Forward to the Future

I have not updated since returning home from Limerick, largely due to dealing with the burdens of new home ownership. I hope to get a new post going this weekend or next week, complete with pictures and tales of Pennsylvania.


For now, I will update you with the news that I was preapproved for the Fall 2012 Unit 1 outage at STP. Pretty obvious, as it is my home plant, but still nice to know they want me. I hope to be counted as a Junior Decon which is a higher pay grade at STP than most other plants, but we shall see.


Thanks for anyone who actually reads this.

Pottstown, Future Temporary Home

Lately, I have been doing some in-depth research on the effectiveness of bleach on roden--wait, I mean, on the small town in which I and my Adventure Buddy, Nicky are going to spend a month pretending to work at a nuclear power plant. Of course, I am talking about the wonderful metropolis of Pottstown, Pennsylvania.

First of all, Pennsylvania was the 2nd state to ratify the Constitution, 5 days after Delaware (and 1 day after my future birthday) on December 12th, 1787. It is called the Keystone State, for which I can only guess is due to massive amounts of Keystone Light being drank day after day at schools like Penn State.

I assume this is the state mascot for Pennsylvania.

But enough about the drunken residents of the entire state. Pottstown is interesting enough on its own. I think.


Anyway, I am amazed at what a town barely larger than Bay City (~22,000 people, compared to the 26,000 who lived there in 1960) can have so many more interesting things than my shitty town. For example: WE GET TO GO TO A WAWA! I am so excited about this.

There's a Planned Parenthood there, so I can abort my food babies after eating at awesome places like the Pourhouse, a pub behind a pizzeria called Little Italy.

Also: there's a K-Mart. They still exist in the wild. I thought they were the stuff of legends.

There's also lots of things like a historical manor, an antique mall, and a highway named after the clinically syphilitic Benjamin Franklin.

I just bought a new Nikon CoolPix S9100 for documenting the Misadventures of Doug and Nicky in Yankeeland. It shall be lots of fun.


As a PS, I will leave you with the website of the tattoo shop I hope to visit soon after arriving in Pottstown: Beneath the Skin

T-Minus 3 Weeks

I haven't been updating this, but now that I am 3 weeks away from my next nuclear job, I figure it is about time to get cracking on the personal posts.


My friend, Nicky Grisham (a newly-made Junior Health Physics Technician), is going to be joining me on a trip to Pottstown, Pennsylvania to work a refuel outage at Limerick Electric Generating Station. We will be gone for about a month and rooming together at the Pottstown Days Inn.


Limerick is owned and operated by Exelon, likely the owner of the largest number of nuclear power plants in the country.


My wages are going to be about the same as at STP, but we get $110 per diem (tax-free), of which I will spend probably spend less than half for expenses. We also get ~$500 in travel reimbursement, the rest of which I can deduct on my taxes.


Limerick has boiling-water reactors, as opposed to the pressurized-water reactors of STP. In a BWR, the reactor core heats water, which turns to steam and then drives a steam turbine, whereas in a PWR, the reactor core heats water, which does not boil. This hot water then exchanges heat with a lower pressure water system, which turns to steam and drives the turbine.


The effect of this difference is that in a PWR, there is only a small portion of the system that is in contact with radioactive contamination, and in a BWR, the entire system is considered potentially contaminated. That means MORE WORK FOR ME. That actually excites me because it is a new set of work details.


Also, Limerick has these bad boys:

Natural draft cooling towers! This is awesome in that they are the stereotypical symbols of a nuclear power plant and I have always wanted to see them. It's like working at the plant from the Simpsons.


That's it for this post. There will be some more as we get closer to launch day, but since there was such a long delay between posts, here is a bonus picture of my recent nuclear-related tattoo:

The molecular structure of uranium dioxide, the mineral of which nuclear fuel pellets are made.  

South Texas Project, My Home Plant.

I mentioned that I would write about the history of South Texas Project in a future post. Well, it turns out we live in the future! I N C E P T I O N .

The reservoir on the left, with Unit 2 and Unit 1 RCBs sticking up like boobs.

South Texas Project is located in the middle of nowhere off of FM Rd 521 in Matagorda County. The nearest towns are my wife's hometown of Wadsworth (a town of less than 200 people), Palacios (a town without even a Wal-Mart), Matagorda (a beach town with basically no other reason to exist), and Bay City, where we live.

The actual site sits on over 12,000 acres of mostly undeveloped land on the Colorado River, including a 7,000 acre reservoir constructed for the plant . This undeveloped area is preserved as a protected habitat for many birds, including bald eagles and peregrine falcons.

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Planning started in 1971 for the two reactor units and construction was started on December 22, 1975. Unit 1 reached criticality on March 8, 1988 (exactly 5 months before my wife was born) and Unit 2 reached criticality on March 12 of the following year.

The site consists generally of 3 areas, broken into further parts. The majority of the site is the Owner-Controlled Area where administrative offices, welding shops, as well as the wildlife areas and the reservoir exist.

Without getting too into details (for legal reasons, mainly), the second area is the fenced-in Protected Area where the mechanics of the plant, such as the Turbine Generator Building and the Electrical, Mechanical and I&C shops lay. This area requires higher access (for obvious reasons) and is monitored by armed security.

The third, and most-controlled, area is the Vital Area where the Reactor Containment, Mechanical Auxiliary, and Electrical Auxiliary buildings are located. This is the heart of the plant and the home of the Radiologically Controlled Area.

There could be said to be a fourth section, if one was to count the Control Room. That requires special access and is very interesting. I was lucky enough to have access to the Control Room for ~2 months after my first outage. It is an experience I will never forget. The room is filled with some of the most important figures in the unit, mainly sitting at computers and looking at the hundreds of gauges, switches, and dials that run the main systems of the plant. It really is like it is shown in the movies: tense, quiet, and awe-inspiring.

Each Unit has a 1250 MW Westinghouse Pressurized Water Reactor. I will explain how the reactors work and the differences between PWR and Boiling Water Reactors in the next post. These two units produce an average of 22,139 GW-hours of electricity each year. That is the most electricity produced by a two-unit plant in the country since 2004.

Needless to say, that is a lot of power; enough to power 2 million Texas homes every year. That's about 6-7 million people, or roughly 25-28% of Texans. All from a single plant. If that's not amazing, I don't know what is.

In the Beginning...

Welcome to my new nuclear blog. I hope to show what it is like to work in such an interesting industry, as well as teach a few people some things about nuclear power and dispel the numerous myths that have emerged over the last 40 years.

My name is Doug De Vos. Some might have read my Cooking and Taxes blog, others may have not. I am a native Texan, currently living in a small Texas town near the coast where my wife grew up. This county possesses a 2-reactor nuclear power plant known as the South Texas Project Electric Generating Station, run by STP Nuclear Operating Company. A post with the history of this plant is forthcoming, so have no fear.

My wife has been an employee of STPNOC for a year and a half as an Apprentice Instrumentations and Controls Technician, having worked an internship previously, as well as two outages (a term to be explained) with the company for which I now work.


To give a very brief introduction to how my employment started and how it works at a nuclear power plant, I'll start by saying that after Jessie worked one outage, we decided it would be better to get married and live near STPEGS. In December 2009, we moved to a 2-bedroom apartment here in Bay City and prepared to work the upcoming outage.

An outage (also known as a shutdown) is any time one of the units at STP shuts down and no longer is producing power. These can be scheduled refuel outages or forced outages due to necessary repairs or accidents. Refuel outages occur (at STP) every 18 months for each unit. This creates a 3 year turnaround cycle for scheduled outages.

Jessie had worked the Unit 1 Reactor Vessel Head Replacement Outage in the fall of 2009 and we moved shortly after. The Unit 2 RVHRO was the following spring and she was returning with the company she had worked with, Bartlett Nuclear, Inc. I needed a job as well, so I applied with the housekeeping/firewatch company, GCA Services.


To make a long story short, I worked the 2-month outage doing decontamination mopping inside of containment, then worked for 2 more months as a sort of mid-range supervisor before leaving for medical problems.

If you have read my mentioned blog, I then worked a season as a tax professional and missed an outage, bringing us to the refuel outage of Unit 2 in October 2011.