Rant: First snow, then comes power losses

[IanB]

The local experience here with underground power has generally been OK, but the local HV goes down one of the main streets to our suburb and the guys are always working on it. One guy was in a talkative mood as I walked past and described issues with the inert gas charging of the surrounding pipe and moisture penetration.

In the UK the power companies are steadily pulling out that old style cable and replacing it with cross-linked polyethylene.

[coppice]

The local experience here with underground power has generally been OK, but the local HV goes down one of the main streets to our suburb and the guys are always working on it. One guy was in a talkative mood as I walked past and described issues with the inert gas charging of the surrounding pipe and moisture penetration.

In the UK the power companies are steadily pulling out that old style cable and replacing it with cross-linked polyethylene.

Aren't XLPE cables universal for new high voltage installations anywhere but on a catenary?

[VK5RC]

This cable and supporting pipes would be less than 10yrs old, I never saw the cables and I think it was reasonably high voltage,  several kV.

[tggzzz]

The local experience here with underground power has generally been OK, but the local HV goes down one of the main streets to our suburb and the guys are always working on it. One guy was in a talkative mood as I walked past and described issues with the inert gas charging of the surrounding pipe and moisture penetration.

In the UK the power companies are steadily pulling out that old style cable and replacing it with cross-linked polyethylene.

... and the telco company (BT/OpenReach) is pulling out "last-mile" cables made of twisted-pairs made of enamelled wire covered with waxed paper, with many pairs sheathed in lead.

Yes, I grabbed a 12" to show people. I only wish I had grabbed an inch of TAT-7, the last trans-Atlantic coax cable, when I had the chance.

[tooki]

As far as I know, power grid systems should be designed to survive and serve power even in extreme weathers, aren't they?

Depends on where you are.

Here in Switzerland, the power grid is rock solid. In the past 7 years living here, I've experienced one single power outage. Power here is nearly universally buried underground, in well-maintained conduit. It's rare to see visible cabling here.

In the US, on the other hand, I had my desktop computer and all the network gear on a UPS, because the power would go out a few times a year. The reason is that the US has nearly all above-ground power. What happens then is that ice can build up on lines and cause them to snap, but even more commonly, trees and branches fall and break the lines. (That's why hurricanes cause so many power outages.)

According to this article just doing this in North Carolina would cost $41 billion and take 25 years.
The thing about infrastructure is that it simply doesn't make financial or logistical sense to try to acheive 100% service during events beyond a certain severity level.

These articles are a fraud. No sane country puts all power line underground.

Switzerland has most power lines underground. I can't find national figures, but one of the power companies (which covers a mix of urban to rural) says it's 92% underground for low-tension, 60% for medium-tension, and 13% for high-tension lines.

There's a lot of discussion here of moving even more of the medium and high-tension lines underground, because people don't want the unsightly overhead lines.

There is a certain size, where you dont need to put it underground, as the cable is thick enought to handle any weather condition. And 95% of the power will go thrugh 10% of the cables. Just put the big cables into protected enviroment, if a block of flats loses power that is a minor issue.
Losing power statewise is a huge issue. Basically life stops, economy stops, losses are in the billions.

The problem in USA is that it's not the big distribution lines that break. In a typical hurricane or snowstorm, what happens is that thousands of small last-mile lines get snapped by fallen branches. So yeah, each one of those might only affect 10 buildings, but when you have 10,000 such breaks in a single city, it's easy to end up with hundreds of thousands of people in the dark. And because many American homes have only electric heat, this becomes a major public safety issue in snowstorms. Unfortunately, every such big storm, a few elderly people die because their heat went out and they literally die of hypothermia.

BTW I dont see poeple from Russia or Canada complaining about the snow. Surely there is more there...

Those places expect lots of snow so they are set up for it. The reason huge snowstorms like this cripple so much of the US is that they are areas that rarely get very much snow. This means they don't have enough snow removal equipment and supplies to deal with it, locals don't know how to drive in it so they crash their cars (causing even more problems), and the infrastructure and housing aren't designed for it. The parts of the US that do get tons of snow every year (think Minnesota or Colorado) have no trouble with it because they are prepared for it.

[cdev]

Every decade there is around a one in eight risk of there being a huge solar flare ("Coronal Mass Ejection" that hits the Earth and causes global power grid destruction. (The transformers blow up) We narrowly missed one hitting us on June 23, 2012.

We should especially build backup power systems that could sustain the spent fuel pools on nuclear power plants to prevent the problems they had at Fukushima. (the technical name for that is "loss of the ultimate heat sink")

There is a significant risk now of a "CME" like the one in 2012 hitting us, knocking out the global power grid for some time, and then shortly afterward, in multiple locations around the globe, the lack of spent fuel cooling could trigger multiple nuclear meltdowns - IF those nuclear power plants could not keep cool water circulating around their spent fuel. The backup could be accomplished with huge solar panel farms. Thats what I think they should do, because diesel fuel could be in short supply during a global power outage.

This potential catastrophe is something we all need to think about preventing more! 

The consequences of knowing about, but failing to address in time, this risk of a solar storm knocking out a great many nuclear power plants cooling is a huge setback to all of humanity that likely would kill billions of people all around the world, mostly children, by raising the price of food to unaffordable levels.

Just as any nuclear war would do.

Its much much higher than almost any of the other risks we are kept scared with . Addressing it is not rocket science.

Its preventable, all they have to do is address it.

[dannyf]

Its preventable, all they have to do is address it.

Not all preventable events should be prevented.

Preventing once a year disaster is easy;
Preventing once in a hundred year disaster may be worth it to some;
Prevent once in a million year disaster is hardly sensible for 99.999999999% of the population.

As you go out on the probability, the cost to prevent such events goes up exponentially.

[HackedFridgeMagnet]

i

Its preventable, all they have to do is address it.

Not all preventable events should be prevented.

Preventing once a year disaster is easy;
Preventing once in a hundred year disaster may be worth it to some;
Prevent once in a million year disaster is hardly sensible for 99.999999999% of the population.

As you go out on the probability, the cost to prevent such events goes up exponentially.

I think you have too many 9s in your percentage. At this point the cost is not going to change as you have already prevented a disaster for all the people on Earth.

Just saying this cause I think people shouldn't use the term exponentially unless they mean it mathematically.

[Mechanical Menace]

There is a significant risk now of a "CME" like the one in 2012 hitting us, knocking out the global power grid for some time, and then shortly afterward, in multiple locations around the globe, the lack of spent fuel cooling could trigger multiple nuclear meltdowns - IF those nuclear power plants could not keep cool water circulating around their spent fuel. The backup could be accomplished with huge solar panel farms. Thats what I think they should do, because diesel fuel could be in short supply during a global power outage.

You can't really shut down a nuclear pile, even if you're not generating electricity with it and it's at it's lowest possible power output you're still generating heat so can still generate steam. Wouldn't a steam powered backup coolant pump powered by the heat you can't help but generate be a more efficient fallback than a massive solar farm for that eventuality?

[SeanB]

There is a significant risk now of a "CME" like the one in 2012 hitting us, knocking out the global power grid for some time, and then shortly afterward, in multiple locations around the globe, the lack of spent fuel cooling could trigger multiple nuclear meltdowns - IF those nuclear power plants could not keep cool water circulating around their spent fuel. The backup could be accomplished with huge solar panel farms. Thats what I think they should do, because diesel fuel could be in short supply during a global power outage.

You can't really shut down a nuclear pile, even if you're not generating electricity with it and it's at it's lowest possible power output you're still generating heat so can still generate steam. Wouldn't a steam powered backup coolant pump powered by the heat you can't help but generate be a more efficient fallback than a massive solar farm for that eventuality?

They tried that at Chernobyl in a way, seeing if they could still generate power during shut down. Would work if you had a Stirling power engine and some reasonable cooling method, like a pump driven off the Stirling plant along with an alternator for electrical supply. Probably would need a few redundant units though, and you would need some extra space in the plant, but would work with the shutdown heat to run cooling even with a 30C above ambient heat source, though at very poor efficiency. Problem is the pool is not pressurised, and you would want to keep the main plant temperature under 200C  and still pressurised to made it usable.  That falls in still running, and you need also the feedwater make up units to keep it that pressure so there is no boiling, which might need more power than the standby plant can generate with only moderate system leakage.

[Jeroen3]

Don't they build new reactors in a way that even if all power and people are lost the core will keep below meltdown due to physics as long as there is coolant in the containment system?
I recall reading an article about self-stabilization of reactor cores some time ago.