Bloomington

[UDELBR]

Were it in Texas, it would be nucular.

Hey, Jimmuh Cottah got a degree in nuclear physics and he somehow still managed to say "nukeah"

[Heavy_Metal]

Hopefully it wasn't built by Babcock & Wilcox.......

Although B & W took a lot of the heat for the TMI fiasco... the bulk of what they build is pressure vessels. It's true that one of their valves failed but it was still the human element that caused the majority of the problems.

Wasn't just that power-relief valve, according to two separate accounts I've read- there were some other design flaws that caused false coolant level readings, the alarm printer ran about 30 minutes behind, every time the reactor core exceeded 700°F the printer would print question marks (and it got two or three times that hot), etc etc etc. And of course the operators didn't believe their instruments. Plenty of blame to go around, but B&W's rather poor design contributed to the accident.

One of my customers was a nuclear engineer (now retired) and he wonders how that reactor ever got approved.

[Dan Schultz]

... One of my customers was a nuclear engineer (now retired) and he wonders how that reactor ever got approved.

Nuclear engineers designed TMI. I guess they can't all be great.

I spent quite a bit of time in the B & W plant in Mount Vernon, Indiana.... just a few miles west of here. I wasn't involved in the engineering but the magnitude of the equipment was (is) amazing.

The concept of laying down several layers of rope welds of Inconel the size of one's thumb on the inside of those vessels prior to being machined smooth is amazing. Imagine a vertical lathe where the operator rides in a cab mounted on the tool bit!

Even after the TMI thing The Government kept that place alive because it's one of the few companies capable of building reactors for The Navy and rocket boosters for NASA.

Yup... despite massive amounts of security and quality control... things can still go wrong.