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Author's Early Energy Experiences
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Index
Section Subject
Prelude. Fixing a
coal furnace's inconveniences and annoyances.
Coal Furnaces
Gas Furnaces
Coal Power Plants
Nuclear Power Plants
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Fixing a coal furnace's inconveniences and annoyances.
Coal Furnaces: Late spring, 1946. "Let's go over to George's house and look at his furnace," my father said over the dinner table. On the way over to George's, my father explained that now that the war was over, people were being allowed to connect their coal-burning furnaces to natural gas lines that ran past their houses.
I was eight years old and it had recently become my duty to carry the coal ashes up from our basement every couple of days so I understood what heating by coal meant. Repowering a coal burning furnace with natural gas which magically made no ashes - I never wondered then where natural gas' combustion products went - seemed a wonderful improvement. (Right. Old coal-burning furnace.)
Going down into George's basement, I saw a furnace almost identical to the one in our basement. The front door of the rusty old furnace had been removed and replaced with a new metal plate screwed to the furnace with a black gas pipe going to it. A small blower was also attached to the lower part of the new metal plate.
George flipped a switch, the fan started whirring, a moment later a click, the furnace went woomp!, and started making creaking and clicking noises as it became hot. George mentioned the furnace didn't seem to heat the house as fast as when he built a big coal fire in it but, all things considered, he would never go back to coal. For me, the idea of not having to carry heavy, dusty, coal ashes and clinkers up the stairs and out the back door anymore had strong appeal. Cleaner was better.
My engineer father explained to my sister and I that we were looking at a conversion burner that changed George's furnace from being a coal burner to a natural gas burner. Another friend of my father, Paul, an electrical engineer who always talked about "Living Better Electrically", had decided to install an electric conversion heater in his furnace instead of converting to gas.
Lesson: Converting a coal burner to natural gas is relatively cheap, quick, and easy. But its only 50% of the job.
Gas Furnace:
My father wanted to get a new 100% gas furnace that had a blower in it. Over the summer, my father removed our furnace and, with the help of a sheet
metal contractor, installed new heating ductwork against our basement's
ceiling. I recall how empty our basement seemed and, being concerned that we had
no furnace, said so. "Don't worry," my father said, "we already have a gas hot water
heater and a gas kitchen range. Adding a gas furnace will be easy." After a
few worrisome cool nights in September, a Sears and Roebuck truck showed up in
our driveway and deposited the largest cardboard box I had ever seen in our
garage.
The next several nights my father spent carrying pieces of the furnace from the garage down into the basement and attaching the parts to each other according to diagrams that came with the furnace. He spent the following weekend connecting the furnace to the ductwork, and being an electrical engineer, the electricity, installing a thermostat upstairs in the dining room, and, finally, with the help of his contractor friend who had a tool that made threads on the ends of pipes, connected the black gas pipe.
The big moment had finally arrived. My mother, afraid of a gas explosion (a frequent occurrence in those days with everyone converting coal furnaces to gas) made us children leave the house with her and stand across the street. "O.K.," she yelled. A few minutes later, my father emerged from the house and motioned for us to return.
Our house was the only house on the block that had an entirely new FORCED AIR gas furnace. The heat was quick and strong. All the other houses on the block were either conversion burners or remained coal burners. We were both proud and so very glad it worked well.
(Right) THE new gas furnace. Beyond the furnace is the now unused coal bin. A coal truck used to back up our driveway, put a coal chute through the open basement window, and lumps of coal rattled loudly down the chute, filling the coal bin with wet coal and the basement with coal dust for my angry mother to clean up. Notice the wash tub that used to always have a layer of coal dust on it.
Lesson: Replacing a coal burner is more expensive, takes longer, and is more difficult. But, in the end, you have more to show for it.
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Atoms for Peace
December, 1953, President Eisenhower addressed the United Nations proposing his "Atoms for Peace.pdf" idea for, among other things, worldwide production of nuclear electricity.
We didn't know it then, but this was the world's only real chance to avoid Global Warming.
It was obvious just ten years after the Atomic Age began that nothing anyone could do would ever make nuclear technology go away. As it was with the war itself, there was no going back.
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Coal burning power plants, Nuclear power plants
Summer, 1956.
Like
nearly every son of a Commonwealth Associates engineer, I was practically
drafted into a Commonwealth "Goon Squad" the moment I graduated from High
School.
Every morning about 30 of us, many my high school buddies, were gathered in a remote unfinished part of the Commonwealth Building for a morning-long class in basic drafting and engineering drawing skills taught by several company master draftsmen.
Every afternoon we were dispersed throughout the company's project teams of engineers to do the lowest level, high volume drafting work - for me it was electrical wiring diagrams from sketches prepared by electrical engineers along with physical drawings of the circuit's electrical equipment boxes and their associated conduit runs. Morning classes, afternoon work, went on all summer until the instructors thought we were good enough to be left on our own. In the fall, we part-time engineering students were allowed to slip off for an hour or two once or twice a day to attend engineering classes at junior college, about a mile away.
Commonwealth's
clients were all the large electrical utilities in the upper Midwest. This was
1956 and the country's postwar growth boom was at its peak fever pitch. There
were about 700 of us there, most sitting at drawing boards in very large rooms
drawing like crazy. There was so much work to do and never enough time to
complete it. 60 hour work weeks for months at a time were typical and there
were periods when the lights were not turned off for several weeks. An
excellent 24 hour restaurant directly across the street, the Regent Cafe, helped
us pencil-pushers immeasurably.
Coal Power Plants: In 1958, I was assigned to the electrical squad working on the Stratton Power Plant project team. Stratton, ( now W._H._Sammis_Power_Plant ), (right-below), was to initially be a twin boiler, single stack, twin 75 MWe facility. Someone had said the Washington Monument-tall stack could loft emissions into the Atlantic ocean. Later I read the emissions actually came back down in New York state, the coal's sulfur dioxide causing weak sulfuric acid rain.
About every two months I was taken to Stratton's construction site, located on the Ohio River near Pittsburgh, PA, to observe and photograph progress, resolve circuit wiring problems and physical conflicts arising from different Commonwealth drawings showing two things occupying the same point in space - a very common problem in those days before computer drafting.
The author worked on three different coal burning power plants. They were all very much alike.
Nuclear
Power Plants:
In the mid-50s, there were no conventional nuclear reactors. Everything nuclear was new and probably had never been done before. We laid out and instrumented Fermi I's control room more or less as if it were another Stratton, using familiar coal-burning power plant control room technology instruments along with additional instruments such as several chart-recording Geiger counters - all as per instructions from the Fermi project nuclear engineering team - mostly PhDs - who seemed to be located everywhere and nowhere.
This control room design approach
always had a few ambiguous indicators - it was to be a major contributor to the
reactor information problems at Three Mile Island
- i.e., "You can't have too much cooling water in the reactor". Today,
everything in a nuclear reactor control room is computerized in every country,
the computers are redundant, spend most of their time checking on each other,
won't let a human do anything stupid, and reactor operators are trained on
simulators like airline pilots - I think once a month, as compared to once a
year for an airline pilot. Some newer reactors, such as pebble beds, have no
dangerous modes of operation.
I was first assigned to do the reactor vessel's temperature sensing devices - type "N" thermocouples, by the dozens - the same kind as commonly used on coal-burning power plant boilers. They would print out the temperature they were measuring by printing a dot and their identity number on a roll of paper. You could then look up in the operator's manual to find out where in the reactor vessel that temperature was. We've come a long way since 1958, baby!
Later, I spent several months on the Cask Car control circuit drawings, a railroad car-like machine (robot?) that carried the radioactive fuel between the fuel storage area and the reactor. Getting it to pass through the containment wall was no simple control logic task using just mechanical relays. Sneak circuits that caused machinery to start or stop when it shouldn't abounded. My boss caught most of the sneak circuits before they left the office. This was when it became apparent why my boss was held in awe by the other electricals.
Fermi was the only nuclear plant the author ever worked on.
It was obvious just ten years after the Atomic Age began that nothing anyone could do would ever make nuclear technology go away. As it was with the war itself, there was no going back.
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