Gas Fired Power Plant Exploded (so that’s what that was!)
February 7th, 2010
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Interestingly I was an observer to a disaster today without even knowing it.
My parents are out of town for a while and because I live quite near to them, I am staying at their home to take care of the dogs and keep down the fort. Their home is in Guilford CT, which is about 15 miles, as the crow flies, from Middletown CT. That’s slightly closer than where I’d otherwise be. A bit before noon, I felt and heard what I would describe as “surge” of wind or vibrations. My parents house is fairly large and when a gust of wind hits it broadside, you can hear and feel the windows and walls rattle. This event was a bit like that, but far more acute. While wind gusts last a few seconds, this was more like a surge of pressure that lasted under a second. It shook the house more than normal, to the point where it felt a bit like it might have been a seismic event, transmitted through the ground.
It was noteworthy enough to make me go to the window and look outside to see if there was something going on, like maybe a big truck or something else that could account for this weird sudden surge of pressure and vibration. The event was not like a “BOOM” but perhaps a bit like a “thud,” although not an easily heard sound. It may have been infrasonic – the kind of sound that you don’t hear directly but which you can feel in your chest and which you can hear indirectly due to the reverberations it causes.
It’s hard to describe the event, but the words “thud,” “woosh” and “surge” are the best I can come up with.
In any case, I went back to what I was doing, which was writing the previous post (the one about diamonds).
Turns out a natural gas power plant blew up and killed at least five people!!!
It seems a bit ironic that it’s called the “Clean Energy Plant” or at least it was, before much of it was blown up. It’s far too early to tell exactly what happened here, but it’s worth noting that the event is not entirely unique. Some enormous explosions have occurred at natural gas fired power plants over the years, as well as at natural gas pumping stations, storage depots and other facilities that support them. A massive natural gas explosion in New Jersey left hundreds homeless in 1994 and deadly natural gas explosions have occurred in recent years in Russia, Texas, Virgina, Alaska, several parts of Canada, China, India and numerous other places. This includes explosions at the power plant location, as was the case in St. Petersburg Russia.
I have to admit that while I’m acutely aware of the potential for disaster that lurks wherever you find massive amounts of flammable gas, this reminder hit especially close to home. In addition to living near a natural gas power plant, I also live about 20 miles from a nuclear plant. The nuclear plant, unlike the gas plant, has never killed anyone or had a major incident that effected the safety or property of those who live in the area. This shouldn’t be surprising, however, because while the American natural gas industry’s safety record is fairly descent, it’s far from spotless, unlike the nuclear energy industry which has never had even a single solitary incident in it’s history that endangered the local community or caused loss of life to citizens in the area.
During its history of roughly five decades, there have been a handful of worker fatalities in the US nuclear industry. Nearly all of them have been from common workplace accidents found in all industries, such as falling off of a ladder or catwalk. There has never been a death of a worker at a US nuclear power plant due to reactor malfunction or a nuclear accident. There has been only one death attributable to a “nuclear” accident of any kind – a worker died as the result of a criticality accident in 1964 at the Woods River Junction reprocessing plant when he improperly mixed a solution of uranium and plutonium, resulting in unexpected critical. Of course, the US is not alone in this. With the exception of the former Soviet Union, most other countries with a nuclear industry have a spotless record and the rest have a nearly spotless one.
Sadly, in a single event, the natural gas industry has killed five times that many. So which one is the dangerous one again?
This entry was posted on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Announcements, Bad Science, Enviornment, Events, Good Science, History, Misc, Nuclear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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February 7th, 2010 at 9:54 pm
Tell me how many did Conn. Yankee, the nuclear power plant in Haddam’s Neck, kill when it blew up, forcing it to close?
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February 7th, 2010 at 9:55 pm
*
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February 7th, 2010 at 10:36 pm
DV82XL said:
Uh, Connecticut Yankee didn’t kill anyone. It was shut down in 1996 after thirty years of service. I believe the primary reason it was shut down was that it was coming up for license renewal and that would have cost quite a bit, especially given the slew of lawsuits and political opposition that comes with that. The plant was only 500 MW, with a single boiling water reactor. I believe that they simply decided that the cash flow from a 500 MW unit was not worth the cost – also, it was pretty much unmodified from when it was built and due for a major overhaul. Again, not necessarily a good return on a 500 MW single-unit.
The other thing that hit it was at the time they were going through “deregulation” which actually meant “re-regulation” because the power market is still heavily regulated but differently. For example, there’s a big limit to what the local utility can have a stake in for generating capacity. On top of that, Connecticut Light and Power didn’t have much liquidity at the time and wasn’t really in a position to get financing.
Thus the shut down was a combination of political and economic factors.
Oh, Conn. Yankee is now a “green field” – I mean, it’s actually green. They jackhammer the foundations out and now all that is there is a field, some woods and a road and parking lot, which is used primarily by those who use the area for fishing. I believe this is the only former power plant in the state that qualifies as a “Green field.” The only thing left from the power plant is a small fenced in area off to the side of the site which has concrete casks containing the spent fuel.
There’s a couple of shut down power plants that are still standing – for more than a decade. Half fallen-down but still the hulk is there. Then there’s a power plant torn down in the 1970’s in Bridgeport. It’s now a big concrete slab with grass growing out between the remains of coal bins and foundations.
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February 7th, 2010 at 11:35 pm
drbuzz0 said:
I was being facetious, of course. I thought the plant was a 600MWe unit. It was also my understanding that it was shut for much the same BS that’s facing Vt. Yankee – over zealous regulators, and the locals whipped into a frenzy by antinuclear agitators.
Point is if the gas plant that went up had been a nuclear plant accident that killed five people, from a major steam rupture on the secondary loop, New England would be under full evacuation at this very moment.
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February 7th, 2010 at 11:47 pm
DV82XL said:
Something like that. I think the rating was like 540 or something. Basically it wasn’t big enough to fight for. There were so many legal and regulatory hurdles combined with the fact that many of the components were due for refitting anyway.
Really, it was an issue of CL&P considering it a war not worth fighting, especially given their finances at the time. They didn’t have the capital to put down on it. One of the big strategies is to throw as much difficulty and expense at the plant owner and try to get them to call uncle. In this case, they did.
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February 8th, 2010 at 12:54 am
Sad to see this kind of thing happen in any case where innocent lives are lost, but all I can say is perhaps it will make some start to think a little harder about all the PR that natural gas interests have been feeding everyone about how safe, clean and reliable it is.
The bare fact of the batter is when you deal with something explosive, every once in a while it will explode. Natural gas, when mixed with air, is very explosive. When you get a big enough cloud of fuel-air mix in an area, it doesn’t really matter what you do to try to keep it from igniting. If it’s big enough and lingers long enough, it’ll find a spark even if it’s just static.
Uranium is non-explosive. (at least low enriched) so it won’t ever blow up on you. worst case is maybe a steam explosion, but that’s still managable with the containment and everything.
Any fuel mixed well enough with air becomes a bomb. Coal power plants have even been known to explode. When the coal hoppers get very low and there’s a lot of crushed coal, there can be a lot of dust kicked up and coal dust in air can produce a surprisingly powerful explosion.
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February 8th, 2010 at 1:06 am
That is terrible to hear. Is there a video of the explosion? I found here looking for that but I can’t find any. Everyone seems to have cell phone cameras and digital cameras now so I am surprised no amateur video is up yet unless you know of one?
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February 8th, 2010 at 3:35 am
I was going to blog about this, but thought I would wait a bit. Jumping with joy about the deaths of 5 people because it proves your point is rather tasteless. Gr**npeace do it all the time and it’s sick then.
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February 8th, 2010 at 3:36 am
Um… Three Mile Island?
It might not have caused any deaths directly attributable to the incident, but you can’t say that it didn’t endanger the local community to some extent.
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February 8th, 2010 at 4:09 am
Brian-M said:
No TMI did not endanger the local community. The containment worked as it was supposed to to keep everyone safe. Less radioactive material was released from that incident, than a typical coal-burning plant vomits into the environment in 24 hours, every single day it operates.
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February 8th, 2010 at 5:26 am
I suggest you recheck that.
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February 8th, 2010 at 7:45 am
If a reactor suffered from a major leak on the secondary loop, or even the primary one, they could simply let go down the control rods and the core would just cool down. Western reactors can undergo quite a lot of critical failures before becoming dangerous.
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February 8th, 2010 at 10:01 am
Entirely agree with what Josh said. Too soon to use the deaths of these people to score points.
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February 8th, 2010 at 10:06 am
Josh said:
I’m not trying to score points on the deaths. They’re tragic and I didn’t see any reason to delay posting this especially given that I actually witnessed this. Maybe I should have toned down the comparison, but given the nature of this site, the comparison seems rather obvious.
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February 8th, 2010 at 10:10 am
Josh said:
Like the antinuclear bloggers would have shown much more respect if a NPP had kiled people, bececause that’s just the way they are.
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February 8th, 2010 at 11:43 am
Josh said:
Well, when it comes to deaths from nuclear power, they don’t generally get the opportunity to jump for joy about it.
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February 8th, 2010 at 12:25 pm
I don’t know if we can count the Woods River incident as part of the “nuclear industry” since it did not happen at a nuclear power facility. From my research, I counted a total of 7 (3 lab accidents, 3 experimental reactor, and Woods River) criticality accident fatalities in the US since 1945. It seems all of these incidents were avoidable had better precautions and safety procedures been followed. Still all other deaths at nuclear facilities have been non-nuclear related as you state – falls, electrocutions.
I see Josh’s point about the taste factor on this particular incident, but unfortunately the incidents with fossil fuels are all to regular. This particular incident is getting 3rd page type coverage. If 5 workers were killed at a nuclear plant, it would be front page news with 60 Minutes reports and the whole nine yards.
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February 8th, 2010 at 3:07 pm
Steve – thank you for the local reporting. I do not at all see this post in the same light as what we would expect from activists fighting against other forms of power production.
It is important to remind people that natural gas is a flammable material that deserves care and respect, especially since it is piped directly into homes, office buildings and apartments. It is reasonably safe and clean, but it is not something that should be carelessly employed.
My thoughts and prayers are with the families of not only the 5 people who were killed, but the dozens who were injured. I hope that the injured recover, but I fear that we have not heard the final death toll yet. As is the case with excessive exposure to ionizing radiation, excessive exposure to thermal radiation can result in injuries that require a long and painful recovery that is not always successful.
I remember trying to keep up with the long term effects of the natural gas pipeline rupture and explosion that occurred near Carlsbad NM on August 19, 2000. (http://www.ntsb.gov/publictn/2003/PAR0301.pdf) Though there were six initial fatalities, by the time it was over the total was 12. That was a 100% fatality rate among the people exposed. The last one died about 30-40 days after the accident due to complications associated with the burns received. As is the case with many natural gas accidents, the only accident updates came from local press sources.
Steve – perhaps since you are nearly “on the scene” you will be able to keep us up to date as the investigation continues.
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February 8th, 2010 at 3:39 pm
Rod Adams said:
Yeah, I’m trying to find out as much as I can about things. As it stands now, there don’t seem to be any videos of the actual explosion. What I can gather is that it was basically a single explosion. Sometimes “explosion” is used to mean what is really more of a raging fire. This appears to be a single boom, perhaps with some flames afterward, but basically a single explosion event.
I’ve seen a lot of photos and heard from friends in the area on this. I think there is starting to be a picture of what happened. Let me stress that this is early, sketchy details and involves some educated speculation:
The building is a very large metal structure. Something like a tall warehouse, steel frame and thin corrugated metal over the frame to form the walls. Industrial light metal construction kind of thing.
It appears that the main portion of the building was blown out. The frame is mostly there but the walls and roof are basically blown outward.
It appears that somehow a very large quantity of gas entered the sturcture. They were supposedly purging some of the gas lines at the time. It may have been the wrong valve was opened or something, but it appears that, for whatever reason, gas was discharged into the structure at a rate faster than it would have vented out. Of course, it will mix with the air. Somewhere in the mixture there’s the right fuel/air mix and something touched it off.
If I were to wager a bet, I’d say we probably will not know what touched it off. I also don’t think it really matters. Fill an industrial building like that with gas and it will find a source of ignition. Even the gas leak itself can generate static electricity as the gas rushes out.
As we all know, getting fuel a fuel air mixture in a confined space makes for a powerful explosive
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February 8th, 2010 at 3:41 pm
I will be going by the area a bit later today. I don’t mean to be a gawker, but if I can gain any info or see anythign meaningful I’ll let everyone know.
If anything is noteworthy, I’ll broadcast it on my qik account live. http://www.qik.com/drbuzz0
If you’re interested keep an eye on my twitter for a notification of the live broadcast
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February 8th, 2010 at 4:28 pm
What I find interesting, is that anti-nuclear forces talk all the time about the risk of terrorist risks of attacks on nuclear power plants and not about the risks of attacks on natural gas storage facilities and pipelines.
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February 8th, 2010 at 6:21 pm
Okay, so I swung by the area as I was headed that way anyway. You can’t really get very close. They have it all cordoned off and there’s no place to get a good view. One of the places near the access road is actually a juvenile detention center, so they don’t like people hanging around there anyway.
The best I could do was seeing the area around the plant from a ridge along the valley. The plant is located on a bend in the Connecticut river, set back a little bit. The river has carved out a valley so it was hard to get a direct view.
What I could see that was astonishing was the trees in the valley near the area were damaged, many of them had been knocked down near the site, and then as you got further away the trees were generally standing but they had a wind-swept kind of look to them, they were leaning to the side with the branches all pushed to the wayward side of the tree.
I’ve never seen anything like it before except in films and photos. It looks very much like what I’ve seen from nuclear tests or something like the Tunguska incident where the trees are all fallen or lean in a radial pattern pointing to the center of the blast.
This is indicative of extreme overpressure. There is reported damage to homes some distance from the blast, including broken windows and things like that.
Last report was over one hundred injuries. Not too surprising, unfortunately. That kind of a pressure wave is capable of causing some pretty severe injuries. It can rupture ear drums and cause trauma to the lungs and occasionally sinuses.
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February 8th, 2010 at 9:46 pm
The tragedy occurred yesterday when an explosion occurred at a power plant construction site killing five workers. I thought it was a little odd that so many was working on Sunday. What is more disturbing is that a lesson was not learned from other fatal evens.
http://www.csb.gov/newsroom/detail.aspx?nid=305
“The CSB issued a safety bulletin on gas purging in October 2009, because of the occurrence of multiple serious accidents during purging operations. Key safety lessons described in the bulletin included purging gases to a safe location outdoors away from ignition sources, evacuating non-essential workers during purging, using combustible gas monitors to detect any hazardous gas accumulations, and effective training for personnel involved in purging,”
The nuclear industry has a very strong lesson learned program and it is sad that this is not a universal practice for handling hazardous materials.
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February 9th, 2010 at 8:48 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Conn Yankee was a Westinghouse PWR, not a boiling water reactor.
I too live in Connecticut, and the TV news coverage here is pretty extensive. The saddest thing I heard was that one of the guys killed, was there on his second day at work.
Oh, yeah, it’s the “KleenEnergy” plant (apparently that’s the name of the company having it built). The news people keep on calling it that. I guess it’s correct, but it is kind of irritating. Suppose Dominion Electric renamed their Millstone nuclear station operations something like, “Zero Karbon Station.” Imagine the reception that would get… I can hear the news reports, “This just in from the so-called ‘Zero Karbon Station’ (chortle)… nothing new happened today, but officials stated ‘there is no cause for alarm.’…(snort)…”
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February 10th, 2010 at 12:10 am
“There has never been a death of a worker at a US nuclear power plant due to reactor malfunction or a nuclear accident. “
Uh, sorry. Gotta call you on that one…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1
“The SL-1, or Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One, was a United States Army experimental nuclear power reactor which underwent a steam explosion and meltdown on January 3, 1961, killing its three operators. The direct cause was the improper withdrawal of the main control rod, responsible for 80% of neutron moderation in the poorly designed reactor core. The event is the only fatal reactor accident in the United States.[1][2]“
Worth noting that it was an experimental, non-commercial-scale reactor, and did use highly-enriched fuel. But bang it went-and took three men with it. One was impaled on the roof of the containment building by the control rod he was (apparently) attempting to lift (or was merely leaning over).
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February 10th, 2010 at 12:47 am
Moose said:
The SL-1 incident was a military research project so the statement that there have been no nuclear related deaths in the American commercial nuclear industry is true.
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February 10th, 2010 at 1:18 am
Okay, well to be complete, the following deaths of workers have occured for reasons other than simple falls or dropping something on someone’s head or something:
Criticality Incidents in the civilian nuclear industry: 1 – reprocessing, Woods River Junction
Steam explosions, steam pipe breaches or steam scalding – 6 (two different incidents, both at Surry Nuclear, separated by several years. It’s a coincidence that they were all at the same plant)
Reactor malfunctions, civilian – Zero
Reactor malfunctions, military and experimental – 3 in one incident in 1961 (SL-1)
Research and military Criticality Incidents: 6 total deaths, not including the civilian death at Wood’s River Junction.
I am aware of at least three other deaths in the sector that are not related to nuclear incidents. One was during construction when an equipment malfunction caused a bulldozer to slide down a hill and ended up in causing a fatal accident. The other two were similar. I believe one was caused by a gantry crane in a turbine hall and the other was some other similar construction accident.
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February 10th, 2010 at 1:58 am
gmax137 said:
Sorry. I got confused there between CT Yankee and Millstone Unit 1 – Two reactors in CT that really didn’t need to be shut down.
gmax137 said:
Yeah, I was unaware that they spelled it with a K. It’s considered really kool and phun to spell things with different first letters. It shows how hip U R.
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February 10th, 2010 at 6:30 pm
Years ago I worked as a test engineer at a nuclear power plant. Between plant startup I was assigned to one of the coal fired plants that imploded. It really exploded but the correct term is imploded as the supply fan lost power, coal dust was still blowing into the furnace and the forced exhaust fan was still running. Result – you suck in the sides of the furnace and it implodes which results in an explosion. After getting that plant fixed I never “volunteered” to go back to a coal plant again. – They are an accident waiting to happen. And to top that off, steam leaks are invisible and could cut your leg(s) off as you walk through them.
And they want “Clean Coal?”
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February 18th, 2010 at 1:39 pm
Gordon said:
That’s not even limited to coal. Grain mills also used to explode in this fashion.
http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/73washburn.html
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