Regional Blackout Shuts Down "Location X"

A widely reported blackout in portions of Washington D.C., Maryland and Virginia yesterday also shut down the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant as a side effect:

Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant shut down automatically today at 12:40 p.m., as a result of a localized grid disturbance that caused power outages in the Washington, D.C./Maryland area.

Calvert Cliffs is designed to shut down automatically during significant electrical disturbances. The plant shut down safely and without incident. Both reactors will remain in “hot shut-down,” which means the reactor remains ready to resume power production, until the offsite grid disturbance can be addressed.

Calvert Cliffs is located on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Calvert County and is Maryland’s only nuclear energy facility. The station is home to two pressurized water reactors capable of generating 1,768 megawatts combined. Units 1 and 2 began commercial operation in 1975 and 1977, respectively.

Calvert Cliffs blowing off steam 4/7/15
Photo courtesy of Capt. Skip Zinck

A picture of CCNPP reported to be from yesterday when the plant dumped it's head of steam to go off line. While the outage had nothing to do with the functioning of the plant, the equipment failure in Saint Mary's County left the plant with no where to send its power. I'm sure they'll have it back on line as soon as they can send the power out. If they're not selling power, they're not making money.

Basically, an equipment failure in Mechanicsville MD power transfer station caused the transformers carrying large amounts of power from rural Maryland to metropolitan Washington, Maryland and Virgina to explode, leaving CCNPP with nowhere to send 2 gigawatts of power.

It is a curious phenomenon that, even though we live only 3 miles from the plant, we were not affected by its shut down; all our local power comes down the peninsula from elsewhere.