From Tim:

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Several items of note today:

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Update on the week's activities at Weston thus far, as reported by Tim:

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Monday (5/19/08, Victoria Day)
Safety training and Daily project meeting performed. 1/2-respirators needed on stack as well as climbing harness and double lanyard. Climbers cannot be provided by facility and new ones are not available.
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Preliminary indication is that all equipment is on site and packages are intact and in the bottom of the stack.
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Transport all equipment up the stack using the external elevator. Takes approximately 5 trips.
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Jack and I begin putting unit together. Side panel with HVAC unit is most heavy and hard to maneuver but two people helps. Small parts/screws are packed in zip locks and for most part are labeled. Overall packing is done well. Unit is pretty easy to reassemble and we only drop two screws. Assembly documented using Jacks camera if we ever need to do this again.
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Leave plant @ 16:00. Assembly went well.
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Tuesday (5/20/08)
Arrive at plant @ 7:30. Have "Tailboard meeting" to review daily safety and activities. Continue hardware assembly including installation of heated line and all interconnecting wiring and plumbing. Unit set in place. Vent is at exact level as handrail although should not be an issue. List of needed material made to complete HSL support. Electricians routing conduit around stack wall and moving signal cable from one conduit to the other. Previous week's installation had communication and power cables in same conduit.
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I leave plant @ 10:15 to obtain supplies and check on RATTS operation at Hotel. Jack using temporary power.
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Return to site @ 12:20. Jack indicates that PAC controller may be compromised and has spoken to Volker and Jim Stroud regarding options. Continue probe support installation in interim. Will need approximately 4-5 unistrut bolts from facility to complete as well as ladder. Talk to Paul Sackman to request bolts and set up install in the afternoon when available.
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12:45. Electrician indicates that limit switch was "smashed" during last trip up the stack. He managed to push door open and get out but.."When you go down you may need to hold in the switch...."
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Jack and I take a look at elevator. Flexible cable is indeed ripped from switch box and elevator car is approximately 6 inches from landing. Attempts by the facility to call the elevator are unsuccessful. Long story short - Jack and I cannot regress using elevator. Installation comes to a standstill.
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Jim Stroud and Volker to update controller at office and post necessary software. All hardware terminations are completed that can be. Gas driers mounted inside unit, but door install is a must long-term due to access. Foil removed from each container. Electricians indicate they will stay until the power cable and signal cable are in place so we should have it available first thing on Wednesday. Facility techs will then need to complete wiring directly to the unit.
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After a protracted afternoon filled with frustration and slowed progress, Jack and I begin descent into the dark abyss. Going is slow. Leave plant @ 18:30.
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Tim

Will:

Tim forwarded me this message and I wanted to briefly respond. I think I am familiar with the paper you are referring to. I assume it is the work that Mandi Richardson has done.at URS.

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I know that her.study shows a trend.of SKC's batch spike being lost when exposed to SOx (or thermal energy); however, we're not sure how to correlate this type of lab study to what we are seeing in the field. The fact is, there seems to be a problem with spike retention in ALL spiked traps exposed to real flue gas under certain conditions. The problem has been nailing down what those "certain conditions" actually are.

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Currently, CleanAir has MET-80 systems running with both Lumex traps (which are front-spiked) and the batch-spiked traps from SKC (like yours). Both types of traps have, at some time or another, shown spike loss. The Lumex traps seem to show a fairly linear loss after a certain volume of flue gas exposure...this supports the theory that the mercury may be migrating through the bed, which is the rationale for foward-spiking. The data for the SKC traps appears more randomly distributed, which we think is a result of the statistical variation in characterizing the batch spikes (this refers to the RSD that Tim wrote about earlier...the tighter we can get them to control this in the manufacturing process, the less variation we're seeing in the data).

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Bottom line is that this industry (utilities, trap producers, testers, etc.) are still trying to understand this, and the amount of long-term field data is actually quite limited. We have been working with SKC on this issue for over two years now, and we're still scratching our heads when we see data like Mandi's. It is my understanding, however, that the data we have thus far at Ratts is meeting the +/- 25% criterion spelled out previously in Appendix K...(Tim will provide this if he has not already). Hopefully, as we gather more data like this we can present it somewhere and help the industry as a whole with this issue.

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Jim Wright

Reported by Tim

Jack and Tim are at the Weston plant today assembling the system on Unit 3.

By mid-day, they had all of the equipment on the sampling platform and are piecing it all together.

Unfortunately, the plant has not completed installing the electrical power, since they didn't know where the cabinet was ultimately going to go (seems that all of that CAD work we did was for naught). It currently looks like we might be looking at a delay of a day or more.