Scuba Diver Survives Being Sucked Into Nuclear Plant (nydailynews.com) 318
mdsolar writes: A man scuba diving in Florida somehow survived being sucked into a nuclear power plant in a terrifying log flume ride. Christopher Le Cun was boating off the coast of Hutchinson Island when he and his friend went under to check out three large shadows beneath the waves that looked like buildings. After diving down, he felt a current that quickly pulled him toward one of three intake pipes, got sucked in and was immersed in darkness for five minutes in the water being taken to cool the St. Lucie Nuclear Power Plant. Le Cun told WPTV that he thought he was going to be chopped into tiny bits when he hit a turbine at the end of the 16-foot-wide, quarter-mile tube. However, the turbine never came, and the pipe eventually spat him out into a reservoir at the plant holding water used to cool the nuclear reactor. After finding a passing worker, Le Cun was able to call wife Brittany, who thought her husband was dead after seeing the shocked face of his diving partner.
From mdsolar? (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow, I didn't see that coming...
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Re:from the not-so-bright department (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a picture of the location of the buoy and a diagram of the intakes:
http://imgur.com/a/Ve4to
The buoy is close enough to the plant that there is no doubt that it is part of the nuclear power plant.
Re: from the not-so-bright department (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you under the impression that Nuclear power plants have great security?
More like rent-a-cop security from the guy off the night job at the mall.
The only thing of any real value there is the uranium in the tanks and it isn't something that could be moved by anyone without really special equipment.
I suppose you could drive a truck in with explosives and blow it up, but you could do that at the Mall of America as well and frankly scare far more people.
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Perhaps but knocking a nuke plant offline would probably cause a cascade of power outages that could affect millions even if the body count is low.
Re: from the not-so-bright department (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuke plants go down once in a while without such catastrophic consequences. Indian Point was just in the news for exactly this.
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Power plants go down for all sorts of reasons all the time, the grid can handle a plant going offline without warning, it happens.
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If that were the case (it's not), it would be the case for a large coal, gas or combined cycle plant too.
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Depends on the nuclear plant. Bruce Power [brucepower.com] regularly wins SWAT championships [talknuclear.ca].
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As far as inside the plant, the security is well beyond average. Everyone who was working had to be accountable for even the path they walked within the building, they were given one path, if they deviated at all, security was there to usher them to the correct area. The whole place is well monitored.
I understand that, but you also have to consider what that security was designed to protect against, and what it wasn't.
Is the security room in a secure area that is not easy to access quickly from the outside?
Is the front door/front drive physically secured against forced entry?
http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINIO... [cnn.com]
That is an interesting read...
Re: from the not-so-bright department (Score:5, Insightful)
The reservoir where the man surfaced does not appear to be within the secure area of the facility. One could jump into the water from a low bridge crossing on S Ocean Dr.
Re: from the not-so-bright department (Score:4, Insightful)
The reservoir where the man surfaced does not appear to be within the secure area of the facility. One could jump into the water from a low bridge crossing on S Ocean Dr.
I would suspect that if the diver chose to continue ignoring warning buoys, dove, and walked the bottom of the reservoir he wound up in, he would eventually find yet another intake that would suck him in, and this one would likely be an impeller/pump-driven intake......
Re: from the not-so-bright department (Score:5, Insightful)
You could just drive along Ocean Drive and get out of your car. You would be closer to the plant than where this guy popped up. He is not inside the plant at this stage.
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I guess you can just run right up to the outer wall and touch it, too. "haha, tag you're it"
I doubt the water storage lagoon has anything worth blowing up. You could try to damage the water, but good luck...
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Umm....maybe this isn't obvious to everyone, but to me it's clearly a bad idea to publish publicly on the internet a perfect covert entrance to a nuclear power plant.
Where do you think he got those images from? Drew them himself?
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It said 16' diameter, not 16"...
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Dumb Cun
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http://www.upi.com/Archives/1989/06/08/Diver-sucked-into-nuclear-power-plant/1273613281600/ [upi.com]
So maybe it's not quite so clear cut as the power plant representative(s) make it out to be.
Re:from the not-so-bright department (Score:5, Informative)
said he saw it but didn't know what it meant.
Boaters MUST know how to identify Buoys [uscgboating.org], Otherwise, they should not have a license to drive a boat or be part of a boating crew, and should not be navigating....
YELLOW BUOYS INDICATE VARIOUS HAZARDS.
The boater must identify what the Buoy is instructing before approaching, let alone mooring to it.
Information and Regulatory Marks These orange-and-white Aids are used to alert vessel operators to various warnings and regulations. ....
Exclusion:
A diamond shape
with a cross means
boats are prohibited
from the area
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For what it's worth, the Daily Mail article has a picture of the buoy. Referencing the USCG guide that you mentioned, this is a "special aid" buoy that indicates "special areas or features"; in general, they mark dangers and should not be approached.
In the picture, there are no visible markings on the buoy. The power plant claims that there is a sign "stay back 100 feet" - if that were true, it would have to be readable from 100 feet, and would definitely be visible in the pic. Still, you aren't supposed to
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By all means, follow your heart. But please warn the bystanders first.
Re:from the not-so-bright department (Score:5, Insightful)
Heh. I like how this guy telling him to be risk taker drew the line at logging in to make his remark.
Re:from the not-so-bright department (Score:5, Interesting)
They show the buoy in the accompanying video. They even tied up to it, though they claim that the warnings were not readable anymore.
Re:from the not-so-bright department (Score:5, Insightful)
#FloridaMan (Score:5, Funny)
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Q: What's the difference between the St. Lucie Nuclear Power Plant and my wife?
Does this happen often? (Score:5, Informative)
A long long long time ago I heard exactly the same story.
Here's a blog discussion [scubaboard.com] among scuba divers claiming the exact same event, at the exact same nuclear power plant, that was posted in 2013 (referring to a past, previous event).
So, either this is a hoax, or this happens occasionally at the nuclear power plant in question.
(I *do* have to wonder how something gets sucked into a reservoir without encountering propulsive blades.)
When I first heard the story, it mentioned that there was no warning of any kind to deter scuba divers from that location. The current news story says the same thing.
I mean, it is *exactly* the same story!
Does this happen often?
Re:Does this happen often? (Score:5, Informative)
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Hardly "often", but judging by the description of the buoy and foreign matter filter in the older UPI article, probably something that Florida Power and Light needs to beef up a bit more - it's clearly insufficiently tamper/idiot proof.
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probably something that Florida Power and Light needs to beef up a bit more - it's clearly insufficiently tamper/idiot proof.
Nothing can be made idiot proof, because idiots are so ingenious. You can put up a sign at a zoo, stating that the lions are wild animals, and you should at all means never enter their enclosure.
Some idiot will still crawl over the fence to pet the "Kitty-Kats".
And then sue the zoo. See cats in the microwave and hot coffee for examples.
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As you said, 2 instances across nearly 30 years? is not even remotely cause for speculation in this instance, given the idiots refusal to read or pay attention while scuba diving.
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the 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000001%
I somehow missed that there were ten tredecillion (10 billion trillion trillion trillion) people on the Earth[1]. That's 20 nonillion people per square meter of land area, and at the average human mass of 62 kg, means the human population of Earth masses 530 times as much as the galaxy! Damn. Population growth is really out of control.
I get that you were exaggerating for effect, but learn something about large/small numbers, will you? Exaggerating by a couple orders of magnitude is fine, but 35 orders of
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I think it was a defective idiot trap. Anyone ignoring the warning buoys right next to a nuclear plant, and then deliberately bypassing the safety grates is by definition an idiot, and the mechanism was designed to chop the idiot up into fish bait. Score another failure for nuclear plant engineers.
Re:Does this happen often? (Score:5, Informative)
The reservoir works by gravity and water pressure. That is how there was no blades. It is basically a man made lagoon except the opening connecting it to the ocean is a series of pipes run underground and out to sea a bit to get deeper and cooler water.
The power plant will take water from the lagoon lowering its level slightly which water from the ocean will flood back in creating a current.
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The reservoir works by gravity and water pressure. That is how there was no blades. It is basically a man made lagoon except the opening connecting it to the ocean is a series of pipes run underground and out to sea a bit to get deeper and cooler water.
The power plant will take water from the lagoon lowering its level slightly which water from the ocean will flood back in creating a current.
Thank you - that makes sense now.
Would this make a new and interesting X-games thing?
Pay money to get sucked into a nuclear power plant, have your picture taken at the end, get bragging rights at poker night?
Just a thought...
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The reservoir is tidal as a result of being connected by the pipe to the ocean. In this case the tide must have been coming in for the moron to be pushed through the pipe. This reservoir could have been connected by an open channel, but for what ever reasons it was obviously decided a pipe was better.
And I know it's pedantic but he wasn't sucked into the pipe, he was pushed. The force was coming from behind him as the tide came in.
Re:Does this happen often? (Score:5, Funny)
I just hope its not the exact same scuba diver...
Guy is a moron (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not like you just come across pipes like this in open water, but no SCUBA diver worth their salt would get near an unknown pipe like that.
Differential pressure makes it terrifyingly easy to get pulled into something you can't get out of. This guy is incredibly lucky.
Re:Guy is a moron (Score:4, Informative)
It's not like you just come across pipes like this in open water, but no SCUBA diver worth their salt would get near an unknown pipe like that.
Exactly! Someone please mod this up! I have some friends who dive, and they tell me, "Before you go down . . . look around!" Local diving clubs have maps of places with potential dangers, and are more than welcome to give you advice, free of charge!
These guys are a couple of idiots with too much money to spend on gear, and obviously have no training whatsoever.
Re:Guy is a moron (Score:5, Funny)
Good advice in all situations.
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This guy is incredibly lucky.
I would say incredibly stupid. This is someone the human gene pool can do without. No diver with half a brain would go anywhere near something like this.
It's also not like it is unknown (Score:5, Insightful)
Shit like this is marked on navigational charts, and there is a warning buoy. It isn't like this is some new feature either so if you happened not to have updated charts it wouldn't be there, the plant is decades old, your charts have it. Don't have charts? That's on you. Ocean navigation is serious business.
That aside, if you see something and you don't know what it is in the water, or see a buoy and don't know what it signifies, the right answer is to FIND OUT, not to go and look. Get on the radio and see what's up. In this case, even that wouldn't be necessary: This is right off the US coast, well within cellular range. He could have just pulled up maps on his smartphone.
Hopefully his lawsuit gets dismissed out of hand.
mdsolar scraping the bottom of the barrel (Score:5, Insightful)
Title says it all. Everyone's favourite anti-nuke troll is running out of things to troll about.
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Re:mdsolar scraping the bottom of the barrel (Score:4, Insightful)
Numbers are useless without context. The number that matters if you're talking about deaths is "deaths per TWh", for which nuclear comes out as the safest form of power. The other thing with nuclear power is people obsess over unny things like one block of large deaths as opposed to the much larger number of deaths scattered more thinly for other power industries.
A good fraction of that is because mining raw materials and construction is dangerous. Nuclear plants have high power density and nuclear fuel has high energy density, so the amount of mining for both the construction materials and the fuel is relatively low, and the amount of construction is realtively small. Fossil fuel plants have similar construction scales, but much more fuel mining. Renewables have much much more constructing but obviously no fuel mining during operation.
Finally, if you're advocating for solar power in first wirld countries, then it's meaningless to bring up Chernobyl. That was a Russian design of the sort that has always been illegal in the west. No western country would ever have built it, because we all knew it was a really really stupid design. Nothing like Chernobyl is going to happen with non Soviet style power plants (and no, Fukishima is not nearly as bad).
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Sea level rise does a double wammy in FL (Score:2)
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STOP IT!!! (Score:2)
STOP IT!!!
FloridaIdiotCount+=1 (Score:2)
He found a new game level... (Score:2)
I've played that game [wikipedia.org] before, but never in SCUBA gear.
[ Happy to hear he's okay. ]
Jonathan Osterman (Score:5, Funny)
This article sounds exactly like the origin story of a superhero.
A stupid, Florida superhero, but superhero nonetheless.
Next To My Home (Score:2)
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Frankly, there is no easier way to send a reactor into an emergency than plugging up its cooling water intake.
When you said "frankly," is that "Frankly, as I know from my years of working as a nuclear scientist" or is it "Frankly, as I know from watching enough movies"?
Imagine what a terrorist with a couple of self inflating life-boats could have done.
At a guess, I'd say they could get a nuclear reactor shut down for a bit, and that's probably about it.
On the other hand, what they could do with a small waterproof bomb might be a little more sobering. Especially as it seems someone could get in there with it.
Do it again. (Score:3)
Free material! (Score:2)
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From TFA (Score:2, Informative)
From TFA: "The company claims that there was a sign telling potential visitors to “stay back 100 feet” to avoid getting sucked into an unwelcome James Bond-style thrill ride. It also said that Le Cun intentionally swam into the intake pipe and got past equipment meant to prevent anything foreign from getting into the pipe."
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James Bond-style thrill ride."
Anyone else read that line and think that may motivate a few copycats? Perhaps the powerplant could charge for it.
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It will also have an effect on the water quality of the lagoon. Depending on the size of the lagoon I expect most water movement comes from the tidal movement of the sea. Remove that and you will have problems of it just getting nasty.
Re:Wut (Score:5, Informative)
It wasn't a nuclear plant that sucked in the diver. It was a current created by an artificial lagoon being drained below sea level and the sea via gravity refilling it. That is why there was no impeller or turbine to chew him up.
There are pumps, but he was still safe. (Score:3)
There are pumps in that artificial lagoon that would tear a diver right up, but the pumps are protected by traveling screens and/or trash racks intended to keep out unwanted material- like a diver.
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What makes you think that? How do you think they drive cooling water into the reactor?
Re:Wut (Score:5, Informative)
How do you think they drive cooling water into the reactor?
With a pump.
A turbine converts flow energy to mechanical energy by driving a shaft. A compressor/pump (whether it has rotating blades or not) does the reverse.
If the fluid is a gas, it's called a compressor; if liquid, it's called a pump.
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Re: Wut (Score:5, Informative)
Just a bit of clarification:
In a pressurized water reactor there are typically 3 loops: primary, secondary and "feedwater".
Both the primary and secondary loops are closed... but can hardly be considered "radioactive". The water in the primary system will develop a small (very small) amount of tritium that will build up. Tritrium does have a medium length half-life (about 12 years) so you wouldn't want to drink a bunch of it... but it also won't be radioactive for long. However, the amount in the primary system is really small.
Other reactor types (like CANDU) that use heavy water (deuterium) are much more likely to develop tritium... but even then it is a tiny amount (a few kilograms a year in thousands of tons of water).
The primary and secondary are really closed because they're at high pressure and have carefully controlled chemistry (to keep down corrosion and, in the case of the primary system, to help control the nuclear reaction using boron (dissolved boric acid).
The feedwater (which is what comes from rivers/lakes/oceans typically) is simply there to condense the steam generated in the secondary system back into water after it flows through the turbine.
Re:Wut (Score:4, Interesting)
It isn't the diver's safety that's the worst with this story. Imagine hostile divers sabotaging the cooling system.
The diver should never have reached the inside of the plant.
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Oh fuck me you've been smoking some good shit this week.
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Rubbish. For a start there was no powerful intake. This was a pipe leading to a pond that as a result of being connected to the ocean was tidal. Exactly the same setup would exist for any other heat based power station.
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There is nothing unique to gas systems being air cooled. Pebble bed reactors are also gas cooled. However because of nuclear fears they have not been developed to the degree she could have been. HTR-10, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org], is an air cooled research reactor in China for example.
As for efficiency, how are you measuring it? Sure the % of heat produced converted to steam is higher in a gas plant but that isn't really a relevant way to compare the two designs. I would have gone with cost per
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Yes I do. However as I said there is nothing unique to gas generation that allows you to air cooling it. All it is is steam is taken from the generator and put into a large water / air condenser system, then the water is fed back into the reservoir before going through the heater again. It is just a sealed water system and could be applied to any thermal generation system.
For example the Guangdong Zhongshan power station is an air cooled coal plant.
All it would take for that system to be applied to a nuc
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Sorry you are correct. It doesn't change the fact though that there is no engineering factor that prevents the use of air cooling. Not that air cooling is particularly important unless you have no access to water. In which case then yeah use a gas system.
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Thermal efficiency is lower on a nuclear reactor than other types of generation. But that is a totally biased way of measuring their efficiency because they naturally suck at it, but it is NOT relevant to the cost of the electricity produced.
Cost per MWh is a much fairer measure. And is a measure that can be applied to all types of power generation equally and easily. If I really wanted to pick a measure which favours nuclear I would say how much fuel per year does your plant use.
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Re:Nuclear power intentionally inefficient (Score:5, Informative)
Uh huh.... http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/a... [eia.gov]
The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is a measure of a power source which attempts to compare different methods of electricity generation on a comparable basis. It is an economic assessment of the average total cost to build and operate a power-generating asset over its lifetime divided by the total energy output of the asset over that lifetime. The LCOE can also be regarded as the minimum cost at which electricity must be sold in order to break-even over the lifetime of the project.
Projected LCOE in the U.S. by 2020 (as of 2015)
Power generating technology Minimum Average Maximum
NG: Advanced CC with CCS 93.3 100.2 110.8
Advanced Nuclear 91.8 95.2 101
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Gah white space filter killed that comment - just visit the page to see the comparisons between the energy sources.
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Re:Nuclear power intentionally inefficient (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, so you want to ignore something written in April, 2015 by multiple people and a huge organisation as being too out of date in exchange for a paper written by one person with a particular focus on moving to solar and wind?
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This was Florida. It's surrounded on three sides by ocean and has no small number of lakes and rivers. Pretty much all of the power plants... nuclear, gas, oil, whatever... are built adjacent to some source of water so they can use it for cooling. If there's a problem here, it's with the intake design and the stupidity of the diver, not the source of heat.
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It was. It wasn't engineered to avoid catching divers who moored to the warning buoy, dived against instructions and defeated the grille. I'm OK with that. It didn't impact the plant and it only is a risk to people to go out of their way to fuck with it.
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Might be just me but you probably don't want to generate the steam that directly runs the turbines from the fission reaction and instead transfer that heat through another medium. And this would lower the efficiency. But if you want a more efficient power plant by all means leave out this step. I'm sure that it's not important.
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Not so. Nuke are about 30% efficient, coal plants around 45% and gas plants around 60%. Other forms of generation need less cooling. Gas can get away with air cooling.
Nope. 60% efficient gas plants do not get away with air cooling. Gas turbine only ones do but they're not 60% efficient. Combined cycle plants reach 60%, but they rely on a Rankine cycle at the low end and of course low temperature heat rejection, for which the requirements are precisely the same as coal. It's possible but really bloody hard t
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Low efficiency of nuclear plants is due to their lower operational temperature, not due to fuel density. Radioactive core heats the water to lower temperature comparing to other types of thermal plants.
Re:Nuclear power intentionally inefficient (Score:5, Funny)
Trump will do away with that Second Law shit.
Re:Nuclear power intentionally inefficient (Score:5, Funny)
Trump will do away with that Second Law shit.
God, like I needed another reason not to vote for that asshole.
Sure, I'll continue living my life without fearing robots, but apparently Trump doesn't want me ordering them to jump into volcanoes for my own amusement.
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i washed my hands but they didn't come clean...
Wow, I can hear the mournful sax and clarinet backup behind you...
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Usually it is just strings and percussion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] was the biggest hit. There is also a country version that is a year older that was 4 guitars and a drummer.
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Lets run some rough numbers to see how plausible it is for someone to be forced down a 16 foot wide pipe and spat out the other end.
16 feet is about 5 meters. Lets assume it's a circular pipe with diameter 5m (radius 2.5m) 2.5 squared is about 6 times pi gives us a cross sectional area of about 20 square meters.
An olypic swimmer apparently does about 1.5 meters per second. A diver has flippers which will help make them go faster but they also have a load of gear on their back and they probablly aren't an ol