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Scuba Diver Survives Being Sucked Into Nuclear Plant (nydailynews.com)
mdsolar writes: A man scuba diving in Florida somehow survived being sucked into a nuclear power plant in a terrifying log flume ride. Christopher Le Cun was boating off the coast of Hutchinson Island when he and his friend went under to check out three large shadows beneath the waves that looked like buildings. After diving down, he felt a current that quickly pulled him toward one of three intake pipes, got sucked in and was immersed in darkness for five minutes in the water being taken to cool the St. Lucie Nuclear Power Plant. Le Cun told WPTV that he thought he was going to be chopped into tiny bits when he hit a turbine at the end of the 16-foot-wide, quarter-mile tube. However, the turbine never came, and the pipe eventually spat him out into a reservoir at the plant holding water used to cool the nuclear reactor. After finding a passing worker, Le Cun was able to call wife Brittany, who thought her husband was dead after seeing the shocked face of his diving partner.
Wow, I didn't see that coming...
i washed my hands but they didn't come clean...
So, apparently these guys moored to the warning buoy being interested in what was beneath it. Upon entering the water, they see a gigantic pipe, with some hardware that was clearly intended to prevent marine stuff from accidentally entering the pipe, so they thought: "What a great idea! lets bypass these things intended to keep big stuff out and enter this here pipe!"
Darwin just missed on this one...
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Or this guy brought a torch under water, cut through the protective bars and then got sucked in.
I saw one of these rigs being repaired near Niagara falls. If its a similar setup, then the grills are not intended to be tamper proof, just keep out accidental intrusions. A diver would be easily able to bypass the protection, as it was similar to a latched gate for a metal fence. The whole thing was painted bright orange though, so there was no way anyone was going to mistake that for something friendly. Sounds like this intake could've used a coat of paint...
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
It wasn't a nuclear plant that sucked in the diver. It was a current created by an artificial lagoon being drained below sea level and the sea via gravity refilling it. That is why there was no impeller or turbine to chew him up.
From TFA: "The company claims that there was a sign telling potential visitors to “stay back 100 feet” to avoid getting sucked into an unwelcome James Bond-style thrill ride. It also said that Le Cun intentionally swam into the intake pipe and got past equipment meant to prevent anything foreign from getting into the pipe."
And if there were bars he'd just be pinned against the intake until he ran out of air? I don't think that is a good solution
They might not be able to put a grill over the pipe. It could get clogged and cut off the flow of coolant to the nuclear plant.
"#FloridaMan arrested for attempted impersonation of reactor coolant in order to penetrate nuclear facility"
If that was a wind turbine instead, the diver would have certainly been reduced to meaty bits. So nuclear ftw...suck it greenies.
captcha: triumphs
A long long long time ago I heard exactly the same story.
Here's a blog discussion among scuba divers claiming the exact same event, at the exact same nuclear power plant, that was posted in 2013 (referring to a past, previous event).
So, either this is a hoax, or this happens occasionally at the nuclear power plant in question.
(I *do* have to wonder how something gets sucked into a reservoir without encountering propulsive blades.)
When I first heard the story, it mentioned that there was no warning of any kind to deter scuba divers from that location. The current news story says the same thing.
I mean, it is *exactly* the same story!
Does this happen often?
I'd say this isn't a problem with a reactor. In this case it is a problem of Florida. I was going to write up a list of things Florida is known for, but I realized after about a dozen, the list didn't seem to stop. This is just a case of self-absorbed youths. You can find them all over South Florida. They seem to be attracted to beach areas, and wealth.
He was just trying to do the Harold Holt.
I'd recommend you go inspect them for possible safety violations. We'll even make sure the turbines are running at full capacity before you go in, just to make sure you see everything!
It's not like you just come across pipes like this in open water, but no SCUBA diver worth their salt would get near an unknown pipe like that.
Differential pressure makes it terrifyingly easy to get pulled into something you can't get out of. This guy is incredibly lucky.
They might not be able to put a grill over the pipe. It could get clogged and cut off the flow of coolant to the nuclear plant.
The typical solution to that problem is burst suction. There is a holding pond that is used to source water for the cooling system. This pond is periodically refilled by opening a giant valve and letting seawater refill the cooling pond. By doing it that way, nothing gets permanently stuck against the protective bars, and thus nothing can clog it up permanently. It does however mean that when pulling water, the pipe has many times the suction that would otherwise be required.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Here, they could just ride in on the tide. Seems to lack physical security there.
Human stupidity and Florida go hand in hand. I think even the Spanish wouldn't want asshole country back.
16 feet wide? That's wide enough for two cars side by side. One doesn't get spit out of a 16 foot wide pipe. Something's not right here. My BS detector is in full ah-ooga mode.
Oh fuck me you've been smoking some good shit this week.
Title says it all. Everyone's favourite anti-nuke troll is running out of things to troll about.
Nuclear power needs lots of cooling because it's just a giant steam engine, and like all heat engines on the planet, requires cooling. Any power plant with the same capacity in such a small area would require the same thing.
Caostal nuclear power is very vulnerable to sea level rise. But, in Floral it is doubly so. Their customers all have too move away as well. http://news.nationalgeographic...
For those of you making up your own "atomic/nukular blow job" jokes:
STOP IT!!!
I think that an unsigned long int should hold that data without much risk of overflow.
I've played that game before, but never in SCUBA gear.
[ Happy to hear he's okay. ]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Not so. Nuke are about 30% efficient, coal plants around 45% and gas plants around 60%. Other forms of generation need less cooling. Gas can get away with air cooling.
Rubbish. For a start there was no powerful intake. This was a pipe leading to a pond that as a result of being connected to the ocean was tidal. Exactly the same setup would exist for any other heat based power station.
Get sucked into a nuclear power plant cooling water intake, but if I do, what ICD code do I use?
This article sounds exactly like the origin story of a superhero.
A stupid, Florida superhero, but superhero nonetheless.
You are welcome on my lawn.
And the energy density of uranium versus methane is how many million, again?
That, and the fact that there are no water turbines in a nuclear plant.
It will also have an effect on the water quality of the lagoon. Depending on the size of the lagoon I expect most water movement comes from the tidal movement of the sea. Remove that and you will have problems of it just getting nasty.
Low efficiency of nuclear plants is due to their lower operational temperature, not due to fuel density. Radioactive core heats the water to lower temperature comparing to other types of thermal plants.
No sig today.
Gas plants can be air cooled. The are twice as efficient.
How can he be sucked in (this underpressure has to be pumped by some engine) and still come out in open air (no pressure)?
"the pipe spat him out" This is silly - probably a hoax.
Getting sucked into pipes usually occurs near large passenger ships. They pay hell getting bodies out of their AC cooling systems. But that nuke is next to my home. Frankly, there is no easier way to send a reactor into an emergency than plugging up its cooling water intake. Imagine what a terrorist with a couple of self inflating life-boats could have done. Home- Land Security needs to be all over those intake pipes.
How cool would that be? Do it again!
Might be just me but you probably don't want to generate the steam that directly runs the turbines from the fission reaction and instead transfer that heat through another medium. And this would lower the efficiency. But if you want a more efficient power plant by all means leave out this step. I'm sure that it's not important.
There is nothing unique to gas systems being air cooled. Pebble bed reactors are also gas cooled. However because of nuclear fears they have not been developed to the degree she could have been. HTR-10, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., is an air cooled research reactor in China for example.
As for efficiency, how are you measuring it? Sure the % of heat produced converted to steam is higher in a gas plant but that isn't really a relevant way to compare the two designs. I would have gone with cost per Mwh which seems a reasonable comparison, in which case some gas systems and cheaper than nuclear and some are more expensive.
No, that would degrade the fuel and warp the control rods. There are engineering imparatives that keep the efficency so pitiful.
Le Cun told WPTV that he thought he was going to be chopped into tiny bits when he hit a turbine at the end of the 16-foot-wide, quarter-mile tube
...because he'd just been watching View to a Kill.
Christopher Le Cun was boating off
Well, if SCUBA diving turns you on that much... oh, wait. Boating. Sorry, I don't have my contact lenses in.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
What makes you think that? How do you think they drive cooling water into the reactor?
Gas cooled and air cooled are two completely different things. You get that, right?
How do you think they drive cooling water into the reactor?
With a pump.
A turbine converts flow energy to mechanical energy by driving a shaft. A compressor/pump (whether it has rotating blades or not) does the reverse.
If the fluid is a gas, it's called a compressor; if liquid, it's called a pump.
Not quite. Simple cycle gas plants are only about 30 to 45% efficient. They only become 60% efficient when you add a steam turbine and turn them into a combined cycle plant. Combined cycle most definitely uses water for cooling.
Trump will do away with that Second Law shit.
Yes I do. However as I said there is nothing unique to gas generation that allows you to air cooling it. All it is is steam is taken from the generator and put into a large water / air condenser system, then the water is fed back into the reservoir before going through the heater again. It is just a sealed water system and could be applied to any thermal generation system.
For example the Guangdong Zhongshan power station is an air cooled coal plant.
All it would take for that system to be applied to a nuclear plant is for the cooling system to be able to handle the thermal load generated. The Loviisa plant in Finland is air cooled, though it has redundant water cooling towers as part of its emergency systems. That plant was built in the 70s.
This never happened. There are so many layers of bullshit here that it is hard to get started shoveling through it.
Firstly, plant cooling water intakes are protected with screens to prevent any wildlife and debris entrainment, so the "quarter mile flume ride" is bullshit. The screens are designed so tiny fish fry that might impinge on them can swim away.
Even if the intakes weren't screened (impossible), the water goes into a condenser which is separate from the steam loop that drives the turbine. Said scuba diver would not be talking to anyone as his ass would plug up the condenser, which would force the plant to shut down, and he'd probably be long dead before they unplugged him. But he'd never be there, because there is a screen system just for this reason.
Source - did contract work in a lot of plants, including nuclear, and am familiar with CE plants like St. Lucie.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Shit like this is marked on navigational charts, and there is a warning buoy. It isn't like this is some new feature either so if you happened not to have updated charts it wouldn't be there, the plant is decades old, your charts have it. Don't have charts? That's on you. Ocean navigation is serious business.
That aside, if you see something and you don't know what it is in the water, or see a buoy and don't know what it signifies, the right answer is to FIND OUT, not to go and look. Get on the radio and see what's up. In this case, even that wouldn't be necessary: This is right off the US coast, well within cellular range. He could have just pulled up maps on his smartphone.
Hopefully his lawsuit gets dismissed out of hand.
Thermal efficency is a pretty standard concept that you should review. As an example, the Magnox reactor, a commercial gas cooled design, ran at about 19% efficiency. It's working fluid was steam and it had to be cooled with water. A combined cycle gas turbine runs at 60% efficiency. It also has to be cooled, but less so, and some are set up for air cooling.
Not all. It does cost something to run the fans but air cooling is a selling point for combined cycle where cooling water is scarce.
Trump will do away with that Second Law shit.
God, like I needed another reason not to vote for that asshole.
Sure, I'll continue living my life without fearing robots, but apparently Trump doesn't want me ordering them to jump into volcanoes for my own amusement.
Last post!
Not all nuclear plants use water cooling either, genius.
That for when the plant is shut down. (Plants face in hands...)
Which ones?
Thermal efficiency is lower on a nuclear reactor than other types of generation. But that is a totally biased way of measuring their efficiency because they naturally suck at it, but it is NOT relevant to the cost of the electricity produced.
Cost per MWh is a much fairer measure. And is a measure that can be applied to all types of power generation equally and easily. If I really wanted to pick a measure which favours nuclear I would say how much fuel per year does your plant use.
Sorry you are correct. It doesn't change the fact though that there is no engineering factor that prevents the use of air cooling. Not that air cooling is particularly important unless you have no access to water. In which case then yeah use a gas system.
The economics really don't work out for nuclear power. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
Uh huh.... http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/a...
The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is a measure of a power source which attempts to compare different methods of electricity generation on a comparable basis. It is an economic assessment of the average total cost to build and operate a power-generating asset over its lifetime divided by the total energy output of the asset over that lifetime. The LCOE can also be regarded as the minimum cost at which electricity must be sold in order to break-even over the lifetime of the project.
Projected LCOE in the U.S. by 2020 (as of 2015)
Power generating technology Minimum Average Maximum
NG: Advanced CC with CCS 93.3 100.2 110.8
Advanced Nuclear 91.8 95.2 101
Gah white space filter killed that comment - just visit the page to see the comparisons between the energy sources.
This was Florida. It's surrounded on three sides by ocean and has no small number of lakes and rivers. Pretty much all of the power plants... nuclear, gas, oil, whatever... are built adjacent to some source of water so they can use it for cooling. If there's a problem here, it's with the intake design and the stupidity of the diver, not the source of heat.
Imagine all the people...
Best to work with the more recent data....
The intake is big because the plant is inefficient.
Right, so you want to ignore something written in April, 2015 by multiple people and a huge organisation as being too out of date in exchange for a paper written by one person with a particular focus on moving to solar and wind?
Cliver Cussler should be able to skip hiring at least two ghost writers this week.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
EIA is known to have trouble with change.
So what about them things that convert the steam from the reactor to mechanical energy to then drive the generators ?
This sounds ultimately terrifying.
That's what I call terror.
There apparently was a gate that he would have had to bypass. You might slowly drift towards the intake at that point, but you wouldn't get stuck against it. At worst he'd just have to kick off away from it. If fish and debris got stuck against them it'd just jam the whole thing up and ruin it, no?
The bars are where there is no pressure, kind of a catch though, he probably went through them thinking there was no pressure.
Jokes aside, what kind of reporting is this? "The turbine never came..." What on earth was happening, then? If there was no turbine, what was moving the water? If there was a turbine, why didn't it pull the water into itself?
It's sort of like saying "He fell off the roof, sixty floors up, and thought he was going to be killed when he hit the ground, but the ground never came."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
That's on a completely separate circuit, and that water does not leave the plant unless there's some critical emergency. It's radioactive, see.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Note carefully:
The LCOE values for dispatchable and nondispatchable technologies are listed separately in the tables, because caution should be used when comparing them to one another.
For meaningful comparisons, the levelized avoided costs of electricity (LACE) must also be considered. Furthermore, the "advanced nuclear" mentioned is conventional technology being deployed now. Next generation molten salt reactors have tremendous potential for reducing costs while also increasing safety.
Lower operational temperature is a result of still using solid fuel/water cooled designs. We're stuck cladding the fuel with zirconium, which become flammable/produces hydrogen at embarrassingly low temperatures. MSR/LFTR doesn't have that problem...
To be perfectly honest, all nuclear plants I'm aware of use single-pass water cooling. Palo Verde, for example, uses purified sewage for this.
The closest I remember to an air cooled plant was a planned expansion to Palo Verde that never happened. They were going to put in 2-4 additional reactors, where insufficient water for the cooling would be available. Ergo, they would have had to be purely air cooled*. This would have actually been slightly more energy efficient, but would have required a much more extensive, and therefore more expensive cooling system.
*Not counting the closed circuit inner loop, of course.
I don't read AC A human right
Just a bit of clarification:
In a pressurized water reactor there are typically 3 loops: primary, secondary and "feedwater".
Both the primary and secondary loops are closed... but can hardly be considered "radioactive". The water in the primary system will develop a small (very small) amount of tritium that will build up. Tritrium does have a medium length half-life (about 12 years) so you wouldn't want to drink a bunch of it... but it also won't be radioactive for long. However, the amount in the primary system is really small.
Other reactor types (like CANDU) that use heavy water (deuterium) are much more likely to develop tritium... but even then it is a tiny amount (a few kilograms a year in thousands of tons of water).
The primary and secondary are really closed because they're at high pressure and have carefully controlled chemistry (to keep down corrosion and, in the case of the primary system, to help control the nuclear reaction using boron (dissolved boric acid).
The feedwater (which is what comes from rivers/lakes/oceans typically) is simply there to condense the steam generated in the secondary system back into water after it flows through the turbine.
Do the turbines in a hydroelectric plant magically become pumps and non-turbines when run in reverse?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
That's exactly what's done in Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . They make up about 1/3 of the nuclear power plants in the U.S. in fact.
They have their own plusses and minuses vs Pressurized Water Reactors. Chiefly: they don't need complex heat exchangers between the primary and secondary systems that a PWR has... because there is only one system! But: they have a lower power density... mainly due to running at lower pressures and lower water densities (which actually reduces the fission reaction through a loss of moderation).
I'm not sure what side you're arguing here. There are two main types of Light-Water Reactors (LWRs): Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs) which run at ~15 MPa and keep liquid water in the core and Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs) that run at a lower pressure (~7 MPa) and boil the water straight to steam in the reactor core.
In the US about 2/3 of our reactors are PWRs and about 1/3 BWRs.
Both types of reactors have engineering challenges... but the efficiency really comes down to the laws of thermodynamics.
Inefficient? In what sense? Thermodynamically?
You do realize that nuclear reactors are only refueled every _year and a half_... right? I would call that WAY more "efficient" than the line of coal cars that needs to flow through a coal plant every day....
Thermodynamic efficiency means nothing when your fuel source has _millions_ of times more energy in it...
If you're going to continue to post FUD about nuclear power... you should at least educate yourself. Go take a "101" style coarse in nuclear engineering at your nearest university...
In the meantime, here are some reactor designs that don't use water for cooling or moderation:
Lead Cooled Fast Reactor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Gas Cooled Fast Reactor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Sodium Cooled Fast Reactor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Pebble-bed reactors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Probably you can just open the grate on the intake. It is designed to keep accidental debris out, not someone opening it on purpose. I saw one being worked on at a hydroelectric plant and the shield on it looked basically like a locked gate.
It impacts how much cooling water you need or if you need it at all. The plant in Florida suck a lot of water and should be engineer to avoid catching divers.
Those are all illegal.
The economics for wind don't work out either once you include operational and (de)commisioning costs. And those for solar panels are based on some miss understandings. (e.g. unless we boost their efficiency CdTe will get displaced, and CdTe demand won't stay high forever). In the case of a well designed nuclear plant one could remove the reactor at the expected end-of-life and throw in a new one. But paranoid idiots such as yourself prevent us (the engineers who build these sort of things) from letting these plants reach their full potential. And then you go off shouting *zomgr inefficient!!!!!!!!!! Dangerous!!!!!111!!!1111"* (Yes, you do sound like that.) It's a sad reflection on reality that uninformed know-it-alls have so much influence.
No, the intake is big to lower the velocity of the water.
Illegal where? No design is "illegal" in the US... provided you fully qualify its safety to the satisfaction of the NRC.
Many of those types of reactors have been built and are operating in other parts of the world.
So far, in the US, there hasn't been enough economic insentive to drive the adoption of anything beyond light-water reactors... but that doesn't mean the other designs are "illegal".
I have a house in PCB, Florida. I am at it right now. I've even got my own private beach and live rather close to a few gated communities and things like that.
I'm not going to nitpick but I will take a minute to point out that this behavior you describe does not, in fact, appear to be limited by age.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
It's not magic, it's just the definition of words.
Do the turbines in a hydroelectric plant magically become pumps and non-turbines when run in reverse?
Not magically, but by changinge their function. Duh.
Just like an electric motor becomes a generator if you use it to convert motion to electrical current.
It isn't the diver's safety that's the worst with this story. Imagine hostile divers sabotaging the cooling system.
The diver should never have reached the inside of the plant.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
The guy should be thankful to be alive given his actions. I suspect his lawsuit will end in stricter penalties being imposed on any future visitors to the area. Turn it into a full blow felony for even loitering in the area.
That said, doesn't this show a major security weakness at the plant? How far are these holding ponds from the reactors? Scary.
There are pumps in that artificial lagoon that would tear a diver right up, but the pumps are protected by traveling screens and/or trash racks intended to keep out unwanted material- like a diver.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Yes but no one does that because the design of pumps and turbines except in special rare cases which are not efficient does not take into account operation in both directions.
I assume you're talking about hydrostorage plants? You'll find they have a different device pumping water up than they do extracting energy from water coming down.
On the other hand on the electrical world a motor and a generator are indeed the same thing.
Not so. Nuke are about 30% efficient, coal plants around 45% and gas plants around 60%. Other forms of generation need less cooling. Gas can get away with air cooling.
Nope. 60% efficient gas plants do not get away with air cooling. Gas turbine only ones do but they're not 60% efficient. Combined cycle plants reach 60%, but they rely on a Rankine cycle at the low end and of course low temperature heat rejection, for which the requirements are precisely the same as coal. It's possible but really bloody hard to air cool them, so they're almost always water cooled.
Also, you can build nukes with a thermal efficiency of 41% commercially. I know this because the UK has a number of them operating. The reason we don't build any more is more to do with the political establishment than anything else. Basically the government hates home grown industry and would always rather buy from someone else, ANYONE else than build up an industry here. So they decided to abandon all the home grown tech and buy American in the early 70s. Now of course we've lost the industry and can't buy locally any more.
This pattern has been repeated many times. Been done with rockets and trains too. The trains was one of the worst. Spend taxpayer money to develop the tech locally. Can it for political reasons. Sell it cheap. Then buy back trains made with that tech at great expense that still don't perform as well.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It was. It wasn't engineered to avoid catching divers who moored to the warning buoy, dived against instructions and defeated the grille. I'm OK with that. It didn't impact the plant and it only is a risk to people to go out of their way to fuck with it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
... The Atomic Scubaman!!!
Wow, solar thermal is so bad... Also, not to discount nuclear power (I totally support it), but something tells me the cleanup costs aren't included. Then again, the cleanup costs are a clusterfuck thanks to the government. Killing Yucca Mountain and having made little progress on cleaning up the worst contamination sites (like Hanford for example) are entirely to blame on Congress. But by all means, let's make college education "free" instead of using money to clean up the environmental disasters our parents and grandparents left for us.
How about we clear off the list of superfund cleanup sites before we start working on global warming?
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Most super hero origin stories begin ?
We don't do breeders. They are one of the chief caused of weapons proliferation.
What super powers did he gain from the whole experience?
It isn't the diver's safety that's the worst with this story. Imagine hostile divers sabotaging the cooling system. The diver should never have reached the inside of the plant.
You can imagine such a thing, but actually pulling it off would be quite difficult, and even if you did the plant would remain perfectly safe as this cooling system is for the electrical turbine generator steam cycle, just like in a fossil plant, not the safety related heat removal systems.
Breeders are not a weapons proliferation problem... in fact, breeders are often cited as being "proliferation resistant"... especially thorium breeders.
But what does that have to do with what we were talking about?
You are way out of your depth. http://science.slashdot.org/co...
.. A wind turbine would have probably chopped him to pieces.
You mean the STEAM turbines?
It wasn't a nuclear plant that sucked in the diver. It was a current created by an artificial lagoon being drained below sea level and the sea via gravity refilling it. That is why there was no impeller or turbine to chew him up.
This what I love about this site, someone here is intelligent enough to explain this. (thanks)
I never understood why more reactors don't have a deuterium / tritium separation side business. I think a lot of the raw tritium for fusion research comes from research reactor pool separations, but I have never heard of the commercial plants doing this. Is there just too much water to get a reasonably high amount of elevated hydrogen isotopes in commercial reactors?
You should watch fewer movies, and read the article more often.
They are pretty common. Here is one from my neck of the woods. http://www.power-technology.co...
There are huge gratings in front of the intake to stop log, divers and other "trash" being sucked in. Depending on the design of the plant he might have been stuck at the grating due to the suction but I do not know of any plants the has that high of a flow at the "filters" though.
There are this thing called "fuel damage" it will send radioactive stuff into the water. The water in itself will not become radioactive (since the contaminants from the fuel does not dissolve into H2O) but there will be radioactive particles in the water. No plant has ever (as far as I know) run for any extent of time without fuel damage.
RIPLEY ......
They're right under the primary heat exchangers.
GORMAN
Shit! (into mike)
Apone, collect magazines from everybody. We can't have any firing in there.
This unique sig is intended to make this user more recognisable.
Having done repair work at St. Lucie; I've been down to the intakes.
The actual plant intake is down a canal and has a mechanical fish screen over the intake so fish aren't sucked in to foul the pumps.
There is no way the diver was anywhere near the intake if his path was as he described. Did the bozo go into the sewage treatment plant down the road from the nuclear plant?
NRRPT/RCT
That plant is ugly on the skyline.
Printed circuit board??? Wtf?
In a "pumped storage" system (e.g. Dinorwyg, Cruachan), yes they do. But it's not magic, its engineering.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
> "average total cost to build and operate a power-generating asset over its lifetime divided by the total energy output of the asset over that lifetime. "
ctrl-f disposal, shutdown, cleanup
nada
I have no idea. But in the US nuclear licensees are required to hold decommissioning funds which average $300-$400 million. Given these are part of the operational cost of the plant I expect they are counted. Whether that is enough for cleanup is a different question of course.
The nuke plant I work at has an 1,800' exclusion zone around our plant out into the water. Looking at the NOAA chart for St. Lucie - I see no such zone... kinda surprising. But in any event - we have screenhouses for each of our units with mechanical screens that keeps stuff like fish, seaweed, etc... from getting sucked into our cooling / condensing system. If someone does make it past the screens - his demise will be fairly quick as the impellers used to pump water into the plant are pretty unforgiving.
"...he thought he was going to be chopped into tiny bits when he hit a turbine..."
wow... I guess this idiot doesn't know the difference between a NUCLEAR power plant and a HYDROELECTRIC power plant???
Trump will do away with that Second Law shit.
Yeah, it's not like it's an amendment. Those are laws of nature, you know. At least the second one.
Feedwater is part of the secondary system. The water used to condense steam exiting the turbine generators and transporting the energy to the ultimate heat sink is typically called Circulating Water.
He did it so he could sue the plant. He knew full well what would happen and he would survive because of his background And , yes , he is suing the plant. This pussy needs to thrown in jail