On 4 Feb 2004 22:29:15 -0800, (pacplyer) wrote:

Hey Bill & O-ring,

My friend's got a beautiful 36' Waco that he let me fly a few years
ago but it's been parked for a few years. One of us is going to sign
off the A&P portion of the annual and go flying (probably not me,) but
the thing's been in the desert forever and he said the glue joints are
probably in bad shape (gulp.) But the guy's not planning to redo that
until he recovers the whole thing in a few years. (Vietnam vet,
completely fearless, but a great guy.) I think I'll convince him to
pull back some fabric before he goes. What would you look for on
this? (didn't do much wood and fabric work, read about it mostly.)
Just a wiggle test, shrinkage/cracks in the glue joints? Chem test?
What?

They just had a great show on the National Geographic Channel tonight
called "Minutes to Meltdown" about the Three-mile Island nuke runaway.
No one could agree what was going on in the out of control (coolant
wise) core so they sent this fearless son-of-a-bitch over the top of
the reactor structure to check it out with a helicopter. He flys that
sucker right over the top and puts it into a hover right on top of the
reactor building! Man what a sight! The hover looked a little tricky
in the wind way up there. And he found significant radiation coming
out of the building… (double gulp!) What was that? A Hughes 500? Was
that you in that thing by any chance Bill? Have any photos of that
disaster that we can post up on Jay's Rouge's Gallery? Come on.
Please? While this thing was pressurizing with Hydrogen gas, and
about to explode like the Hindenburg, gov Scanton admitted the
bureaucrats were talking about evacuating the seat of government (not
the people!) Meanwhile you guys are marching right up to this ticking
radiation bomb! We probably all owe you a beer.

Cheers,

pacplyer

I do have some photos of the TMI stuff. That was in April of 1979.
Yeah, I flew a lot of the radiation cloud tracking missions, but not
in that MD-500. Those guys were from EG&G Las Vegas. They were my
buddies, but not me. They hovered there for DAYS, sniffing away. I
flew the stuff in the Vopar that tracked the plume farther out. The
radioactive gas was mostly Xenon-133 and Krypton-85. Nothing much to
worry about health-wise. All the Iodine-131 was filtered out in
activated charcoal filters and never left the main reactor containment
vessel. Since the I-131 has a half life of only 8 days, it all
decayed away long before we purged the gas a year later. I have a
photo of us drinking beer at a keg party on the Susquehanna River on
July 4th, 1980, a year later while we were venting the remaining gas
out of that reactor primary coolant pressure vessel. I'll have to
search for it, but if I can find it I'll scan it an post it in the
binaries stuff.

My concern too was the outflow into the Susquehanna River. I had this
really cool monitoring system using a sodium iodide crystal gamma ray
detector windowed for iodine on the outfall from those big hyperbolic
cooing towers. If my system detected anything in the energy window
for iodine, it automatically called a telephone number in the EOC.
We'd rush over to the Island from across the river and check it out.
But, there were only false alarms.

Three mile island was the worst accident in the history of commercial
nuclear power in the FREE WORLD and not one single person was hurt or
exposed with anything that was a health concern. We build reactors in
the free world totally differently than the reckless Russians ever
did. Those *******s killed lots of people in their big screw up in
Kiev a few years later. That reactor was a graphite reactor and was
running at 18 times higher power density than anyone could ever get
licensed to do in the free world. Those stupid *******s just
basically drove a freight train off a cliff at full speed with that
accident.


BWB