BWB, the following is pure fiction:

Nuke story #1:
Were those plumes you were monitoring in the Vopar 18 coming out of
the cooling towers? (gulp!) Later in 79', I had the bright idea of
flying though the steam plumes of the Rancho Seco (sister plant)
cooling towers in a 150. I did this several times before they shut
the plant down due to radioactive discoveries in the local streams. I
was only 16 and rationalized that since there weren't any restricted
or prohibited areas on the chart, I could just buzz those towers any
time I wanted to. Then I flew over them a bunch after the reactor was
shut down and peered down into the cooling towers. They are basically
empty as I recall, just a series of pipe coils way down at ground
level. My exploits always stopped the workers in their tracks for a
few seconds, but I never came back for a second pass the same day!
(big numbers.) Now days, if a kid does something like that, sowing
his aviation oats, the department of Homeland Insecurity will have his
whole family spread eagle on the ground staring at tommie guns… I'm
glad I started in aviation when I did, and glad I was born when I was.
Big Brother in his menacing gunships, the grand canyon airspace
changes, F-16 intercepts on airliners, TFR's, etc, all are talking all
the fun out of flying. The Bush crowd is taking a lot of aviation
freedom away from the common GA flyer. Think I've gotta get rich
quick and head back out into the third world again if I'm going to
have any pure freedom and aviation fun at all. :-)


Nuke story #2:
We lived for six years just a few miles from the Battan nuclear power
plant on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. I was told that that
was another sister plant to the three mile island one. Designed by
the same people. The local construction was so poor (goes the rumor)
that it was never fired up. (fortunately for us!) Most major
engineering projects over there go south due to corner cutting and
corruption. I'm sure they'd be dumping spent rods in the jungle just
as soon as the ex-pats left and handed them the keys… (that's what
they did with our trash we discovered. A bunch of our thrown away
mail, documents etc where blowing across the road for anybody to pick
up when we went jogging.... One of our guys looked over the
embankment and saw mountains of garbage behind our housing complex.)

After the navy left Subic Bay I used to drive my jeep into the
abandoned underground magazine bunkers used to store bombs for the
fleet. I always wondered if those big steel doors left in the open
position that I had to drive by to get in (the better to impress the
native lass that was riding co-pilot for me,) were still glowing from
the hasty evac after Mt Pinatubo blew up. Maybe they didn't store
any thing that hot in there, I don't know. Heard it both ways from
retired crew chiefs that stayed after the navy left.

And we hauled a lot of radioactive "fun boxes" over the years in the
"R-one" position (right behind the cockpit) with no TI limit! The
goods news is my power bills have gone way down over the years. I
don't use the lighting anymore in my shop at night cuz I'm glowin! ;-)

Hope you've enjoyed my fictitious stories.

pac



(Badwater Bill) wrote in message . ..
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