Hot water forces nuclear shutdown.
In the USA the Houston Chronical is reporting TVA reactor shut down; cooling water from river too hot.
The Tennessee Valley Authority shut down one of three units at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant Thursday because water drawn from a river to cool the reactor was too hot, a spokesman said.
The nation’s largest public utility shut down Unit 2 about 5:42 p.m. CDT because water drawn from the Tennessee River was exceeding a 90-degree average over 24 hours, amid a blistering heat wave across the Southeast.
“We don’t believe we’ve ever shut down a nuclear unit because of river temperature,” said John Moulton, spokesman for the Knoxville, Tenn.-based utility.
A key thing many commentators on global warming miss is the non-linearity of the effects of small changes to the mean global temperature. We are heating the planet but not evenly, and the consequences of this heating are often quite unpredictable. Little tipping points are revealing themselves only in hindsight. This is, for me, one of the scariest things about global warming.
No-one can predict just what the consequences of this warming may be. All we can be certain of is that these consequences will be unpredictable, and for the most part they will not be good for us. By heating up the world we are exposing us to what Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to as Black Swans, large-impact, almost impossible to predict and rare events that nonetheless shape the world and, with hindsight, seem utterly predictable.
The true danger of global warming is the chaotic changes being unleashed. Randomness comes in lumps. — DS
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