Tales of Darlington - 1

I thought I'd go into a little series about excavations at Darlington, which was our site of exceptional rock. Unlike the hell at Bruce, which 'allegedly' is on the hanging wall of the biggest fault zone in ENA: the Grenville Front. Of course, I don't have any proof of that, not enough to put in front of a legal panel, but then again, nobody has the proof to go against the main presentation. That's the problem when 'burden of proof' is placed on the outsiders. But I digress. :)

On a happier note, we look at the superb rock of Darlington (and Wesleyville). Once we had all the till stripped off, we could stand on the bedrock and look around. The diamond cores had revealed a limestone of remarkable tightness and perfectly level beds. In fact, the major rock layers (marker beds) hardly varied from a slightly tilted billiard table.

The rock on top was neat. It was the Whitby shale, which was a very oily shale, with unbelievable fossils. In fact, I think it's to our eternal shame that we didn't have fossil-people there for the excavation. Construction workers found museum pieces of large trilobytes, and one idiot even spray-painted his with gold paint. I, myself, only picked up some small partials. Perhaps, with the new plant, they'll be nicer.

We had to blast in big holes and trenches into the rock, for the reactor foundations, and the water intakes. Two tunnels had to be blasted out under the lake, one for the intake, and one for the outflow diffuser. The funny story is that we were going ahead for just the intake, when legend has it that they discovered one pregnant whitefish, perhaps the last in Lake Ontario. (There are billions of them up in the North Channel!). Suddenly, at the last minute we had to design the outflow tunnel, after the intake blasting had been started.

The rock was interesting to walk over, since I don't recall that the boreholes had told us about a 1 metre broken zone at the top. This comprised mostly of solid plates of rock, underlain by about 5 cm of injected sand. It was clearly glaciation-induced, much like the disturbed rock of the Rouge Valley, although there was one crazy guy who said it was an earthquake fault!