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John Zinkand
Manheim Township
Dear John:
You have come to the right specialist, John. Dr. Scribblergenerator has just the medicine to cure your curiosity.
Or, rather, Dr. Scribblergenerator's informants have the correct medicine.
The current cylindrically-shaped steam generators arrived at TMI in May 1970.
Those two generators were manufactured by Babcock Wilcox in the Midwest and transported by rail to TMI, then operated by Metropolitan Edison.
They were only "a little bit lighter and smaller" than the new 811-ton generators, according to Ralph DeSantis, spokesman for TMI, which is operated by Exelon Nuclear.
"The big difference was that they did some fabrication here to weld flanges on the generators' sides and then installed them," DeSantis says.
The new generators' flanges were installed in France, where the generators were manufactured by AREVA Inc. TMI can no longer weld flanges on site.
Generators with flanges are too wide to fit through the railroad tunnels. Instead, as thousands of spectators watch, they are moving by road from their end-of-shipping point at Port Deposit, Md. Today they are passing through Columbia.
Road travel has required the building and bracing of bridges, the raising of power lines and TV cables, and the trimming and removal of trees.
Flangeless generators avoided all of that disruption four decades ago.
DeSantis does not know the rail route used in 1970s, but it would have been along Penn Central lines. Penn Central, no doubt coincidentally, filed for bankruptcy protection the month after the generators arrived.
The flanges, by the way, will connect the generators to the piping of TMI's reactor coolant system. The piping carries water and steam from the generators.
The generators themselves are full of pipes used as heat exchangers.
The point of the whole process is to turn water into steam to turn the turbine that produces electricity to power the computer producing this column.
And that is about all that Dr. Scribblergenerator knows about that.
However, since this column is not filled and the electricity is not exhausted, here's a bonus answer to your question, John.
Ken Hoak, director of the Conestoga Area Historical Society has found a precedent, of sorts, for the movement of these massive generators in 1970 and 2009.
In August of 1900, the Magnetic Ore Mine, located just south of Conestoga, ordered an 11-ton boiler to use in its mining activities.
The behemoth boiler moved to Safe Harbor by way of the Columbia-Port Deposit rail line. From there, 20 or so mules pulled it up Horse Hollow at Sickman's Mill to the mines along Pequea Creek.
Hoak, who provided a photo of the boiler, mules and human guides from the historical society's collection, observes that "hundreds of people must have come out to look at it, too."
By the way, the boiler produced steam to operate an engine that, in turn, operated electromagnets that separated iron ore from other rock.
And that is about all that Dr. Scribblerboiler knows about that.
E-mail: jbrubaker@lnpnews.com
