Tick Tock

It's been a few weeks since I last updated. Hey, I've been busy as these photos show. Working an outage at a nuclear power plant can be fun...annoying...frustrating...and fun again. There are several reasons for the range of emotions that you go through.

First the annoying. There are many different personalities you come across in an outage. You have your "I don't care" people, your "What are we waiting for?" people, your "find any excuse I can not to work people" and people like me the "please don't make me sick" type. Which ultimately happens anyway. To be honest I fall in all of the other categories too.

Next is frustrating. It seems that everyday there is mass confusion for everyone. It seems when you are ready to go, the plant stops you for one reason or another. When they want you to get something done, you want to take a lunch break. Or when you are dressed out (anti-contamination clothing) with all your safety gear on it many times seems unsafe. Your anti-c's are way too big (so they come off easier) and then you top it off with an air sampler, a safety harness, gloves that are the equivalent of boxing gloves and so on. You get the idea. Safety to the utmost. Not to mention the 7 days a week, 12 hours a day part.

Then there is the fun. There a ton of different things to do in a nuke. There is ISI which basically we remove paint (this can also be frustrating/annoying) from pipe and welds so they can ultrasound the pipe to get an accurate pipe wall thickness. Pretty easy stuff. Then there is the super technical pipefitting. This year we did 3" schedule 160 (.499" wall thickness) and a 36" weld repair inside the pipe. This is what the pictures are from. I hope you enjoy as I cut this short since this is suppose to be about Allied Milk Cycling.