This last Friday I went on a field trip for work. I love field trips! Unless they are lame or otherwise terrible. We went to a coastal/port city called Gochang (about 5 hours from Seoul) to tour a power systems research facility. They had test centers for ultra high voltage power lines (up to about 800kV). We got this really expensive delicacy of marinated eel (장어) by the coast. They brought the eel out to the grill and then cooked it over coals and added random eel parts to the mix. There were eel spines and livers and internals in the mix. I thought the eel liver was actually squid, which granted to some would seem out of the typical, but here is pretty normal. Anyway, it wasn't squid and tasted okay. The eel just tasted like a fish fillet to me which is fine and well by me. Eel spine was shockingly similar to bacon (but less savory and flavorful). Texture-wise it was spot on. Bacon is a delightful meat.
This is a picture by the coast. It wasn't the best looking coastline because it's a port town, but it was still fun to see! I hope to make it to a Korean beach sometime soon.
This is a model overview of the lab facilities with testing for photovoltaics (solar power), high temperature superconducting cables, underground cable testing facilities, UHV transmission towers, and other interesting upcoming technologies.
This is some high temperature superconducting cable which we may or may not test with KEPCO (Korea Electric Power Company) in the future. High temperature means cooled by liquid nitrogen (or around minus 196 C) instead of liquid helium (much colder). They pump liquid nitrogen through the entire length of the cable and regulate a really low temperature that maintains superconducting properties (very low losses of energy). The picture on the left shows the actual cable (which is pretty massive) and the right shows the line feeding to an underground tunnel.
The trip was a little bit boring because nothing was in English, but I did at least manage to play it safe around electricity!
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