The Dick


At the end of the tax year, SARS sent an inspector to audit the books of a local hospital.  While the SARS agent was checking the books he turned to the CEO of the hospital and said, “I notice you buy a lot of bandages.  What do you do with the end of the roll when there is too little left to be of any use?”

 

“Good question”, noted the CEO.  “We save them up and send them back to the bandage company and every now and then they send us a free box of bandages.”

 

“Oh”, replied the auditor, somewhat disappointed that his unusual question had a practical answer.  But on he went, in his obnoxious way.

 

“What about all these plaster purchases?  What do you do with what’s left over after setting a cast on a patient?”

 

“Ah, yes”, replied the CEO, realising that the inspector was trying to trap him with an unanswerable question.  “We save it and sent it back to the manufacturer, and every now and then they send us a free package of plaster.”

 

“I see”, replied the auditor, thinking hard about he could fluster the know-it-all CEO.  “Well”, he went on, “what do you do with all the leftover foreskins from the circumcisions you perform?”

 

“Here, too, we do not waste,” answered the CEO.  “What we do is save all the little foreskins and send them to SARS, and about once a year they send us a complete dick.”

Turbine Accident at Duvha- More EKSDOM


Not really intended for the public BUT amazing how pics like these can get out even after Eskom put a blanket of secrecy around the whole incident.  Duhva Power Station is near Witbank.

 

 

So I found out what happened at duhva.

 

They were doing a test of the turbine overspeed protection system, and in short, the protection did not kick in. conventional wisdom tells me that there should be a better way to test a protection system than to try and destroy the turbine and see if it feels like protecting itself, but that’s basically what they did.

 

The turbine has a governor valve which controls the amount of steam coming into the turbine In order to keep it running at the right speed (3000 rpm for our grid frequency) and then it has a main isolation valve to shut the steam off completely. The protections systems (of which there are 3 independent systems, and a dude with his finger on the emergency button) are supposed to close this main isolation valve in a fraction of a second when the turbine overspeeds.

 

So they get ready for the test, they dump a helluva lot of steam onto the turbine, speed starts going crazy, it went from 3000 RPM to 4500 RMP in ten seconds (they are generally only designed for 10 to 15% overspeed, all three protection systems should have kicked in by the time you get to 110%). Anyway, I don’t know why, but all three systems failed, and the dude with his finger on the manual trip button wasn’t at his post.  So the result was a big bang, some fire and a lot of steam going where it shouldn’t go.

 

Scary thing is duvha has a shared turbine hall. All six units are placed in one long straight stripe, with no missile shield between them. And if you look at the third last pic you can see how big that shaft is, if that landed on another turbine it would have destroyed that too. They are very lucky they didn’t lose the entire station.

 

So anyway, what gets reported in the news? “Unforeseen maintenance” at one of the units at duvha requires it to remain shut down for 18 months. understatement of the century in my book. But you shut off the containment ventilation system at Koeberg for one hour and a radiation alarm goes off, then it’s a front page news national crisis. I give up. 

 

 

 

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