Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Zone 4 Seismic Cabinet


Article

Sure, this has got to be the dullest thing in the world, but it reminds of a story.

For nuclear plants, the toughest thing to buy is misc. shit that has to be seismically qualified. They used to have a bizarre system where they used their own totally weird seismic history, and shook things like hell. Hardly anything ever survived, so if they wanted a simple cabinet like this, they paid a fortune for it.

One thing I promoted there was "If it's good enough for California, it's good enough here." I had all sorts of good industry data behind that, and for a while I was successful in getting stuff like this into the nuclear plants. Then I left, and they erased all trace of me, like Orwell-1984, and I don't know what they do.

But basically, cabinets like this have to undergo a shake test. They are heavily reinforced, and the Zone 4 classification is quite severe, and good enough for the worst places in California. Yep, I saved a lot of money with that.

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