Posted on 08/07/2011 4:23:21 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Decontamination system stops at Fukushima Daiichi
The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is facing yet another problem with its wastewater filtering system. The system came to a halt again on Sunday.
Tokyo Electric Power Company has been filtering highly contaminated water in basements to remove radioactive material and then pump the water back into the reactors as coolant.
Shortly after 7 AM on Sunday, some of the pumps in a US decontamination device stopped and could not be restarted. The equipment is used to remove radioactive cesium.
About an hour later, a pump in a French device also stopped working.
A back-up pump also failed to work, bringing the whole decontamination system to a halt. TEPCO says it is continuing to inject cooling water into reactors by using treated water.
The decontamination system has faced earlier problems. On Thursday, another pump stopped at one time. On Friday, an alarm went off and the system stopped operating.
TEPCO added a Japanese-made decontamination device to the system to make it more stable. But the utility wanted to treat wastewater before the test run of the new device, because there is little available storage space for the contaminated water.
TEPCO is trying to determine the cause of the malfunctions while working to restart the system.
Sunday, August 07, 2011 12:46 +0900 (JST)
P!
Ho-hum. Must have been a slow news day, so they decided to try to revive the glory days of nuclear hysteria. Fukushima radiation death toll: zero and counting...
2 - the French system fails
3 - the backup system fails
Either the gods are out to get them, they're complete idiots, or its sabotage. In any other case, I'd go with sabotage but after the gods did their thing, these guys have shot themselves in the foot at every turn. It really makes you wonder just how well maintained the equipment was to begin with.
They’re still living in the middle of a major disaster area, remember - tens of thousands of people are still refugees within their own nation. So I wouldn’t be so harsh as to call them idiots.
Given the urgency of the situation and the rushed procurement and installation, maybe they were exceeding the duty cycle of the pumps that failed, which nobody thought to consider in the turmoil.
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