[The Lone Ranger]

Will turbulent flow always separate into disconnected droplets?

No. Otherwise a fast-flowing mountain stream (which is most-definitely turbulent) would consist of disconnected water droplets. Most faucets produce turbulent flow, but it isn't necessarily broken up into individual droplets.

And will this happen at the tap opening or some distance below?

If you turn your kitchen tap to a very slow, laminar flow, such that there's a very small volume of water flowing, you can see it shatter into individual drops maybe 6 inches to a foot below the tap, depending on the flow volume. This assumes that the flow is sufficient that the water does not separate into drops because of surface tension (as you pointed out), and come out one drop at a time.

If your tap allows for laminar flow with a greater volume of water (i.e., it doesn't have an aerator), the column of laminar-flow water will remain intact all the way down to the sink. What causes the column of water to eventually "shatter" into droplets as it falls (whether the flow is turbulent or laminar) is mostly the tension created by gravity pulling on the water column, though air resistance doubtless also plays a role, since it will magnify any deviation from perfect smoothness in the column of water, making the flow more turbulent and hastening the "shattering" of the column.

Assuming the fluid in question is electrically conductive, the basic question is under what circumstances could current flow up the stream of fluid, and under what circumstances can you safely piss on an electric fence/electric eel/other hazard?

Electricity would flow through any electrically conductive fluid that was in laminar flow quite nicely, since the molecules are more or less in contact. It would also flow quite nicely though any conductive fluid that was in turbulent flow, so long as it hadn't shattered into droplets.

If you wanted to safely urinate on an electric fence, the trick would be to be far-enough from the fence that the urine stream had shattered into individual droplets by the time it reached the fence -- and that the droplets had moved far-enough apart, on average, to prevent the current from "jumping" from one droplet in the stream to the next.

If you're standing on an elevated platform and urinating onto a fence 20 feet below you, my guess is that you'd be perfectly safe. I wouldn't want to try it from a distance of 2 feet, though.

It depends on the voltage of the fence, too. The greater the voltage and the amperage, the larger a gap the electricity can jump. Urinating on a high-voltage electric line -- even from a considerable distance -- would be a very bad idea.

Cheers,

Michael