From: jgd@dixie.com (John De Armond)
Subject: Re: Nuclear Power and Climate Change
Date: Tue, 05 Jan 93 04:45:54 GMT
Organization: Dixie Communications Public Access.  The Mouth of the South.

yodaiken@chelm.cs.umass.edu (victor yodaiken) writes:

>>Ahhh, Yackadamn's back!!!!  Just like a persistent case of the Clap.

>Your postings make it seem like your problem is probably tertiary syph
>instead, but you should get qualified medical treatment in anycase..

C'mon Yack.  You can do better than that.  Oh... Maybe you can't.

>This is typical of your level of either honesty or understanding, I'm not
>sure which. You project costs to be trivial, but on there is zero
>'on the ground' evidence to backup this assertion. Nobody has ever tried
>annealing in any commercial plants, and you the only evidence you 
>provide for your claim is your own personal credibility --  a rather
>valueless item.

True, no pot has ever been annealed in-situ.  Nor has a pot been replaced, 
nor any containment vessel been replaced, nor any site moved.
Why?  Simple.  Because none of these have ever been necessary.  On the 
other hand, things previously declared "impossible" by the armchair
critics have been done with little ado other than fighting the ever-present
anti-nook-kooks.  Things like complete steam generator changeouts (several), 
complete recirc piping changeouts (Plant Hatch) and "impossible to fix" steam 
generator tube damange (TMI-1).  Like the old saying goes, we nukes do hard 
things trivially; the impossible takes a bit longer.

>>As to effectiveness, if you've ever annealed a piece of hardened
>>steel, you know how effective heat is in eliminating stress.  Really
>>does not matter how the stress got there.  

>Look up "extrapolation" in a dictionary.

Hmm, trying to figure out how "extrapolation" would be used here.  Perhaps
Yack just knocked a dictionary off the shelf and that's the word that 
popped out.  Relative to the thread, the pots are typically inductively 
annealed during production.  No extrapolation involved.  The same procedures
will be used, adapted as needed for in-situ work in a rad zone.

I'm trying to attribute some other motive than malicious ignorance to 
your continued claim that something the size of a reactor pot 
can't be economically annealed in place.  A pot is certainly not the 
largest vessel in use.  The metallurgy is nothing special, surely
less complex than that seen in oil refineries.  The only complicating
factor is the radiation environment but that will be dealt with 
in exactly the same way we dealt with it at TMI during the SG refurbs -
chemical flushes, shielding, remote manipulators, robots if necessary,
and short stay times.

>Yankee Rowe was shut down by the NRC, not the utility. And it was
>shut down because of embrittlement. 

Believe what you want, Yack.  I called my friend and colleague yesterday
(Monday) at to chat about Rowe just to make sure my information is up
to date.  He faxed me some of the press releases from the period.
If you'd like to continue this thread, I'm willing but your guessing
and imagining just isn't going to work.

>The utility decided not to pour
>an unknown but large sum of money into a speculative process. 

Well half right.  Knowing what should be intuitave to anyone capable
of giving it any thought, the support costs for doing an annealing will
be approximately the same regardless of the unit size.  The utility
correctly decided that the expense was not worth the results.  No 
surprise.  I had hoped that they'd do a demonstration project - perhaps
with DOE assistance but they didn't.

>When it
>comes time, other utilities will make the same judgment with bigger
>reactors -- unless the public gets stuck with the bill.

You mean like customers get "stuck" with the bill for fuel? Or like car
customers get "stuck" for the mfr's research and development costs?

Now, now, Yack.  Dan Rather can get away with that kind of propaganda on
TV; here in this interactive media and with your skillset, you don't
have a chance.

John
-- 
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