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Aug. 29, 2005 For a few months in 1981, I worked in the engineering department on the site of the South Texas Project Nuclear Power Plant, about 20 miles from Bay City, Texas and 90 miles from Houston. The owners of the facility were a number of Texas electrical power suppliers, most important among whom was Houston Lighting and Power Company. The general contractor, responsible for engineering and construction, was Brown and Root, in the days before it was called Halliburton, Brown and Root. The man who hired me, though I knew the position was to be only temporary, assured me that I could look forward to about 5 years of employment, but this was not the case. He did not explain that Houston Lighting and Power Company had been growing increasingly dissatisfied with Brown and Root’s performance. The original cost estimate had been exceeded several times over and delays had caused the project to drag way beyond what the schedule had anticipated. It was for this reason that I worked there only briefly, for Brown and Root was expelled from the project eventually, with Bechtel Corporation taking over. Inasmuch as I had no seniority, it seemed unlikely that B and R would transfer me to another project or that Bechtel would hire me. So when the news broke, I decided not to stay in Bay City to see what would happen, but instead, returned to Atlanta, Georgia, where I had been living before. Anyway, I had been working on power plants for several years, but always in an engineering department, more or less distant from the site. This was the only time that I was actually present on the spot during the construction, and it was an experience worth remembering. Of the 450 power stations in the world, including about 100 in the US, South Texas Project is one of the largest, generating about 2500 megawatts of power. This is enough power for 2,500,000 people—about the size of greater Houston—to run ten 100-watt lightbulbs each, 24 hours a day all year long. There are two containment structures, each measuring perhaps 200 feet in diameter and 300 feet in height, and in these the reactor vessels are housed. The walls and the domes of the containment structures are concrete, heavily reinforced with steel, four feet thick. The concrete floor slabs are also four feet thick or more, heavily reinforced, and resting on a substructure of steel beams to three feet in depth. There is no more impregnable bastion anywhere. The reactors themselves, four or more in each containment structure, are where water is converted to steam at incredible pressures to turn the turbines that generate the power. An electrical current is automatically generated in a conductor moving in a magnetic field, and this is multiplied as many times as the conductor is wound around the armature, which is revolved by the turbine between powerful permanent electromagnets. When I was there not all the reactors had been installed yet, and I could see one of them lying in the yard, a massive piece, 20 feet in diameter and 200 feet long, fabricated from 12-inch-thick steel slab. Obviously such a piece cannot be hauled by rail or truck, but must come aboard a barge. This, of course, entailed the construction of a dock and massive lifting equipment on the local river, which was a navigable tributary of the Colorado or Llano River. The unloading facility in itself was a major project. Inside each reactor there is an incomprehensibly vast and complicated electrical network. Conductors, that is, electrical wires, are laid in troughs called cable trays. In cross-section, each cable tray measures about two feet wide and 9 inches deep, and houses thousands of conductors packed neatly in place, like lengths of dry spaghetti in a cardboard box. There are thousands of lineal feet of these cable trays that coil around inside the containment structure and fill most of the interior. I was told that if it had been necessary to cut through a cable tray to move a piece into the building, and then splice the conductors back together again once the piece was in, it would take a whole year to cut and tag the conductors, and reunite them later. Any thermodynamic cycle, Otto, Carnot, Diesel or other, discards heat, just as a car has an exhaust. There is no way to run a car without an emission and no way to run a power plant without casting out hot water. A reservoir, covering 11 of the 19 square miles of the whole facility, received this water. At the time I was there, this was just a massive earth work. Whether later it was revetted with concrete I don’t know. Brown and Root maintained a fleet of 200 vans to transport the 2400 workers engaged on the facility to and from work, and this had meant building an access highway, complete with bridges over local rivers. So, all in all, it was a gargantuan undertaking to raise such a behemoth of a plant. One interesting aside was that, during excavation of the reservoir, a number of alligators were caught, and they became the company mascots. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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