Tennessee Valley Authority

I was working with Southern Company Services (SCS) in Birmingham, in support of Georgia Power Company's Edwin I. Hatch Nuclear Power Plant. One day, a vice president came by to tell us that the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) had asked SCS for help in getting Unit 1 of its mothballed Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant back into operation. A 1975 fire had caused significant damage to wiring at the Browns Ferry plant.

I had no interest in the temporary assignment at Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant. I had a house and friends in Birmingham, and would be dwelling in an apartment in North Alabama and only returning to Birmingham for the weekends. But I was a bit peeved with my boss, as I felt that I was the most efficient engineer in the group, and yet kept getting average ratings on my annual reviews. So I raised my hand to ask a question about the assignment, just to make my boss nervous. However, this backfired, as the next day I was told that I had been volunteered for the project. As a result, I got to spend about five months in North Alabama.

We worked in a lovely double-wide trailer about a mile outside of the gates of the plant. Some of the team were eventually able to go inside the plant to gather information, but I spent my time in the trailer. At first we had nothing to do, and I would read books and eat M&Ms. I was told that it looked very bad that I was sitting there reading novels, but since we had nothing to do, I didn't really care. I just spent my nights in my new apartment in Athens and my days in the engineering trailer.

We didn't have a paved parking lot, but at least the gravel was in pretty good shape, so I couldn't complain:

Now, a significant safety factor in the design of nuclear plants is that no single failure should prevent the safe shutdown of the reactor. That means that there are redundant safety systems. As a result of the fire, it was recognized that sometimes cables were routed such that a fire in one area could knock out the main safety system and its backup.

One approach to this problem called for routing new cables and segregating them so that the redundant safety system cabling did not pass through a common area. Another approach was to apply fire retardant to mitigate the effects of a fire. Cables at nuclear plants are not always run in conduit, but often are run in cable trays, which look like ladders in which the cables are laid on the rungs. TVA decided to spray a fire retardant called Flamastic over the cables in many cable trays, so that even if a fire broke out, it would not spread.

Workers were supposed to spray on 1/4" thickness of Flamastic, but they apparently decided that if a little Flamastic was good, then 2 or 3 inches would be even better. Unfortunately, someone later realized that would contribute to higher temperatures in the cables, and they would have to be de-rated as to what was a safe amperage.

That's where we came in. After sitting around for two months waiting on security clearance, we were finally tasked with some real work. Some of our team was called upon to go inside the plant and try to measure or guess at the thickness of Flamastic in various cable trays.

Those of us, such as myself, in the trailer, would then take that data and calculate (or guess) how that would affect the ampacity of the derated cables, and determine if any of them were problematic. Of course, the records at the plant were such that we weren't always sure which cables were in the cable trays, their size, or the number of amps they were carrying. For example, we might have records that said a tray included a particular cable that was 12 AWG, and that it was feeding a 10hp pump. Now, a 10hp pump would need a much larger cable, so we knew that was wrong, so we had to have someone visit the pump, which usually turned out to not be a 10hp pump, but a 15hp pump, and then tell us what size cable it had in it, and then run calculations to determine if, after derating, the cable was adequate or if a new cable had to be pulled. Fun, fun, fun.

One of the managers in the engineering trailer wore suits every day, that were apparently handmade by his wife, which was very industrious. This included matching ties:

I drank a lot of water while I was working in the trailer, and I noticed that the water tasted funny, especially after the crop-dusting planes flew over the adjacent cotton fields. For a smart guy, I was awfully dumb at times, and it wasn't until years later that I wondered if the water was coming from a well that was being contaminated by chemicals from the crop dusting. I then worried for a few years that I had been drinking gallons of dangerous chemicals, and would develop cancer.

I eventually learned that cotton fields were likely being sprayed with methyl parathion, and that it is not considered a carcinogen. Nor did I suffer at the time from other symptoms of methyl parathion, such as profuse sweating/salivation, vomiting, diarrhea, pinpoint pupils, muscle twitching, difficulty breathing, confusion, or severe weakness. So it's possible the strange-tasting water had nothing to do with the crop dusting.

Anyway, after about 5 months I was allowed to return to Birmingham, and some other unlucky soul was brought in to take my place.

My "volunteering" did nothing to help my career at SCS.