I saw on your account that you're at Watts Bar. There's a chance my dad might know your plant manager.
That's pretty cool. Our site VP seems to be a OK guy, he got quite a few things fixed during his tenure here. A couple of which were on my "this stuff aggrevates the crap outta me" list. I usually work the midnight shift so I don't see him often, but I do see him in passing. Like I said, he's pretty OK.
I don't tend to get to know the muckety-mucs well though. They only stay around for a cycle or two before they move on, up or out. Site managers, VP's, Maintenance managers or what-have-you all rotate in and out so often that I usually don't care about them one way or another. Maintenance techs (mechanical, electrical or I&C such as myself) stick around for decades.
Nuclear power is far more safe than the fossil power plants I've been to in my career. Although, if you turn on the aspirating air to a coal furnace and open the hatch while it's online, you can see a pretty cool sight. At Bull Run it sort of looks like a flaming tornado, that's the best way to describe it that I can come up with. It doesn't look like anything that I can explain with any accuracy. But one of the coolest things I've ever seen with my own eyes. And the only thing holding in place is air; and the waterwall tubing keeps the temperature down. The furnace wall generally runs 150 degrees or so, but main steam is 1050, at 3500 psi.
Our main steam isn't nearly at that temperature or pressure. Because it's pretty easy to bring down a fossil plant and replace boiler tubes. A steam generator at a nuclear plant is another matter entirely.
Anyway, nuclear maintenance is often cumbersome, due to the regulations involved. There are dangerous elements every now and again, but it is drastically reduced due to the processes the nuclear industry have implemented.
And, there are engineering controls in place to where (basically) it's designed to not run. If anything goes awry, the plant will shut itself down (in theory) safely if the unit operator just sits on his hands. TMI (Three Mile Island) became such a problem because the operators insisted on trying to stay online, while the plant was doing what it could to trip off.
Don't ever watch "The China Syndrome" and think that that is the way things are. There are more flaws in that movie than in Armegeddon if you know what your looking for.
