What could possibly go wrong?
Manitoba Hydro has shut down a dam after a European engineer alerted Hydro’s staff to possible cracks in the plant’s underwater turbines. […]
Early last month, a European engineer who worked at Iron Gate and knew Jenpeg was the only dam in North America with similar, Soviet-made turbines, sought out Hydro’s engineers at a conference overseas. So serious was the European engineer’s warning, Hydro shut Jenpeg down almost immediately about two weeks ago. Last week, Hydro’s engineers inspected the first turbine and found many cracks, about half a centimetre deep, on the shaft near the propellers — a part of the turbine that’s hard to get at and not normally inspected. Engineers are usually more concerned with the end of the shaft that’s closer to the power-making equipment, said Schneider.
h/t Mungman
Another reader notes, “A first term NDP government in 1972 was the only jurisdiction in North America to purchase these Soviet made turbines…”
Another reader notes, “A first term NDP government in 1972 was the only jurisdiction in North America to purchase these Soviet made turbines…”
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At first I was expecting to see that asshole Pierre Elliott Turdeau’s name prominently mentioned,but “NDP government” was close enough.
Like whats the difference?
They’re all filthy commies anyway.
Penny saved, pound lost. Ah Socialism.
This is the same Manitoba Hydro that is taking extreme risks, borrowing Billions of dollars to finance hydro projects for electricity exports down south. It’s a huge gamble.
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/westview/good-reasons-to-worry-about-hydro-66817997.html
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/hydro-inks-3-b-deal-with-xcel-energy-95172889.html
They also want to route a big transmission line down the west side of the lake, instead of the more cost and energy efficient west side:
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/letters_to_the_editor/west-route-for-bipole-iii-wrong-96636839.html
If these are the same turbines involved in last year’s disaster at the Sayano-Shushenskaya plant in Siberia, then it’s a good thing that they’ve shut them down. The entire turbine hall was destroyed and 75 workers were killed when one of the turbines failed.
The best I could find, with photos, is this article by the BBC. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8216138.stm
According to Wikipedia, the Sayano-Shushenskaya plant operated ten type РО-230/833-0-677 hydro turbines[10] manufactured at the Leningradsky Metallichesky Zavod. It will be interesting to see if Manitoba Hydro purchased the same or similar turbines. And if so, why did it take them almost a year to look into this after the disaster in Siberia last August?
“On 3 October 2009 the official report about Sayano-Shushenskaya hydro accident was published.
In summary, it states that the accident was primarily caused by vibrations of turbine № 2 which led to fatigue damage of the mountings of the turbine, including its cover. The report found that at the moment of the accident, the nuts on at least 6 bolts keeping the turbine cover in place were absent. After the accident, 49 found bolts were investigated: 41 had fatigue cracks. On 8 bolts, the fatigue-damaged area exceeded 90% of the total cross-sectional area.”
More info here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayano%E2%80%93Shushenskaya_Dam#2009_accident
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/09/the_sayanoshushenskaya_dam_acc.html
http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Sayano-Shushenskaya-dam-hydro-electric-power-station-accident
An old Soviet saying was “The best is the enemy of good enough”
Sayano-Shushenskaya
My opinion for what it is worth would indicate poor maintainence and inspections. Missing nuts place more strain on the remaining bolts on any assembly….a missing nut on a truck wheel can get you arrested and fined bigtime…….
Generally Soviet/Russian stuff is extremely well designed (design by genius to be operated by idiots). But nothing is idiot proof.
Manufacture quality control is another matter.
Remember the USSR made perhaps the most accurate ICBMs but had trouble producing reliable toasters….
Massive forgings such as artillery barrels and marine propellor shafts are tricky things to machine. Poor machining procedures can leave tiny stress cracks that are difficult to detect…..and they seem too grow….hence the grinding of these cracks….
old soviet joke…
when true marxist socialism arrives we will all have rocket ships to go where we wish when we wish
yas komrad …and then we can fly to Vladivostock when they have eggs on sale…
Being that I’m from Manitoba I just knew it had to be an NDP government that would buy these parts from the Soviets.
And, so it was.
They’re still a bunch of commies in Winnipeg.
Engineers are usually more concerned with the end of the shaft
Oh.. I’ll just stop there.
Ed Schreyer was the premier. You know the one that became our GG.
Useful idiots indeed. Need to look up those justifications again.
I am sure the smae people will be buying things from Hamas and the Iranian regime, in the name of peace doncha know. Ideological discount applies to this situation in more than one way.
Today, stinking giant fans are shipped from China, repainted in Canada to meet local content regulations.
What could possibly go wrong?
Even I, a devoted hater of all soviet, would ask: a shaft developed cracks after 40 years of service, so what?
Soviet style socialism . . . “We pretend to work, you pretend to pay us”
As result, nobody cares about quality.
@Aaron
First, it’s not 40 years, the dam entered service in 1979, so more like 30 years. Second the design life of a hydro dam is a lot longer than say a butler steel building due to the consequences of a catastrophic failure and the high initial costs involved , probably more like 75 or 100 years. A failure in less than half the lifespan, that’s not good performance.
Can’t they just use underwater Soviet Mini-Cams to monitor the turbines?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv1j9erks2Y&feature=related
Prior to the catastrophic failures overseas, this situation in MB would be the equivalent of overhauling a diesel engine on a regular basis to replace easily accessed normally worn parts and by a complete fluke inspecting and finding huge flaws in what should be the strongest, most massively over designed component in the whole assembly.
It brings to mind the first purchase of American jet airliners by the Chinese communist government. They bought spare engines in the same quantities they normally got with their inferior Soviet airliner buys and as insurance against future bad relations with the USA bought an extra allotment of spare engines. Years later they still had a large majority of those engines sitting unopened in their original crates and began selling them off to various buyers around the world. Each engine sold for more than they had paid for any of the brand new individual original aircraft they started out with.
Our current health care system is also a “Made in the Soviet Union” solution.
Henry Sigerist, a doctor at John Hopkins loved how health care was amdinstered in the SOviet Union and wrote a book called ‘Socialized Medicine in the Soviet Union’. After Tommy Douglas was elected, Sigerist served on the Committee that introduced Universal Healthcare to the province…and the way health care was organized here looked an awfully lot like what he wrote about in his book.
Unfortunately for us, fixing health care will not be as simple as replacing a turbine or two.
RE Soviet quality….
When the Soviets introduced the Hind gunship-helo, it was a problem. Then the lads learned to shoot at the engine intakes.
The Soviets armoured them…but then the Mujahedin learned that the expected AIRFRAME lifespan was 10 hours. The muzzies nearly died laughing.
The main contributing factor in the collapse of the USSR was that it’s infrastructure was collapsing….shoddy construction. Basically the entire country was built like a LADA.
Built like a Lada? You mean like those buses Premier Bob Rae bought for Ontario from Eastern Europe?
Soviet workers “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work”.
I would be curious if it was in the design or the manufacturing. Russians, even the soviets, tended to produce some pretty competent engineers. But you cant help it if the materials are bad, the manufacturing is shoddy etc.
Nonetheless, I thnk the left in Manitoba is moreradical than the left in other parts of the country, certainly in the 70’s
Schreyer, what an idiot..too bad you have to live with his misguided decisions 40 years after they were made.
speaking of prairie goings on:
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/100703/national/sask_tornado
deluge, tornadoes, finances in the stinker and whatnot.
could it be ‘punishment from God’ for all that extreme right wing venom emanating from sask. based SDA?
IMO, only ideologically-fettered lefty idiots would have chosen Soviet turbines, when numerous Western corporations make far better and more reliable ones.
I remember years ago, on a trip to Las Vegas, I went on a tour of the Hoover Dam. Inside the dam, the generator room has seven massive turbines. They only use three turbines at a time, or four in max use winter and summer seasons, rotating usage to even the wear and tear. These massive turbines have to be seen to be comprehended. There’s a good Wiki photo at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tourgroup1940.jpg They’re reminiscent of the technology imagery in the sci-fi classic “Forbidden Planet”, in which all the machinery was massively larger than human scale.
They were designed for all the moving parts to have multiple times the max calculated needed strength. As of the mid 90’s when I went on the tour, the guide said no turbine had ever broken down and the engineers anticipate at least another century of use before any overhauls are needed. … As opposed to Soviet socialist crap engineering, “Chernobyl-style” engineering, we could say. To paraphrase Forrest Gump, “Cr*p is as cr*p does.”
Some of the posts here are way over the top. You should educate yourselves as to what metal fatigue is.
In materials science, fatigue is the progressive and localized structural damage that occurs when a material is subjected to cyclic loading. The nominal maximum stress values are less than the ultimate tensile stress limit, and may be below the yield stress limit of the material.
A lot of materials which are subjected to repeated loading and unloading are candidates for fatigue problems. If the loads are above a certain threshold, microscopic cracks will begin to form at the surface. Eventually a crack will reach a critical size, and the structure will suddenly fracture.
Because it is slow developing a common prevention program is inspection. In aircraft design they use what is called damage tolerant design where they assume there is a crack and set up an inspection program that provides three inspections before it would fail.
It appears that Manitoba Hydro was not inspecting this particular part, but to blame it on the Premier in 1970 is as ridicules as saying that the bridge collapse in Minnesota was caused by climate change. BTW it was caused by fatigue and it was on W’s watch so was it his fault?
Infamous fatigue failures include : Versailles train crash (France), The 1980 capsize of the oil platform Alexander L. Kielland (Norway), Eschede train disaster (Germany), Boston Molasses Disaster
Xwayxway pronounced “Thiswaythiswaytothecasino”
ES,
You are correct the cause is whatever physical thing is happening. However, the decision sticks out like a sore thumb and it makes you wonder if an “ideological discount” was applied. Buying from an unproven supplier, the Soviet Union, to
1) Make a point
2) Or other less ideological reasons
Of course the bridge in Minnesota didnt fail due to Climate Change….but if you found out that the metal supplier was the brother of the governor at the time, and he had just entered the business wouldnt you ask yourself just why the decision was made.
It is such an outlier decision you are left to ask why they would do it. Decisions like that, that nobody else confirms with a follow up purchase either make you a hero or a goat. In this case Schreyer is a goat and its worth revisiting the decision since. Especially since any cabinet records leading to the decision would past being sealed.
My suspicion, it was driven by some peacenicky driven motivation of peace through turbines.
Once again, was it design, materials or manufacturing and what was the inspection regime like when it was installed, or was it Ivan inspected it in Smolensk so its ok.
Its a hunch only but to say it is simply metal fatigue, and that happens, is missing the rest of situation here. At a minimum the ideological discount theory and/or the payoff theory need to be explored.
Having been a resident of Manitoba in the 70’s, I remember this project by the NDP gov’t of Ed Schreyer. It starts because in the 40’s Man. Hydro built the basis of the headwaters for the Nelson river which ultimately drops into Hud. Bay. About every 10 – 15 miles on the Nelson you can drop a dam and generate 10 – 12 Megs of Hydro power. The NDP wanted economic development -so build a hydro dam. The problem then as with todays NDP there is no contract for the power. They built it on spec. Blackrod Blog has been chronicling this latest example over the past year.
Hooray for non destructive testing!
Soviet-made?
Holy wow! Does someone have a death wish?
Just as Stalin enforced three year plans with slave labour and shoddy materials, so, too, do governments repeat similar mistakes.
And stopping nuclear subs from sinking. Oops. Sorry, that was one of yours, wasn’t it ulianov?
Manitoba bought parts from the Soviet Union? How appropriate.
An unmanned Russian Progress cargo ship on Friday failed to dock as planned with the International Space Station after flying past the facility in a rare mishap, mission control said.
The Progress M-06M cargo ship, launched on June 30, is carrying 2.6 tonnes of fuel, food and water for the six astronauts on the station. A complete docking failure is very rare and an irritation for the Russian space program, which proudly touts how its manoeuvres have proceeded without a slip.
“The cargo ship passed the station, at a safe distance. It could be said that it missed. Now the vessel is 3 kilometres from the station. Our specialists are monitoring the situation, a spokeswoman for mission control said.
Say uli baby, didn’t the Russians have to NUKE an oil well they couldn’t cap? I do believe that’s the case.
Hate to mention Chernobyl and spoil your day, ucommie.
Hey, ulianov, or is it Lenin? The Russians and Ukrainians said they want “no more soviets” when we asked them.
That “Soviet engineering that defeated the Nazis”…what you actually meant to say was “the human peasant cannon fodder, that the Commissars and NKVD troops at the point of a machine pistol,ordered into suicide missions.
We have also seen some of “superior” farm equipment that the now free farmers inherited and are farming with on their own farms.
If those turbines are of the same quality as the tractors, seed drills and combines, then Manitoba better shut the rest down real fast.
ulianov:
dont forget the nazi scientists and most of the industrial infrastructure that was looted by the commies after WW2. Once that stuff became antiquated the USSR was a backwater technologically speaking – stealing most of the technology – including corn seeds from ag canada tst plots when Gorby visited canada.
The Soviet Union looted American technology by the truckload. A famous book named East Minus West Equals Zero contains the details. Werner Keller is the author’s name.
Meanwhile, by coincidence, in today’s Toronto Star is an article by none other than Ed Schreyer, entitled “Build Houses To Fight Poverty”. Not that governments should be in the housing business, but when they are, it’s “underfunded” because they’re too busy spending taxpayers’ good money on essential stuff like fixing turbines.
Link: http://www.thestar.com/article/831101–schreyer-build-houses-to-fight-poverty
We don’t need a “national housing strategy”, all we need is capitalism.
I don’t have too many concerns about soviet mechanical engineering. It was a pretty mature field.
And I don’t doubt that Schreyer had ideological reasons for choosing a soviet design.
I did read something interesting about computer science.
Many people think Reagan brought down the soviet union.
Instead it was their decision to abandon research and development in computer science and to steal from the West.
The Americans knew they were stealing and would allow them to take flawed software for such things as pipeline control systems.
Then they’d watch the seismographs for the explosions caused by the bugs they’d planted.
Do you honestly have to ask which is worse between the Gulf and Chernobyl? Those parts of the exclusion zones in Ukraine and Belarus won’t be safe for habitation for another 600 years, and radiation levels will remain above normal for many thousands more. As bad as the Gulf spill is, even if it were left totally untreated its environmental impact will be negligible after several years.
What exactly is your point about Challenger and Columbia? That space travel is not routine, and is in fact an engineering challenge under the very best of circumstances? Well congratulations, consider us edified on that point. Why, I bet the Soviets have even lost a few spacecraft too. Cosmos 954 should be especially near and dear to Canadians. And what is this Russian shuttle still operating? The Soviets started a shuttle program but it never carried anyone into orbit. The two US shuttle tragedies represent a 1.5% loss rate of all shuttle missions. In view of the complexity of the craft and the stresses of repeated launch and reentry cycles, I’d say that rate is actually remarkably low in fact.
People in this topic thread were simply musing on the Soviet tendency to pursue brute force solutions in the face of complex engineering challenges, and an almost institutionalized corner cutting for political expedience. When you have for instance a high speed interceptor that relies on massive engines to compensate for its wing fencing, exposed rivets, and heavy steel construction, you have a good example of the Soviet engineering tendency. No one has denied that their stuff worked, and sometimes worked very well indeed. Yet the crudeness still often exacted a greater backend cost, such as short service time between overhauls. Such backend costs are often overlooked in direct comparisons, and truth be told is probably what lies at the heart of the issue with these turbines.
But I think all this is just a pretext for you to wade in and extol the imagined superiority of communism and a Soviet-style state, so I hasten to add that there can be no such thing as “not withstanding the reckless waste of life”, because a reckless waste of life was endemic to the Soviet system. I realize it is fashionable for comfortable Westerners to be apologists for communism out of some sort of intellectual conceit, but don’t let your hammer and sickle fanboyism go so far as to be dismissive of the enormous body count racked up in pursuit of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The Soviets’ ability to engineer a work-til-death camp in the middle of the frozen tundra is one arena in which their supremacy goes decidedly unchallenged.
I think you will find that the superior Russian technology that defeated the Nazi’s was actually a combination of Russian manpower and Western tech. The T34 mainstay Russian tank was modified off the British Christie suspension system and a tank design and the aircraft were similar design modifications of western aircraft. In fact its debatable if there is any original design in Russian, or just really good industrial espionage and looting. About the only thing that has lasted is the legacy of the AK47 (a rip off of the schmitzer machine gun anyway).
A lot of nonsense in much of this thread. Yes, the Soviet Union occasionally made garbage hydraulic turbines. So did lots of others. It’s why Ontario Hydro had to replace ALL of the turbines in all of its hydraulic projects in the Mattagami complex of dams in the late 1980s, and why Westinghouse hasn’t sold a hydraulic turbine in the last 25 years. They low-bid their original installation in the 1950s by leaving out spacers in the stator rings. Sayana is NOT a story about bad equipment; it’s a story about corrupt management and operations over decades.
Worse is the blather about the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Unsafe for thousands of years? Utter drivel. The exclusion zone is based on the half life of Cesium 164 which is about 30 years. And if conditions in the exclusion zone are so lethal, then please explain why the wildlife there is flourishing. As for radiation above normal, more ridiculous rubbish. Natural radiation varies enormously across the surface of the planet dependent primarily upon rock conditions and elevation. Many areas of the world have naturally much higher radiation levels. If you think Ukraine and Belarus are unsafe, then you’d better not go near Copacabana Beach, just to name one of a horde of examples.
Yes, Ulianov, western engineering is generally superior. Not because the engineers are brighter, but because there’s a much greater plethora of inspections, checks, engineering standards and qualifications for projects and components. The failure rate of western engineered large projects is much lower than that of the former Soviet Union. Why do you think it is that as nations industrialize they adopt the engineering QA-QC systems of the OECD nations and NOT those of the former USSR?
As for the space programs, Russians operate BDRs, that’s big, dumb rockets, to use NASA-speak. Very crude, very simple technology, and they use very basic liquid fuel, primarily hydrazine. It’s simple and it works, but it’s very inefficient. NASA uses until the end of this year the space shuttle. It uses a combination of solid fuel and hydrogen, offering much better energy density and allowing much heavier payload. The international space station couldn’t have been built without the shuttle because the Russian Vostoks CAN’T LIFT that much. But the much higher fuel density and the nature of solid fuel means that such craft are inherently more dangerous. So stop comparing apples and oranges. Or are you trying to gloss over the very long list of dead cosmonauts from the 1960s? Those folks are the ones who really paid for the USSR going into manned space programs before their technology was really ready for it.
The commentary about the German ballistic technology is particularly stupid. No, ulianov, they didn’t take it to keep it from Germans. Germany was merely a heap of rubble and no longer mattered. Germany had made enormous advances in ballistic missiles with the V2, and both sides desperately wanted to get their hands on it. The result was that the USSR was able to orbit Sputnik in 1957 while US Vanguards were blowing up on the launch pad. Space programs were small beer however; both sides wanted ballistic missile technology for their nuclear weapon programs.
So please stop yammering on about topics on which you know nothing.
A quick skim on Wiki infers that the failed Soviet hydro turbine design is not some stolid and unimaginative “play it safe” effort, just the opposite. In simple terms, it resembles a reversed function very large ship propulsion system extracting energy from high speed water flowing over a vertical propeller attached to an inadequate horizontal shaft.
The Soviet propensity for stealing or reverse engineering western technology on a massive scale had many facets but one of the most urgent was that of self preservation by the secondary and lower decision makers. If you didn’t have powerful patrons or ironclad proof that your designs were in sync with and improvements upon western ones, your life and the lives of those up and down your chain of command hung by a thread passing through the hand of some imbecilic party commissar or NKVD predator.
As to the stripping of East Germany, when you wish to disguise your specific needs, take everything and everyone.
How does the old joke go? “In Soviet power station, turbine rotates you!”
Ulianov, please go read the UNSCEAR 2000 report, then come back and talk to me about Chernobyl residual radiation. The current levels are lower than exist naturally in many places of the world and are in any event below the ICRP dose limit.