Bird blamed for nuclear incident
From correspondents in Arizona
July 22, 2004
A BIRD dropping may have short-circuited a unit at the largest nuclear power complex in the US, causing the plant to shut down last month, investigators said.
"There were eyewitnesses," said Kwin Peterson, a spokesman for the Western Electricity Coordinating Council, which is looking into the incident at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station that caused outages all the way to Canada. "There was a bird on a 230 kilovolt power line west of Phoenix, and as the bird took off, it let loose as birds often do."
Investigators thought excrement contaminated an insulator and electricity flashed to the tower, creating a short.
At the time, utility officials said all three units at Palo Verde, plus the natural gas-fired Red Hawk power plant, turned themselves off because of a disturbance in the transmission system. But they did not know the cause at the time.
There was no radioactivity leakage or danger to plant workers or nearby residents, plant officials said.
From correspondents in Arizona
July 22, 2004
A BIRD dropping may have short-circuited a unit at the largest nuclear power complex in the US, causing the plant to shut down last month, investigators said.
"There were eyewitnesses," said Kwin Peterson, a spokesman for the Western Electricity Coordinating Council, which is looking into the incident at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station that caused outages all the way to Canada. "There was a bird on a 230 kilovolt power line west of Phoenix, and as the bird took off, it let loose as birds often do."
Investigators thought excrement contaminated an insulator and electricity flashed to the tower, creating a short.
At the time, utility officials said all three units at Palo Verde, plus the natural gas-fired Red Hawk power plant, turned themselves off because of a disturbance in the transmission system. But they did not know the cause at the time.
There was no radioactivity leakage or danger to plant workers or nearby residents, plant officials said.
