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« on: September 14, 2018, 03:17:17 PM »
I heard from a retired eng that Oyster Creek nuclear power plant is shutting down early. I know - for everyone else this isn't any kind concern, but for a certain population, it was the reactor that many of us cut our teeth on. My first visit to Oyster Creek was right after college. They(along with FermiLabs in IL) were kind of a training ground for people new to the nuclear industry. I was working on some of the radiation monitoring stations, and did a few jumps in the reactor bldg there, and learned a ton of how things in the field work compared to the theory in school. Some Navy guys got their start at Oyster Creek too, but they also have their own training track through the Naval facilities.
Oyster Creek is one of the old style reactors, called a boiling water type. There is no intermediate thermal exchange with the water from the reactor to the turbine, as with a more modern pressure water reactor. The Rankine cycle is typically used to determine efficiency of a reactor, and the guys at GE did an excellent job with Oyster Creek. It always ran pretty clean, and would do around 35% or better on the scale, which is meaningful in terms of energy conversion. Pressure water are not as efficient, but there are reasons that they sort of displaced the boiling circuit.
Will be kind of sad to see it shut down. A lot of people relied on that unit to power their homes and businesses. Most people never new it was there, because it didn't have the typical cooling towers we associate with modern reactor plants. Back in the day, we were hot spit because even though it was a single unit reactor, our uptime was pretty remarkable. I never really got comfy with the idea that the pressure water reactors were any better at containing radiation. Due to the complexity, and added valving, pumping, and heat exchangers, I always found the PWRs to be more hassle to control. The feedback mechanisms for modulating power output on the BWR were dead simple, basically a big throttle to maintain constant pressure ratio in the reactor, and condenser loops.
After leaving Oyster Creek, I had the 'pleasure' of going to Peach Bottom plant. It was a derelict, and everything was screwed up there. The people at Peach Bottom were the worst I've had to work with. Then on to Three Mile island, and finally back to the west coast and some of the stuff there. Good times. I made a stop at a test reactor in CO(you know where) which used a plasma-kind of gunk called Uranium Hexafloride as the fuel. Imagine a slurry that was; Spontaneously fissile, spontaneously combustible in air, under pressure,and extremely caustic. All the kind of stuff one wants in a slurry paste. Thankfully, their funding ran out before they really crapped up pretty parts of the state.
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