how the atmosphere will dilute the radioactive cloud or it's safe in the drinking water crowd.

Let's hope that's really snow falling outside right now.

Guess I'd better check in on him, even though rarely talks to me because I voted for that (you know the word) Obama.

Sigh

It is a different world up there. The N-word is used with abandon.

Also, the last time I was there I was made to visit this attraction:

?zz=1

http://lavernetripp.com/schedule/dover-ar-booger-hollow-tabernacle

in 2010. They definitely had some interesting crafts - lol!

I used to have a clear view of that plant from my backyard in London. My father was a maintenance procedure writer for the instrument and electrical systems there in the 80's and 90's.

They depend on grid-tie for power to the cooling systems, so the cooling doesn't fail instantly if they ever have to SCRAM the reactors. So a loss of shore power means the plant goes offline at the least, if not emergency backups.

(This transformer may not be related to incoming power though.)

Bears watching, that's for sure.

Come to think of it, if they lost offsite power, I think they shut down the reactors. Then it is up to the diesel generators to provide the electrical power needed to run the cooling pumps to remove the decay heat.

They have multiple redundancy on those generators, but... Switchgear can fail, the generators can fail, etc.

It's not without risk. Pretty reliable, but the stakes are very high.

and if I'm not mistaken, Fukushima wouldn't have had the loss of cooling and subsequent meltdown if only those emergency diesel generators had worked. But as we all know, the generators and the surrounding electrical equipment were flooded out by the tsunami.

This must have been a helluva transformer to make the ground shake.

I hope the fire department is using proper gear and techniques to extinguish it.

airport to use foam. I don't know if they have to do something to ensure it's non-conductive or anything like that.

I haven't seen anything about this in the MSM.

I didn't know transformers exploding have that big of earth-shaking "BANG".
Hope this is under control but IMO, nuke plants are never really under control. Ban them all.

During the '92 Inaugural Day storm in Seattle, we went down to Alki, stood with our backs to Puget sound, and watched the show. You could see transformers going up all over Seattle. Quite a number of them could be heard clearly over the storm, and those were small transformers.

D'oh.

Reactor shut down at Nuclear One after transformer fire
By David Smith
This article was published today at 2:11 a.m.

A nuclear reactor at Entergy Corp.’s Arkansas Nuclear One was shut down at 7:50 a.m. Monday after a transformer exploded in an electrical switchyard at the power plant near Russellville.

The fire at the transformer was put out at 9:17 a.m., said Donna Gregory, an Entergy spokesman at the plant.

There was a “fault in the transformer that resulted in the fire,” said Mike Bowling, an Entergy spokesman.

No injuries were reported. Entergy has about 1,000 workers at the nuclear plant, including many contract workers.

The plant’s fire brigade began fighting the fire, but Entergy then requested offsite help, Gregory said. The nearby London Volunteer Fire Department was called in to help with the fire, Gregory said.

The federal Nuclear Regulator Commission labeled the shutdown an “unusual event,” the lowest of four nuclear emergency classifications. That means the event indicated a “potential degradation of the level of safety of a plant.”

The plant’s Unit 2 reactor will be kept offline while the cause of the explosion is investigated and repairs are determined, the Nuclear Regulator Commission stated. Power is being supplied to Unit 2 by an emergency diesel generator and one source of off-site power, the commission stated.

Unit 1 remains operating at 95 percent power, the commission stated.

There were no radiation leaks reported, the commission stated.

More at link:

http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2013/dec/10/reactor-shut-down-nuclear-one-after-trans-20131210/

[the article is behind a paywall]

Think they're telling the truth?