the pig in the pipeline

40 years ago local experts predicted great short falls in electric power
so the big companies commited to simultaneous build of 5 nuclear power plants
one was completed and produces power

and when liquidation of assets of our two local incomplete units began--i was there

i wanted the 400 ton rotary crane intended for reactor building --opening bid was $250K-- no one took it home that day---but i did get the complete control console complex for the german built crane

next auction --scored four pig traps--800 lb german built cannisters dedicated to trapping 12 inch pipeline pigs used to clean and pressure check high pressure lines routed to cooling towers--

each trap had a 44 mm thick viewing window--acrylic-- and fiberglass porus trap--i still use the traps to hold garden hose

first recorded use of pigging was 1870 in Penn oilfield pipelines

pigs have gotten smart and on occasion still squeal as they squiggle thru
iron tubes

pics---

local project

cleaning pig

snooping pig

instrument of payment by bankrupt power supply system to bondholders

"Rotary crane"- It is a "polar crane". The "WHOOPS" fiasco is the result of lying to constituents and failing to maintain the skills to construct such. You were robbed to dismantle and scrap a 90+ % unit out of spite.

Some of those "pigs" shown in your pictures are still used today in the pipeline industry. Now they call that "upstream" in the oilfield. Very little change in them, even the one's for doing NDE. The smaller 'pigs' we use as plugs in the headstock spindles of lathes and work pieces to contain cutting fluids from flooding the shop.

One hundred trillion Zimbabwe dollars = about 15¢ US, right?

We were due to lose a nuke plant about 150 miles north of here Clinton Nuclear Generating Station - Wikipedia

but it looks like we will be subsidizing it instead.

We lost a 500 megawatt coal plant at Wood River a while back and are losing 2/3 capacity at Baldwin (another coal plant, western coal)

wawoodman said:

One hundred trillion Zimbabwe dollars = about 15¢ US, right?

Click to expand...

That was yesterday. Today's valuation is 3¢, forecast is for toilet paper tomorrow.

We built a 16 MW electric process furnace for a chemical plant in Kalama, WA. It replaced an oil fired furnace of slightly smaller capacity. They saved about $2 million bucks the first year in fuel costs after factoring in the $1 million equipment cost. I think the electrical cost was a quarter mil per kW-h. Then Whoops happened and the cost of electricity bumped to maybe 5 cents per kW-h and they wanted to shutdown the heater. Power company came to some sort of arrangement as the infrastructure investment the power company made wasn't paid off yet. Not sure what they are doing now, or if the plant still exists...

John

Tough bacon from those pigs!

Smart pig in the pipe!

Well, a fish anyway.

What's That Swimming in the Water Supply?; Robot Sub Inspects 45 Miles of a Leaky New York Aqueduct - AUVAC

I worked on the Whoops project indirectly - it dawned on someone among the many engineers working on the project that if there was a loss-of-cooling accident and a lot of steam got discharged into the building around the monolithic concrete reactor container that a steel mezzanine going all the way around the containment might get heated up all of a sudden by that steam. I was hired to test a number of alternative solutions for accommodating the resulting relative expansion between the mezzanine and the containment building. The mezzanine was to be attached to a series of steel plates let into the concrete, with right-angle brackets supporting the mezzanine. The tests had to be on full size mockups of the actual steel parts, made by the exact same welding as for the actual plant. I worked out the dimensions of all the necessary bits and pieces and ordered them from an extremely cooperative local supplier ... they arrived in due time strapped in a huge pile on a wooden pallet ... only one tiny piece lost in transit ... and a very competent welder and I set about putting the pieces together in the same room in which they were ultimately to be tested. Somehow I managed to work out a procedure whereby the welder would put 'em together, one little combination at a time, times about a dozen separate mockups ... as the welder didn't want to have to read and memorize a dozen large drawings ... and we got them all built without any rework, with the welds all the right size, right number of passes, etc.

The mechanical tests involved measuring the force to pull each bracket off of its wall plate while simultaneously applying a downward force equal to each bracket's share of the weight of the mezzanine. That meant using a hydraulic jack to apply that 10,000 pound downward force (using an Instron load cell to measure the force) and the adjacent mechanical testing machine to apply and measure the roughly 50,000 pound force to do the ripping-off.

Some of the brackets were attached with deliberately weakened angles only partially welded between the wall bracket and I-beam, and one set of attachments were made with bolts meant to mirror the original design. Most of the intentionally weakened attachments came apart in a rather meek, quiet manner, so by the time the project was in full swing, there were a number of interested bystanders ... who were rather startled to say the least when the strongest (and least desirable !) connection let go with a bang as loud as a gunshot. Imagine the acceleration of about two square feet of 300-pound steel area being suddenly yanked apart with 50 tons of force ...

We got all the data our client wanted, at about twice the original cost estimate, but we did manage to get paid for most of it.

George Langford
georgesbasement