Phasing out of Kori plant

By Nam Sang-so

On a balmy autumn day in 1972, a tall antenna tower collapsed. There were 30-meter-high six-guy-wired communication towers located in the barbed-wired compound near Gimpo International Airport west of Seoul. The owner, one of the U.S. agencies in Korea, had suspected that it may have been an act of terrorism.

The agency asked us, an architect/engineering firm (a Nevada corporation) to investigate the cause. Leading structural engineers in the field and I found no trace of sabotage of the steel structures. The tension measurements made on the guywires, however, showed unbalanced traction, which had caused the collapse (due to the law of cosines) of the guywires and tower, we concluded.

Hearing news of the antenna report, the Korea manager of Westinghouse walked into my office. Westinghouse provided the main technology and major equipment for Kori Nuclear Power Plant. He said the engineers and technicians from the United States got stomach problems upon arriving at the Westinghouse compound in Kori, north of Busan.

“We suspected the drinking water and analyzed samples in our laboratory back in the United States repeatedly but the results have been all good for drinking. We get all food in from San Francisco, except the water. And we have a physician stationed at the camp and she is puzzled. We are hauling drinking water from Camp Hialeah in Busan. Could you get an answer for us as quick as possible?” the tall American said. “By the way this is between you and me, but there is an air of suspicion that there may be some outside interference,” he added, hinting that some South Korean party was responsible as the country wanted to build nuclear arms which the United States opposed.

So, we sampled water at every faucet in the camp for testing, and the results were the same; it was clean potable water. On our fourth attempt when pumping was ceased and the piped water running under the rice field pressure dropped, however, we found traces of farm chemicals and some microorganisms. There had been a cathodic reaction going on ― the electrons from the breakdown of elemental iron flew through the pipe wall to the cathode corroding the pipe. The Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEPCO) replaced the raw intake pipe with a new concrete pipe immune to the cathodic reaction. Suffice to say, the Westinghouse man and I became good friends.

In the summer of 2009, I visited a nursing home in the middle of a North Carolina corn field and I pushed the Westinghouse man's wheelchair out into the warm sunlight. “I'm sorry I couldn't tell you earlier but I worked for the federal government,” he said. He died a few weeks later of old age and dementia. He died before the first reactor of the Kori Nuclear Power Plant was decommissioned in 2017 with units 2, 3 and 4 programmed to be decommissioned fulfilling their successful mission for the Republic of Korea.

The writer (sangsonam@gmail.com) is a retired architect/engineer.