Turbine towers?
I did some work there. Not many homes nearby. A little village a mile down the road, otherwise fields. They were very paranoid in the late 90’s about security. This was the only plant (including a nuclear plant) that thoroughly searched me and my truck. Also made calls to veriy my work there. I never found out why.
A turbine failure at 3600 RPM would be no fun. If the blades breach the outer shell, there would be an immediate release of energy in the form of thermal energy and the danger of scalding or lacerations by flying debris in the immediate vicinity high. Prayers for the injured.
A steam turbine on a USN destroyer received a “slug” of water from the boiler instead of the required steam. The resultant “explosion” (actually, the blades broken from the rapidly spinning turbine, after being hit by water instead of steam) threw blades out a velocity which carried them from the engine room up through four steel decks.
A lot of energy is in those spinning turbines!
bmark
Think that makes three Nuclear Plant accidents since Easetr Sunday. First they dropped the million pound turbine down in Arkansas, then supposedly a Switch Unit arced at another Plant and now this ? That makes three this week. Any Koreans working at these plants ?
Bowen was at one time the largest coal powerplant in the U.S. and maybe the world.
I worked there for a quarter as a co-op engineering student ~35 years ago, and am somewhat familiar with the plant layout and equipment as a result. There are large natural draft hyperbolic cooling towers, but there is very little inside them, nothing likely to create holes if it failed.
If one of the main steam turbines failed catastrophically, the hole(s) would be in the turbine house structure, which is the long low part of the main powerplant structure. The high part houses the steam generators, AKA “the boilers”.
I will now read the thread to see what else we’ve learned about this story beyond the OP.