might regret building those intercoastal canals to the plant? 

The plant is 23 feet above sea level. 

Hmm, Adams Normal search is working. The content search seems to be overloaded. 

Weakened a bit. Still heading for Brunswick. Big swing to south Carolina. Still stalling. Might rake the coast of South Carolina. Vogtle might get a lot of water and lesser winds. The final path is still highly questionable. The weaker side and then the stronger side might slowly go over the plant. Lost of power and no regular communications for a prolonged period of time...total devastation and unprecedented flooding in the surroundings of the plant.      

Is Brunswick designed for 30" of rain and 9 feet of surge?    

Update Sept 11 

There is a really high concentration of nuclear plants in the foot print and precipitation potential of this massive storm. It is like at the casino playing the slot machines. Play one line gives you a minimal playout. Playing 15 lines for the same odds might give you a gigantic playout.    

That is a ridiculously short period of time. It should be 8 to 12 hours. Just check out the Turkey Point hurricane. How hard it was on the employees at the plant and too the families. They were soon short food at the plant and their families couldn't get cash because of the widespread power outage. They brought in cash my helicopters. Many families fought life threating flooding without their men in the house. These guy should get a humongous bonuses for voluntary staying at the plant. This is why they should be in cold shutdown many hours before the hurricane hit. Minimize employees at the plant. Can you imagine having to run around outside the plant to try and prevent serous damage. There is a high fatality potential in this kind of storm.         

"The company is also preparing for potential shutdown of nuclear reactors at least two hours before the arrival of hurricane-force winds. Duke operates 11 reactors at six sites in the Carolinas, including the Brunswick Nuclear Plant located south of Wilmington near the mouth of the Cape Fear River."

No domestic nuclear plants were operating back them. It is going to be very dangerous to keep a nuke plant operating in the vicinity. The grid load drops in the area around a nuclear plant. There is no reason to keep a plant open. They should be shut down. There is going to be unprecedented flooding over a extremely large section of the south and the tip of the north. They should be situationally aware and very cautious.  

What is different in the hurricane, shortly after landfall the storm is supposed to stall and go in circles for days on end. We have a hurricane warning deep into encompassing most of North and South Carolina. There is a lot of nuclear plants in this region.  

By The Associated Press

The last time the midsection of the East Coast stared down a hurricane like this, Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House and Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio were newlyweds.

Hurricane Florence could inflict the hardest hurricane punch the Carolinas have seen in more than 60 years, with rain and wind of more than 130 mph (209 kph). North Carolina has been hit by only one other Category 4 storm since reliable record keeping began in the 1850s. That was Hurricane Hazel in 1954.

On the far side of side of Cape Hatteras, Surry is the next plant North. Right near Virginia Beach. A little north of that is the Chesapeake Bay. The warning cone has already shifted north. A direct hit on the Chesapeake Bay would be ominous.  

Update

Is the dam above Oconee at threat?

Threats 
Summer 
Cataba 
Harris 
Vogtle 
Harris

There are three or four hurricanes lined up behind Florence heading for the USA? 

***Heading to North Carolina Now. Just jumped to cat three to four in about two hours. It's supposed to stall shortly after hitting the coast. Huge rain maker. It been shifting towards the North it seems. If it slides to the far north side of Cape Hatteras a lot more people and plants are going to be involved  

Brunswick is in the bullseye today.  

Hmm, rip a roof off a nuclear power plant (Turkey Point)would surely change our nation -meltdown or no meltdown. Would the incoherence of the Trump administration make the public relations catastrophe worst for the industry?

I don't like the flex safety equipment add-on. They don't have the same standards, quality and testing as safety related equipment on site. We have been having realistic catastrophic drills in ever colors and stripes in the USA. Realistic shooter drills in our schools without notice. The nukes get them all the time. Not with our fake flex system. You know, like the worst accident imaginable and the longest distance from the nuke safety depots. So you would stage the equipment on site and operate all the equipment just like the real accident. Actually pump water with equipment. But we don't test like that in the USA with our weak political system. 

NEI: After the 2001 terrorist attacks, U.S. nuclear energy companies took steps to safeguard plants against a large fire or explosion that potentially could disable vital equipment. Because it was not possible to predict exactly which equipment would be affected, the industry focused on what would be needed to keep the reactor and used fuel storage pool cool if the usual safety systems were not available. Companies purchased portable equipment—such as generators, battery packs, pumps and battery chargers—that could be stored and used to respond, regardless of the location of an explosion, aircraft impact or massive fire.

FLEX expands on this approach with multiple sets of additional portable equipment at each nuclear energy facility to provide backup power and inject cooling water into the reactor and the used fuel storage pool. The backup equipment has preinstalled connection points (“plug and play”), making it reliable at various locations at the facility. 

The industry also established national rapid response centers with the same portable equipment in Phoenix and Memphis, Tennessee that can be dispatched if additional equipment is needed. The Institute of Nuclear Power Operations has upgraded its emergency response center to better facilitate the sharing of equipment and expertise whenever and wherever it is needed, within 24 hours.

Imagine being in a cat 5 hurricane in a nuclear plant and the roof gets ripped off the reactor or turbine building. There would be multiple fires and electrical shorts all over the plant and maybe more than one roof gone. The Diesel Generators gone. The transmission system and our roads down everywhere. The roofs aren't safety related. Do you trust the engineering in the 1960s and 1970s? Do you think the Trump administration will get it early on in the accident?

We could be testing our transmission system any day now. I think our transmission system in NE is only designed for 70 mph winds. 

Japan’s power supply system weak link in times of disaster

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

September 7, 2018 at 16:45 JST

Japan's ultramodern conveniences, its zippy bullet trains, automated ticketing systems and smart homes work just fine, until the power goes out.

The blackout across entire northern island of Hokkaido after a powerful earthquake struck early Thursday showed the weak link in all that technology.

It's a problem shared by most affluent countries, but seems more apparent in this seismically overactive nation, where earthquakes and tsunamis are a constant threat and even the high-tech toilets have electronic flushes.

The magnitude 6.7 quake on Hokkaido's southern coast knocked out power to nearly all 3 million households on the island, forcing essential services such as hospitals and traffic lights to use generators or other backups. Damage to some generators was likely to delay the full restoration of power for more than a week, officials said.

On Friday, with power restored to about half of all Hokkaido households, Industry Minister Hiroshige Seko urged residents to conserve electricity.

"Unplug appliances. Families should try to all stay in one room," he said. "That can help us more quickly restore power in more places."

The vulnerability of the electric grid was driven home most painfully in 2011 by a massive earthquake and tsunami on the northeastern coast of the main island of Honshu, and subsequent meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. Shutdowns of reactors for safety checks put a chunk of Japan's power generating capacity out of commission--straining supplies in this resource scarce nation.

Some 3 million households on Hokkaido, whose power supplies generally are only based on the island, were without electricity for nearly a whole day after the quake. After a long, dark night a large share of the lights were back on early Friday in the prefectural capital of Sapporo, a city of 1.9 million.

Without power, most tap water systems didn't work. Traffic and street lights were dark and cellphones ran out of power. Some landlines were also silenced, though public phones were working--for free, carrier NTT said.

Hokkaido Electric Power Co., or HEPCO, said the large-capacity Tomato Atsuma power plant--source of most power to the region and located relatively close to the quake's epicenter--will take about a week to restart. As a stopgap, the company restarted three other plants with less generating capacity and switched on dozens of small hydroelectric plants.

Officials at METI, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, which is in charge, told reporters the utility lacked a contingency plan for the failure of all three of Tomato Atsuma's generators--echoing the lack of emergency planning that caused massive problems at the Fukushima plant. HEPCO had only anticipated the possible loss of up to a third of peak power demand, or up to 1.3 million kilowatts, they said.

Likely mindful of complaints over the handling of the aftermath of the 2011 disaster by Tokyo Electric Power Corp., operator of the Fukushima plant, the industry minister, Hiroshige Seko, ordered HEPCO to be sure to provide quick and thorough updates.

Japan's nuclear regulator said that external power was restored at Tomari, Hokkaido's only nuclear power plant, after it temporarily switched Thursday to backup generators to power cooling systems for spent fuel from its three reactors.

The Nuclear Regulation Authority said there was no abnormality at the plant, which has been idled since 2012 for routine safety checks, its reactors emptied of fuel.

Hokkaido Electric says the island's average peak demand is about 3.8 million kilowatts. By drawing on secondary generators and possibly importing power from elsewhere in Japan, the utility said it could provide about 2.9 million kilowatts of power even if Tomato Atsuma remained offline.

Like many tough residents used to Hokkaido's long, harsh winters, Norio Oikawa was looking on the bright side. His home in Sapporo had no power by early Friday, and he was rationing the water he managed to store in his bathtub before his taps went dry.

Thankfully, basic public facilities were at hand--no fancy electronics involved.

"There is a park nearby, with a toilet and running water. So, that's a great help," he said.