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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...
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."
"#FloridaMan arrested for attempted impersonation of reactor coolant in order to penetrate nuclear facility"
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?
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.
Title says it all. Everyone's favourite anti-nuke troll is running out of things to troll about.
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.
This article sounds exactly like the origin story of a superhero.
A stupid, Florida superhero, but superhero nonetheless.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
How cool would that be? Do it again!
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.
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.
Trump will do away with that Second Law shit.
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.
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!
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
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?
Lets run some rough numbers to see how plausible it is for someone to be forced down a 16 foot wide pipe and spat out the other end.
16 feet is about 5 meters. Lets assume it's a circular pipe with diameter 5m (radius 2.5m) 2.5 squared is about 6 times pi gives us a cross sectional area of about 20 square meters.
An olypic swimmer apparently does about 1.5 meters per second. A diver has flippers which will help make them go faster but they also have a load of gear on their back and they probablly aren't an olympic level swimmer. Lets assume our diver can swim at 1 meter per second (pretty sure this will be an overestimate). If the water flows faster than the diver can swim then the diver will be dragged along with the water flow and spart out the end of the pipe.
! meter per second in out pipe would mean 20 cubic meters of water per second or 72000 cubic meters per hour.
Lete assume the tidal range is 3m (number plucked from averaging the top and bottom of the middle category in the wikipedia article) and assume the tide flows in and out twice per day so it takes 6 hours to completely flow in one direction. To keep the maths simple lets assume that the tide flows in/out at a constant rate. to get 72000 cubic meters per hour would require a surface area of 144000 square meters.
That's a decent sized lake for sure but it doesn't seem implausible to me.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.