mike_s:
question:
Surprised you haven't had "law enforcement" stop by to see what you
are doing. The nuke plant where I live has had it's security go up
big time since 9/11. They are afraid the public would try to blow it up.
by public I mean "terrorists". I'm surprised there aren't any rules
or laws about diving so close to the water take intakes or outtakes.
just curious.
Mike, have you ever been to Oconee? There are two rather large discharge ports that are protected by several rebar screens. You might be able to get your hand up one, but I wouldn't recommend it. Oconee does not have the typical cooling towers you see at other nuclear facilities because the lake water is cool enough to dissipate the heat. I went on a tour of the facility as an environmental science major at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
That is one impressive facility. Nowhere in the cooling process does the water from the lake come in direct contact with the boron-treated water that is used in the reactor areas. (Boron-treated water is "heavier" than regular water, and does not discharge radiation to the other parts of the facility) The water from the lake is then heated via interweving the pipes with lake water with the enclosed boron-treated water. Through that process, the lake water turns to steam, and the steam is what turns the turbines. Once through the turbines, the steam then condenses again, and is discharged back into the lake.
Now, if you want to be diving right up to the discharge ports, I'm sure the police will be pulling out a crispy critter, instead of a potential terrorist. Also, if a terrorist did figure out how to overcome the whole temperature factors, they would then have to work to remove the grates, swim through a couple hundred meters of HOT water, to reach the steam coming from the turbines.
Or, if they managed to find one of the intake ports, at undisclosed locations at the bottom of the lake, they will still have to remove several protective grates along the way to get in the system. Each grate has an array of physical security measures that would prevent divers from getting into the system, even if they are using closed circuit rebreathers. It's physically impossible to do. Oh, did I mention that the water import tubes fork several times and get concentrically smaller and smaller to allow for appropriate heat dispersal to turn the water into steam?
And that is the information they release to the general public. I have no idea of the behind-the-scenes security measures that are kept top-secret within the facility. Plain and simple, there aren't enough underwater cutting tools and batteries to get through the grates along the way of either the intake or discharge ports in one mission, and by the time they got back, repairs would have already been made. If I were on security there, I'd laugh at the attempt, and wait for the guy to die, and retrieve the body when it's flushed out.
