Of no importance whatsoever

 My AI wants to write this.  It's the secret final section of a previous series hidden under this weird title that nobody will notice.

As a physics person, I never say anything to counter the influencers.  I don't go on tv, or get grilled by nasty rightwingers.  I just put out hypotheses, which can be safely ignored for a while.

As we were saying, the nuclear plant foundation was a wonderful mess of deep piles, and the whole thing rests on these.  They used huge well points and massive pumps to keep the lake out of it, and they kept all that pumping going after construction, because who would want it to float away?

Then came an innocent physics person onto the scene.  For legal purposes I can't remember any of this.  Turns out there was a huge transformer on Unit 7 sinking into the ground.  The stiff connectors kept breaking.  What a nuisance!  I was the second opinion to a bunch of very cool influencers (consulting company) who had it all solved.  They found a huge cavity under the transformer concrete pad, and were going to fill it with grout for a cool few mill.

They had to drag me out kicking and screaming -- "Wait a second!  Where did all that dirt go?"  I was clubbed on a the head like an anti-trumper in a rally, and could say no more.  I filed a report, which was burned up in the last records fire.

That was all settled by the fact that they closed the unit.  Unit 7 is right beside one of the massive well point drains, but it was obvious all the dirt couldn't have been sucked out by the pump.  There would have been no pump left (abrasive sand eats pumps).

This was thrown out of my mind, until yesterday, with my brain storm that I had to drug myself out to get to sleep.  Where did the dirt go?  And was the process of dirt removal still active?

When you renovate a house, you're base assumption is that the foundations are solid.  No termites.  That is one hypothesis that can be tested.  That's what the warmies didn't do.  They based their carbon warming on one false hypothesis that was never tested.  Then it went to all the influencers, and floated up on its own.  You shouldn't do that.  It became a fact by consensus and groupthink.

Here's the hypothesis that can be tested.  The huge pumping at the deep well points continued to consolidate the loose soil  Consolidation is the process of making the soil denser by removing the water between the grains.  We do that all the time in geotechnical engineering.  Making the soil denser would be great before you build, but they suspended everything on piles.  The huge soil bulb under the plant became a little dried raisin.   Here is the meat:

Pickering is standing on stilts with a huge cavity underneath.  It is the nuclear plant equivalent of termites.

Not too bad, except that all the soil beside it, is caving into the giant cave.  All the important equipment beside the plant is standing on nothing.  

This can easily be tested by drilling a hole in the basement, and launching a sewer rover to see how bad things are.  I'm guessing a few metres.  With giant sewer monsters.

Again, not too bad, unless you worry about earthquakes.  Stilts are bad enough for the floppy vacuum system, but a reactor on stilts is a giant Bouncy Castle.

This is just a hypothesis.  You can't condemn it with influencer shouting.  You have to test it.  I think it is a good hypothesis that follows all the laws of physics.  They do drilling for new roadwork, why not this?  The bounciness of the reactors can be tested with seismometers.  It should be down a factor of 10 from the surface, but my secondary hypothesis is that the stilts make it as bouncy as the surface.  This violates the seismic design, but it could be wrong.

No media can write about hypotheses, and the need for testing.  Everything they say violates the laws of physics.  So neat.  So most likely, the termites in the basement will be ignored.

I digress -- they renovated the church near me, but when they took out the floor, the giant beams from monster trees of long ago were rotten with termites.  Could have done an investigation before.

ps. the real termites are the bacteria on exposed piles.  They are meant to be in no-oxygen soil.  Those piles are probably sloughing off huge hunks of rust.  That puts a damper on making it a go-cart track.

pps. nobody ever tests any hypotheses.  The Scientific Method is in the past.  It's all yelling and trying to get people fired.  This is the reason for all our disasters recently.  Lots to write about.

more - Feb 3, 2024.  This is a popular post.  I threw this out of my brain because it is so horrible.  Luckily, it's all physics, and has the popularity of ts porn - who wants to see that?