Humor Random Comments Thread

[Artlav]

River temperature

Could you disperse all the horror scenarios of fish soup and steam clouds that comes to imagination from this phrase as seen without any clarifications?

 

[Loru]

Could you disperse all the horror scenarios of fish soup and steam clouds that comes to imagination from this phrase as seen without any clarifications?

Ok. Now I see PC along with entire crew on the river bank chilling fuel rods by dipping them in river using fishing rods.

 

[PhantomCruiser]

Sure!

There are essentially 3 main water systems that we use; Primary Water (this is the water inside the reactor used for cooling) is a closed system. Or at least at closed as we can make it. There is some leakage, but it is rigorously monitored and identified. And it is an awful small amount, like less than a teaspoon per hour or something like that... it's shiny-pipe stuff so not my department (Chemistry and RadCon take care of that).

The condensate system is pumped through the steam generators to generate (eventually) superheated steam. It's also a more-or-less closed system.

This steam is fed to the turbine where it then passes across tubes below the turbine in the condenser (where it accumulates in the hotwell as condensate to repeat the cycle).

In order to have an efficient transfer of energy from steam to condensate, we use river water from upstream of Watts Bar dam that is piped through the condenser. As river temperature increases efficiency decreases. And why power plants can crank out several more megawatts during the winter months.

There are other factors as well; tube leaks, clogged tubes (things have been known to get past strainers), backpressure, condenser vacuum, environmental conditions (big thunderstorm - drop in atmospheric pressure) etc.

Anyway... after the river water (called condenser circ water or CCW) passes through the condenser it is pumped over to the cooling tower. Here there are lift pumps that send it up into the interior to be sprayed onto some diffusers to eventually rain down into a basin under the tower (oddly enough called a cooling tower basin). This water will eventually flow wind up back in the Tennessee River (normally spending some time in one holding pond or another. The big plume rising up out of our cooling towers is nothing more than water vapor. This water here participated in the transfer of energy as one medium (steam rolling the turbine at around 770 degrees F) to another (condensate in the hotwell at around 94 F).

The water has to be held on site because we are only permitted to discharge water once it's cooled down to some temp that I don't care to know. We cannot just discharge it to the river, that temperature shock would kill off some wild life and fishes, clams and the greenies would just love that...)

So there you have it. I'll admit it's over-simplified, but it'd need a thread of it's own to explain fully.

 

[Urwumpe]

We cannot just discharge it to the river, that temperature shock would kill off some wild life and fishes, clams and the greenies would just love that...)

Also, some other algae just love that warm water, which is a good way to turn a clean river into a brown-green stinking soup. Nobody likes that, especially because it also ruins the flow of the river eventually.

(And much worse than the temperature itself is the fact that the water can hold less molecular oxygen dissolved, when warmer)

 

[PhantomCruiser]

Well I may have jinxed it. The good news is that all the safety systems work.

Almost 3 hours ago "B" phase transformer blew up. Unit tripped offline and all systems worked as designed. We've got a lot of emegency services people on site, the transformer was full of mineral oil, so there's no PCB to clean up, but still it's a mess.

The silly thing is we were going to trip from 100% this Friday to test all these same systems, but since it was unplanned the NRC said it doesn't count and we can't take credit for it. But like I say, all systems worked flawlessly. Unit 2 is in mode 3 and holding, turbine and feed pumps are on turning gear. We just need some direction, parts and a clear path.

Still nothing from the Powers regarding the fatality at Groende. I'm thinking that since it wasn't related to the primary, that noone cares. Sad really, a life lost like that and it hasn't made it to any safety notices. :beathead:

 

[jedidia]

Almost 3 hours ago "B" phase transformer blew up.

Please clarify "blew up"! :lol:

 

[MaverickSawyer]

Rapid unplanned disassembly. At speed.

 

[PhantomCruiser]

Well, according to the security video there was a spark first on the 161 side of the step-up transformer. This was immediately followed by a lot of flame and smoke. Followed by more flame as the mineral oil was atomized and ignited.

So to put in managerial speak it was a post ingnition followed by a spontanious and rapid disassembly?

 

[jedidia]

Oh... so it actually blew up. I thought it might be in-speak for a serious malfunction that does not necessarily involve rapid disassembly accompanied by loud noises.

Like, when the sysadmin says "The server blew up", he doesn't usually mean that the thing went physically kablooey, just that the whole solution stopped working from one moment to the next.

 

[Urwumpe]

Still nothing from the Powers regarding the fatality at Groende. I'm thinking that since it wasn't related to the primary, that noone cares. Sad really, a life lost like that and it hasn't made it to any safety notices. :beathead:

Yeah, not much here as well, it took a while until the national news noticed the event (2 days ago). It was none of the 247 significant nuclear events at that nuclear power plant that had to be reported to the government in the past years.

The monthly reports of the nuclear power plant events are also only available for June 2016, the following months are not yet published.

http://www.bfs.de/DE/themen/kt/ereignisse/berichte/monatsberichte/monatsberichte.html


Still there is a criminal investigation running in the background.

---------- Post added at 11:09 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:08 AM ----------

Like, when the sysadmin says "The server blew up", he doesn't usually mean that the thing went physically kablooey, just that the whole solution stopped working from one moment to the next.

Those had been times, when servers actually DID blow up...

 

[Thunder Chicken]

The water has to be held on site because we are only permitted to discharge water once it's cooled down to some temp that I don't care to know. We cannot just discharge it to the river, that temperature shock would kill off some wild life and fishes, clams and the greenies would just love that...)

So there you have it. I'll admit it's over-simplified, but it'd need a thread of it's own to explain fully.

Sections 316 a (cooling water discharges) & b (cooling water intakes) of the Clean Water Act. I worked with a consulting company that helped plants meet these requirements.

The best fix to lower discharge temperature (316 a) is to put more cooling water through the condenser. However, you risk sucking up all the aquatic life on the intake side (316 b). You either need to put big intake screens out to exclude wildlife ($$$), build closed loop cooling towers ($$$$), or de-rate your plant (WTF! :huh.

A lot of big plants have been whacked by trying to get into compliance with these rules, and then they got double whacked with sulfur and mercury emissions remediation, then finally CO2 rules. Coal in particular pretty much dried up because of this triple whammy.

Natural gas Brayton cycle plants are king now because it they produce less CO2 per unit of energy, have less pollutants, and have lower cooling requirements.

 

[Urwumpe]

Natural gas Brayton cycle plants are king now because it they produce less CO2 per unit of energy, have less pollutants, and have lower cooling requirements.

And have a much better efficiency when combining a gas turbine with a steam turbine. The few modern combined cycle plants in Germany are pretty, but expensive.

 

[PhantomCruiser]

I think the GE7FA are pushing 65% or so. The ones we bought were 2 on 1 (2 gas turbines with 1 steam turbing) generating 560ish MW. The simple cycle 7B turbines are (roughly) 80MW each, but are much less efficient.

When I first started with this bunch of morons I was in Mississippi at a simple cycle plant (Kemper). Those were the days! I had it made and didn't realize it. That was 13 years ago. I'm happy to be closer to home though, but it was a slight pay cut.

One of the things that I have as an option if I finally decide to speak my mind here is that I'm very familiar with the environmental monitoring equipment of a gas turbine plant. I don't know how many hours I have under my belt rebuilding/reconditioning NOX probes.

 

[Evil_Onyx]

Some local (to me) news that may bring a chuckle to some,

Police Land Rover pulled apart outside station - BBC

Thieves have stripped the doors and bonnet off a marked Land Rover outside a police station.

 

[PhantomCruiser]

We had to idle unit 1 in order to inspect the adjacent bus duct for damage. Looks like all is well so unit 1 will roll back up some time tonight. So here i sit waiting for the phone to ring to go support this.

Waiting on the phone...

And we're waiting.


Does time pass like this for normal people? Quite boring if you ask me.

Gone on walkabout twice now. Nobody seems to have noticed. If it weren't against the rules I'd have brought a blanket and a pillow (can't intentionally sleep at work, nodding off and faceplanting into the keyboard isn't forbidden but is very much frowned upon)

 

[jedidia]

I am sitting in school listening to a lecture about UML, when suddenly one of the examples slaped dystopia in my face:

[FONT="Lucida Console"]
                                
| Company |1-------------------0..*| Person |
                      [/FONT]

EDIT: Argh, no monotype font, simplifying this a bit...

 

[orb]

Argh, no monotype font, simplifying this a bit...

Test 1234567890 iiIIWM

Test 1234567890 iiIIWM

Both [font=monospace] and [code] look like monospaced for me (but they will use different monospaced typefaces on different OSes and browsers, also with exactly "Monotype" typeface being used on some Linuxes, if not "Liberation Mono" or "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono", while "Courier New" being the default on Windows). :shrug:

 

[Artlav]

Quite boring if you ask me.

Speaking of boring, i just read that Watts Bar is the only reactor in the world that is used for producing commercial He-3 at the moment, the previous sources being the aging of nuclear weapons.
That stuff goes for $17000 or so per gram.

Is that something a typical worker at the plant knows about?

 

[PhantomCruiser]

Oh yes. We all know about it.

As far as operations and maintenance it makes little to no impact. We just have some extra equipment here and there.

 

[Artlav]

On a random note, who here have heard of something called a "starbow"?

The new story in Spaceway involves slower-than-light interstellar flight, so i've been adding relativity effects recently.
A naive implementation of the doppler shift yields a colorful effect of the stars contracting into a rainbow-like pattern ahead of the ship. A pretty sight, described in many an old school sci-fi story.

Sadly, some research later it turned not to be real - a relativistically doppler shifted blackbody would still be a blackbody, only with a different temperature.
The result is dimmer stars behind, and brighter and bluer stars ahead, no rainbows.

As one article's author put it, "We hope that this presentation will spell the end of the `starbow`. At the same time we regret its demise. We have nothing so poetic to offer as its replacement, only better physics."

This being a game, i'm considering leaving it as an option.
What do you think?


At 0.9c, looking mostly forwards.

Starbow version:

Real version:

Standing still reference:

At 0.5c, looking left, with the galaxy behind for emphasis.

Starbow version:

Real version:

Standing still reference: