Nuclear waste loonies in Windsor

I was waiting for this. The federal report on the storage of high-level nuclear waste mentioned everybody and their dog as candidates for a deep waste anti-mine. Now a local desperate candidate has whipped up the conspiracy theory that Windsor, Ontario (low on the list of best places to visit!), has been singled out for nuclear waste.

Of course, nearly any town in Ontario could do this, but Windsor is the first! People should be more concerned about real plans! One day, I would be proud to get money for a decent effort, but I haven't seen it yet. I would also like a decent effort for a new nuclear plant (ditto!). Speaking of which, there must be dozen people in Canada, who could lead a new plant, but they are all very retired. I know there is now an effort to knock at their door, and I hope, for their health, that they have a good chuckle! That only leaves me!! :) (and right now I'm at the cottage, enjoying the fall colours).

Nuclear operators clam up about rusty clam shell

Once again nuclear operators are hoisting the old petard of 'meeting standards' with their rusty steel containment. 'It functions as it always has' is their answer. Of course, the dang thing stands there! It's sole purpose is to provide containment in an emergency.

Wouldn't it be refreshing if nuclear operators were open and transparent, instead of being terrified of the sunlight. They could say something like: "We were darn-tootin' sloppy about letting that thing rust halfway through, and we're scaling all the rust off to see what we've got. Pictures will be posted on the Web." As if this will ever happen!

Maybe it's true that this thing was so over-designed that massive rusting could have no effect. Maybe it's like having wooden beams in a cooling tower! All I know is that I spent my whole working life in a cult of secrecy, and I did everything I could to bust it open. Perhaps that's why they don't speak to me anymore... :) (They didn't even speak to me when I was there!)

US utilities can jump-start

This is interesting to starving geologists and geophysicists, like me! (keep clicking on those ads!). In the US, a ton of lobbyist money was poured into redefining the word 'construction'. Now, construction is defined as 'putting the cherry on top', or pouring concrete for the reactor. All the bulldozing, excavation, drilling, tunneling, etc, can be done, before the first paperwork flies.

This, of course, greatly disappoints the 'loyal opposition', who relied on infinite amounts of courtroom logjams to block any hope of a nuclear plant. From one extreme to another! Should be fun....

ps. Ontario better get its act together and start doing something that resembles intelligent action, on building a new plant!

Fault discovered beneath nuclear waste dump!

No, it isn't up at the Bruce! It's the poor, hard-hit Yucca-yucca site that the US has pinned so much hope on, merely because it's in the middle of all those old nuclear bomb sites.

They have had the difficult task of showing that the area is a perfect glass marble, and will remain pristine for a million years! Well, nothing and nobody is that perfect! I wonder how this will affect all those new nuclear plans....

North Channel DEM's

Here is the North Channel, which is the zone of water north of Manitoulin Island. It has the most fascinating geology, and once the election is over, I might delve into it.


You might notice that something big and nasty zooms into it, which is the whole reason it is there. Here is an angle shot.


Again, just like the Bruce, this is a most unstudied area.

North Channel Nuclear Plant Lives!!

OMG! I just read this. They said the north channel plant was studied in the 70's, but completely forgot that we resurrected it in the 90's for the 'great expansion'. I spent a whole summer there doing the geophysics! We had tons of data, and then were ordered by the NDP to destroy it all!!

Of course, I have it all committed to memory :). I won't tell them what it showed, because that would spoil their happy-happy party. I'd love to go on the north channel in the summer and do it all over again. I'd want a fancier ship, and a pretty crew.....A very suitable boat for marine geophysics.

Power track - 3

This power track had problems from the start. It would mysteriously break off wheels. These were tremendously strong, custom-machined super-steel wheels and bearings, yet they would break off, along with other things breaking.

As usual, they would just fix things whenever they noticed something broken, but one day there was a serious breakage. A wheel snapped, and wasn't noticed. Then the other side broke, and a large piece of axle fell into the track. The driver of the train (remotely!) noticed things jamming, and kept going, trying to clear the jam. Finally, the whole thing jammed up and lost power.

We were very lucky that this happened before hot fuel was in the hopper. Had that happened, the cooling water would have boiled off, and there would be a big radioactive mess! Might have even had to go public!

I got brought in because I was a dynamics expert. There was also an outside consultant. I saw the magnificent video of the damage, which would be an instant u-tube hit, if they released it! For at least 10-20 m, the track was totally ripped out, and bent steel everywhere! Better than a Minnesota bridge!

When I saw the broken pieces, I immediately thought of my water laser experience. This was no ordinary fatigue failure, of which I had seen my share (happens all the time!). This was a dynamic break, instantaneous, caused by tremendous force. I told them to get the proper scans, but they never did.

The failures were essentially random. Some pieces were lasting forever, sometimes brand new replacement parts broke. They thickened up some sections on the shaft, then the failures would move to the next area. I saw it as dynamic wave failure, but could not figure out how that could happen.

I went through many more videos, and still pictures of the whole system. I made my little model. The consultant and I agreed that it had to be an alignment problem. Finally, I figured it out. The big frame was flexing dynamically, under certain conditions. Once in a while, a very thick piece of steel on the frame banged against the tracked sled, with explosive force. You could see the impact points on the photos! Dynamic waves went through the sled and popped off wheels, and damaged the cable chain.

We wrote a report, saying how it needed some dynamic monitoring. As well, I wanted some ultrasonic monitoring for bearing damage. I never heard from them again, and I last heard they were still inspecting and fixing things when they broke. A big accident can never, ever happen again......

Power track - 2

What the heck, one extra comment, and no bucks. I'll do the short version.

The giant power track beneath the reactors goes for the length of a football field. Think of it as two loops of cables which must be picked up and laid down on the floor.


This cable comes from a central location and must be supported on a central sled which has big wheels on a railroad-type track, and rollers for the cables which are enclosed in a steel chain-like arrangement. I once made a K-nex model of it to figure it out! As the big frame moves back and forth because the upper fueling choo-choo is moving, you can see that the leading cable gets laid down, and the trailing cable gets picked up. The sled moves half the distance of the frame, since at one end the frame is right up at the end of the sled, and the same the other way.

This all happens in a deep dark dungeon that nobody can visit because it is so hot with radioactivity. But I was called in because of a horrible accident, which never got into the press (Problem with Fueling Machine), just like the recent closure of another station was 'Problem with Backup Power'. HA!!

Now, since nobody is really interested in this, I will try to calm my blogging addiction with exercise, or pills, or something.

Power track - 1

Today's very long and boring story, started out as a mystery, and ended as a mystery, even though it didn't need to.

To start with, we have to delve into the bizarre world of the Candu nuclear station. This is always touted as having the magnificent feature of on-line fueling, but in reality, the plain-jane uranium fuel is so difficult to get going, that they constantly have to shove in fresh fuel. Now I know you're imagining little radioactive men stoking the fires with shovels, but the boring truth is, that machines do it all.

Now in this station, there are 4 big Calandrias lying like pop-cans on their side.
Inside each calandria are hundreds of pressure tubes, like this.


And inside each pressure tube are a whole bunch of fuel bundles. This is where all the heat gets generated, and the uranium 'burns'. Eventually, these fuel bundles get tired, and this is where the magnificent, Rube Goldberg fueling machine comes in.

This thing (more than one) trundles along a big underground railway, like Thomas the Tank Engine (lead-free version!). When it's time to get to work, they latch on either side of a calandria, like so.


They hook on like an automatic tank-gun loader, and shove a fresh fuel bundle in one end, and eject an old one out the other, all without spilling a drop of precious radioactive water!

Now this machine is the most wonderful mess of hydraulics, water pipes, and electrical cables. It has to get supplied with lots of power, and how do you suppose they do it? That's right! With a Power Track, which is the star of the story.

Here is a simple power track for some sort of machine. The idea is that the upper machine can move back and forth, and the cables are laid down in loop. All the main elements are there, such as the chain holder for the cables, so they don't rub. If you ever took apart an old pen plotter, this is how it worked, and you ink-jet printer has one.


The ones on a nuclear plant are a tad bigger.... (to be continued).

Hanford starts up again

I like to have fun with Ontario's plans to stack nuclear waste into an active fault, but the truth is that our waste is nothing compared to the US. They've got liquid plutonium, for God's sake! The worst crap is up at the Hanford nuclear dump. I've been following this for years, but this article says they've started again on their pie-in-the-sky dream to turn all of this into beer-bottle glass. They are umpteen years late, and billions over budget. Just shows that nuclear spans the full spectrum of human behaviour! (ie. STUPID!!) :)

Rust vs. Radiation

I find this article fascinating. It seems that a steel containment structure has rusted halfway through, and yet they say it's good for another 20 years. One side says it doesn't meet code anymore, another says that it's good.

I'm all for relaxing code on existing structures, because the code usually has a high margin built in. I had big fights with 'code fundamentalists', mainly because something is originally built to code, and it won't meet code anymore once it ages. But the code has built that in!

Still, extensive rust seems a bit much! There's no experience database on this, and I didn't see any extensive analysis. As well, who knows what other damage there is? The original designers did not foresee extensive rust, caused by sloppy maintenance. All in all, it sounds rather stupid. (and not very earthquake-safe!)

US nuclear plant uses rotten wood beams

Ok, I've seen everything in nuclear plants, but this sticks up above the noise. They were using wooden beams in an ucky, wet cooling tower. Can you imagine if an earthquake hit? That's like putting a transformer on quicksand, which I've never heard of....

Water laser - II

I shall continue my story, even though my ad account remains at a pristine zero! After all, I think I'm writing for my own soul, to boost my serotonin levels!

When the Big Company fired up Darlington, something horrible happened. There were tremendous vibrations, and fuel bundles were coming out shattered. I looked at the photos of these things, and was amazed at the stresses that would be involved to do this. On some bundles, the serial number of the adjacent bundle was imprinted perfectly, implying almost explosive shock-like impact!

For some reason, I was enjoying one of my high cycles in the company, and was thrown into the investigation, because of my experience in dynamics, and they were fond of shit-disturbers! They thought there was some sort of resonance involved, and switched the main pumps from a 5 blade impeller, to 7 blades. This had the effect of a dramatic decrease in vibrations, and broken fuel bundles. The whole case was closed.

They attributed the whole thing to acoustic-type stub resonance, which is the amplification you get with the chamber of an acoustic guitar, perhaps a factor of 2. They actually called it organ pipe resonance, without understanding the physics of an organ pipe! After the pump change, vibrations continued to plague the station, and they fooled around with the end fittings to change the perceived stub resonance. As of this date, they've had to do modifications in the heat exchangers for the vibrations, and I fear the place is shaking apart!

The biggest mistake they made was attributing organ pipe amplification to passive resonance. In reality, there is a feedback mechanism with the air stream, which flows chaotically up against a knife edge. A tiny change in pressure makes the air stream flow into the pipe, compressing the air, while a change the other way, causes the air to flow outward, creating lower pressure. The air stream starts as white noise, and the organ tube selectively filters the resonant frequency. This sets up a wave train of acoustic waves going up and down the pipe. When a compression pulse hits the air stream, it pushes it out, creating low pressure, which adds to the open reflection pulse. This builds up into a tremendous sound!

The combination of the fuel bundles, the water flow, and the pressure tubes, created something much more powerful than an organ pipe, and we'll go into this next time, when I feel like it...

Deep Geology Thingie dishes out the cash

This article is what I've been waiting for! 100 thousand loonies have been handed out to people, to make the OJ-hearings a bit more exciting. I hope they do a good job!

As we all know, the Deep Geology Waste Respository (DGR, whatever!) is a big plan to spend all that money which has been building up, from the nuclear plants (a percentage is set aside for the garbage). This is generally a good thing, and I'm all for nuclear power, but technocrats are in charge of this money.

These people actually hate to be open, and face the public, so they'll have their lawyers do everything. The people getting the money will have more lawyers. The lawyers will get fancy sports cars. All the money, for and against, will go into the Bruce area, so they'll get new cars, as well.

Will there be any open, and worthwhile science? You can figure this out for yourselves!

Nigeria goes one up on Alberta

Wow! I was joking that the arrangement for the Alberta Nuclear Plant made Nigeria look good. Now Nigeria wants a nuclear power plant, too!

Yeah, Nigeria!

Carbon and Water Cycles II - boring!

Well, I just took my middle guy to Queens. What a zoo moving day is! I didn't like the low-life Queens engineers insulting the parents, they can insult the frosh all they want. Well, they have to compensate for being inferior to UofT Engineering!! :)

Summer is practically over, and it's time for me to look for some tiny bit of work. I sure hope they take their thumbs out and actually start building a nuclear plant! OPG's top guy already bailed, perhaps because he saw all the political (and union!) interference. I like to think that he presented my ideas for a nuclear plant in my lifetime, to the Big Board, and they tossed him out on his ear! :)

Back to our little thought experiment. Like I said, we have two dials on the world, one for water and one for carbon. More water is injected water vapour, and less water means it has been sucked away down deep. More carbon is injected carbon dioxide, and less carbon means that it, too, has been sucked down deep.

The most fun is with the water dial. We can turn it way down and watch what happens. The oceans shrink. There is much less rain in the world. Large mountain ranges continue to rise, but are never eroded, like some ranges in South America. The ice sheets evaporate, but the world gets colder, like when you are camping and it's a clear night, and you know you are going to freeze! Lots of plants die. We have a cold, dry earth, suitable for tiny mammals that live in the desert.

Enough of that, now let's turn it up! We have lots of water, and oceans rise. There is lots of rain everywhere. The mountain ranges rapidly erode, causing carbon-poor sediments. The plants start growing, but become limited by the lack of carbon dioxide, just like my aquarium plants. The earth becomes very warm, because water vapour is the most effective greenhouse gas of all. We have a very wet, warm world, with limited vegetation.

Set the old water back at neutral, and play with the carbon dial! We turn it right down to almost no carbon. The atmospheric carbon dioxide gets quickly used up by plants and erosion, and little sea creatures. The world most likely gets a lot colder (if you believe all those carbon-people!). We have ice sheets, and maybe an ice-age, if the Sun turns down a little, as well. The plants aren't too happy and mostly refuse to grow.

Let's turn it up now. Remember, this dial is infinitely more powerful than the smokestacks of pitiful humans! We flood the place with carbon dioxide, and the oceans go acidic, we dissolve mountains faster, and most likely the world warms up. The plants are limited by the available water.

I think that's generally boring. The big fun comes from twiddling the dials to their extremes. First, we knock down the water, and the carbon. Nothing much happens from the water alone, except the plants are even more dead, and the world is much colder (Iceball Earth!).

Keeping down the water and jacking up the carbon, probably just results in a big mess!

The one I'm more interested in is jacking up the water and the carbon. Then we have a totally different Earth! The mountains are eroded faster, massive carbonate sediments are laid. The earth is very warm, and all the land is filled with swamps, which have tremendous plant growth. The growth of the plants fill the air with oxygen, and the air is thick. All the mammals get fur-rot, and the place fills with dinosaurs. The carbon is so thick, it gets laid down in beds of pure carbon (coal).

These things have actually happened, and we'll look at the geology in the next episode, after I recover from paying the tuition!

The perfect nuclear plant

I'm about the only nuclear seismic expert who talks. Everybody else works as a consultant and has to be quiet, in order to satisfy political bosses with money. The most exciting thing (recently) in the nuclear seismic business has been a thing called Experience Data. You won't find this on the Internet, but it's a lot of fun! Like fishing!

Basically you start with the idea that all industrial plants are the same to an earthquake. There are transformers, barrels of waste, storage tanks, pipes, etc. Then, the seismic fishermen go around to all areas that have had earthquakes, and look at the industrial plants. They look for damage, and especially non-damage (which most people don't look for!). They compile tables (a lot of data!), and determine what gets damaged the most, and what never gets damaged.

This information has completely turned a lot of conventional seismic engineering on its head. There are many things that get damaged which the old engineers ignored (like Japan!). There are things that never get damaged, which engineers pour billions into (like pipes!). Old OPG is spending billions (more or less) in replacing feeder pipes which can absolutely never get damaged in an earthquake. It's all due to the old crap analysis which I'm sure the Japanese love (and OPG!).

The Japanese had a lot of experience data from previous earthquakes. But like The Claptrap Society, they never talked about it, or participated, as long as they could keep quiet about it. As far as we knew, they never applied the findings to their own plants (quiet again!). In Experience Data, there is some really, really good information on seismic interaction. Of course I would never say 'never, never' because of Conrad Blackism Libel Chill (I'm just kidding everybody!).

And so this brings us to our new nuclear plant in Ontario (and a very long post!). Are we applying the old crap or the new stuff? I'm not very hopeful, because so far, everything has been very politically correct, trying to keep everybody happy. There is no hope we can build a new nuclear plant, when we really need it to keep on my air conditioner in the Home.

Here's how to bring it on-line in my lifetime. Forget all the PC crap. Just lay down the only design that can be built by 2014, and people can take it, all or nothing. Of course, I know the only thing that can be done in that time, and I'll save it for another post. Right now, they are jamming 4 reactors sideways, in a postage stamp lot, with damn cooling towers, that will cast a permanent ice fog on the 401 and kill everybody! Does anybody think this can be built?

Megathrust Fault Basement Geology of Ontario

In case anybody was asking, I had a great weekend fishing. I caught some large bass on a very tiny hook, and they spit it out when I raised them. For those serious about fishing, never raise the fish out of the water, always slip a net underneath.

I was asked to clarify my geology ramblings over the last few posts. I hesitate to do this because of the implications, but what the hey! I express this in the form of a Wikipedia article, but I could never submit this, since it contains original thought (a big no-no!), and references which cannot be easily verified (behind the paywall). If this had been a real Wiki article, I would have extensively wikified it with links.

The megathrust fault geology of Ontario

There are two types of megathrusts in this world: a downward megathrust such as the big subduction zone near Vancouver, and an upward megathrust that is involved in mountain building.

Before 1.1 billion years ago, most of southern Ontario did not exist. It was a big deep ocean, with a bottom of cold oceanic crust. At that time, the cold oceanic crust began to sink, and the ocean started to converge, creating many subduction zones. Much like modern-day Japan, these subduction zones created volcanic island arcs, but still the ocean converged, and continents were starting to collide, much like Indian and Asia.

The first island arc complex collided with the cold core of North America (Archean). Huge megathrusts formed, creating a linear mountain range, as seen in the Rockies today. The heat and pressure, melded the rock together into a solid mass (metamorphism), and there was sufficient time before the next island arc collided, creating weak 'cold joints' between each episode.

These cold-joint megathrusts are clearly visible in deep seismic reflection data. The leading one is the Grenville Front (GF) fault, the middle one is the Central Metasedimentary (CM) fault, and the third is the Elzevir (EL) fault.

Note the perfect parallelism, as with most mountain ranges. Soon the oceanic convergence stopped, and the mountain ranges cooled down, eroded, and sunk. There may have been some backsliding collapse, which further weakened the main megathrusts. The basement rock was almost ground flat, but there remained very significant topography (Grand Canyon scale), at the megathrusts.

Eventually, the basement rock cooled so much that it went below sea level. Shallow seas made extensive deposits, as the basement deflated. The sediments made flat layers for the most part, except over the megathrusts, where they had some difficulty. The continued sedimentation solidified the rock, but the rock over the weak megathrusts continued to fracture and slide, forming faults.

At some point in the past, we Ontario residents were lucky that the deep Moho once again heated up, lifting Ontario into the position we now enjoy. This probably happened during the last mass convergence of the continents, just before the Atlantic separation. This uplift once again disturbed the megathrusts, and weakened the Paleozoic rock above.

Of course, we cannot forget the last few million years of ice sheets, and damage they did to the already fractured rock. The basement rock sunk under the ice load, and is still uplifting in parts, but the general trend is for the rock to be sinking again over the last 50 million years.

Now, each one of these megathrusts has the following generic cross-section:

This can be seen on the available seismic sections, except for the GF fault, which only barely appears on the Lake Erie lines.

The first map shows the maximum disturbance zones, which can be easily traced by long linears in shorelines, and rock topography. Along these lines lie most of our earthquake zones, oil and gas zones, and zones of smashed Palezoic rock. In between these lines are the the zones of solid rock, and high horizontal stresses.

These fault zones have severe implications on the seismic hazard of nuclear facilities located on them, as well as deep geological waste repositories. More effort should be undertaken to properly map these megathrusts, mainly by processing the available seismic data in Lake Huron.

Deep Geology Thingie

I just have to be the only blog in the world to mention this.

Deep Geology Thingie Saves a Bundle

The DGT has the skids greased to go, as they go straight to a panel of old guys. This will save them lots of unnecessary trouble, such as explaining why the heck they went there in the first place! Anybody with any brains will stay away from this whole affair, and watch it from a dock, with a beer in one hand and a rod in the other!

Sorry for actually putting in a news item. I truly thought I could be the one blog that never does that....

Seismic Fishing

Throughout my long scientific career (now ended!), nothing got me more excited than pulling up a big 'fish' of new data. I've always regarded science as fishing on the edge of great ocean, and once in a while, pulling out something interesting (didn't somebody else think of that first?).

My very best fishing story was around the 80-90 decade boundary. We were looking for new nuclear sites, and this time, we actually had some money! (unlike the cheapies today!). We had heard rumours of 'sunken treasure', old seismic data, and we were looking for it. (This story has lots of credits to people who are smarter than me, yada, yada).

It turns out that at one time, the Michigan Basin was a really hot place to explore for oil. This attracted the 'spec data' seismic boats, who are the true high-rollers of the sea. They gather data on spec, and sell it to the highest bidder. The big boats came in up the St. Lawrence Seaway, and went out the same way. On the way out, they decided to trail their kilometers of equipment and 'shoot' Lakes Erie and Ontario.

This was in 1971, and 1985. The 1971 survey was done with Marine Vibroseis, which I still don't know how exactly it works, but these records went deep, right to the Moho! The 1985 survey was shot with conventional big airguns, which scare the fishies to death, and is very controversial now.

Well, these crazy guys just processed the first couple of seconds, and saw to their horror, there was just a thin crust of 'good' layered sedimentary rock, on top of a horrible swirly mess of granites. These sections got out into the wild, and were declared worthless by other scientists. The poor guys sent them down to their cavernous storage libraries.

Then we came along with our pockets jingling with coins. One of our experts noted that the data continued beyond their cut-off point, and might be good. We went down to Austin, Texas and looked at the tapes. It was amazing that they had saved everything, and it was all still readable! To cut this ramble short, they fell over themselves giving us a real cheap deal to process the data (in the hope they could sell the details!), mainly because we only required 'relative data', not accurate enough to actually sink an oil well.

Those gorgeous records showed magnificent structure right down to the Moho! Many papers were written, and we got an excellent view of the deep crustal structure under Ontario. Most of my subsequent endeavours (and windmill charges!) were guided by this. As expected, the 'pancake rock' (sedimentary) guys continue to ignore this.

Another day, and I'll dig up some of the sections.