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Gold/Mining/Energy : Strictly: Drilling and oil-field services
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To: heraclitus who wrote (80008)11/25/2000 6:11:22 PM
From: Douglas V. Fant  Read Replies (2) of 95453
 
Homer, Well here I go blowing a bit what used to be top secret information. Back in the 60's, all of our nuclear submarine fleet used incalinc in piping around the cores of their nuclear reactors.

The nuclear industry followed suit too, many nukes using incalinc piping around the core of reactors. Incalinc is a special alloy of certain metals expected to withstand the high temperatures of cooling waters circulating around the cores of reactors.

Well heh-heh, in the mid-60's the U.S. Navy began to experince corrosion in the incalinc piping around their ship-based reactors whenever cooling water temperatures exceeded a cetain degree limit. Well unfortunately most reactors, in their most efficient mode give off cooling waters with temperatures that exceed this limit-by about ten degrees.

Well generally the US Navy felt it in bad taste what with the USSR looking over their shoulder to give out publicly information that the piping arund the cores of our nuclear submarines would fail if the reactors were pushed too hard in combat.

So...the US NAVY had to sit on this information for decades- and the world nuclear power industry unaware, kept on building reactors with incalinc piping right into the 80's.

Well the nuclear power industry began to experience some of the same corrosion problems. With the Cold War over, the US Navy could also share this alloy temperature limit information.

The end result for the power industry is that many reactors have/had to run at about 92% efficiency in order to keep cooling water temperatures under the corrosion effecting level for the incalinc piping.

In addition this caused many reactors to be taken out of service and the piping extensively reworked. These renovations while time consuming, have upgraded numerous key elements of many reactors- and extended their useful and safe lives for an additonal 10-20 years beyond their original base cases....
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