Federal inquiry into San Diego blackout last year

[bananas]

http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/mar/08/cause-blackout-2-months-away/

Federal inquiry into San Diego blackout

Federal authorities are within two months of providing a public report outlining the root causes of the Sept. 8 power outage in San Diego and surrounding areas, according to a staff member at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Six months after a cascading electrical outage swept from western Arizona to the seaside San Onofre nuclear plant, regulators are refining a computer-simulated model of the events as they research and test conclusions about the equipment and decisions that allowed the outage to spread so far.

The inquiry is being performed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and North American Electric Reliability Corp., often referred to as FERC and NERC, with the goal of providing the industry with well-supported guidance on what went wrong and how to avoid similar problems.

Initial probes have established that the outage began with maintenance work at a transmission substation outside Yuma that tripped off a 500 kilovolt power line at 3:27 p.m. That disruption cascaded across San Diego County and Baja California, halting 11 minutes later at a San Onofre switch yard 45 miles north of San Diego.

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The blackout also caused the two reactors at San Onofre to shut down: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/09/blackout-san-onofre-reactor.html

and they weren't reconnected until four days later: http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2011/sep/12/san-onofre-nuclear-plant-reconnects-after-blackout/

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1. They shut the reactors down so they won't go Fukushima

Reactors continue to generate lots of heat after they are shut down,
enough to melt down and destroy the containment.
Also, the spent fool puels require cooling, or the water will evaporate and the rods catch fire.
It takes a lot of electricity to run the cooling pumps,
so when the grid is down, the reactors are required to shut down.