Thanks for the common sense post. What the chicken littles don’t realize or do not want to read or hear, is that OUR nuclear plants have back-ups for cooling, which Japan obviously did not!!!
Well actually, they did. They had both on and off site power sources plus batteries to operate the various cooling and circulating systems. Problem is, they lost all sources except the batteries in the tsunami for units 1-4. And, they only had a few hours of operation using battery power and a steam-driven circulation pump.
While we do have a few more system on plants that use similar-vintage GE reactors, the big issue for this plant was losing all sources of AC power. The tsunami was devastating, and well beyond the design of the plant.
The Japanese plants did have back-ups for cooling... large diesel gensets, which the tsunami took out.
The plant had battery back-up for eight hours or so of control and cooling operation without the diesels. Those ran down.
What ultimately failed here were engineering assumptions of how much water could wash in on top of the facility. The reactors shut down properly after the quake, the buildings and containment held through the quake with no problem. All of these problems at Fukushima ultimately are rooted in an under-estimation of the worst case tsunami event, and the subsequent inability to deal with the residual heat in the reactors after they were shut down.
The reason why there are so many “chicken littles” surrounding nuclear power is that a) the press has hyped the dangers far, far beyond what the data actually indicate is the danger (and there are dangers, to be certain, but there has been a deliberate disinformation campaign on nuclear weapons and power for the last 30 years), and this is received b) by people who are just plain stump-stupid about numbers, science, statistics, mathematics, medical statistical studies, etc.
Basically, while the liberal arts majors who get elected and spend inordinate amounts of time bloviating on the Boobie-Tube about “illiteracy,” they spend almost no time worrying about innumeracy.
And it is the innumeracy that has led to abundant chicken-littlism in the western press, and not just surrounding nuclear power. A great many people are quite simply fantastically stupid around numbers. You can see it in the discussions of radiation exposure and dosages - the cartoon from xkcd put the orders of magnitude into perspective for some people, but others simply gloss over it. And level of technology that is beyond people’s understanding becomes magic. Cell phone spread spectrum modulation? Well, that’s good magic. Nuclear radiation? Bad magic. But they both might as well be magic vapors in a bottle as far as most people are concerned. Rub the lamp the right or wrong way, the Genie appears and grants you your wishes... or kills you dead.
Want to prove this rampant innumeracy to yourself?
Go forth into the street and casually ask people how many millions are in a trillion. Go ahead, try it. You’ll be *amazed* at how astoundingly stupid your fellow citizens are. Heck, I see this out of supposed “conservative Republican” professional op-ed blowhards all the time, and it is the reason why I cannot watch TV talking head shows any more: people conflate “billions” with “trillions” all the time when talking about the budget, the outstanding debt, market capitalizations, etc.
When an engineer hears “billions” where he was supposed to hear “trillions” (or vice versa), his brain goes “Wait - WTF?@!” whereas the typical blowhard on TV with a liberal arts degree and JD blithely carry on, as tho billions and trillions were interchangeable.
What’s three orders of magnitude among supposedly educated people, anyway, right?
Go ahead, I encourage you to do the “how many millions in a trillion?” experiment. It will open your eyes.
When I’ve done it, and people get it wrong (as the majority of people do - I’m deadly serious, only about one in three people get it right - that there are a million millions in one trillion), I try to explain it thusly: “If you had a trillion dollars, you could spend a million dollars *every* day of your life and die with plenty of money left over. Let’s say your nanny or mother spent your million for you while you were too young to read or write or handle that much cash...”
They refuse to believe this. Go ahead, try it.
Then watch what happens when you go through the reckoning. You’ll see people’s true level of stupidity come to light. Once, when I multiplied mantissas and added exponents, I had one woman start shouting at me that “you can’t do that! That’s illegal!”
Riiiight.
There was an article on FR a week before the Japan earthquake criticizing US reactors for only having one backup system for cooling.
Japan had backups, they were just disabled by the Tsunami.
The Japanese did have back ups for cooling, but the tsunami washed them away or shorted them out after it topped their 20 foot sea dike.