These are very precautionary evacuations and if there was a chance of a Japanese version of the China Syndrome, they would be evacuating a lot more area than just 10 miles around these plants.
Think about Chernobyl. The reason it continues to be so horrible is that there was absolutely no containment around the reactor, so when it blew it spewed directly into the atmosphere for weeks until they could snuff it.
The Japanese nuclear generation plants are state of the art with many backup systems to prevent a major accident; and I define “major” as being on the level of a Chernobyl. They are not even close anywhere in Japan.
I agree that there’s not going to be a full core meltdown. But if the backup cooling systems were damaged by the quake, that could greatly complicate the situation. It’s odd that radiation levels outside the plant are reportedly 8X normal levels. That probably means some radioactive steam has already been vented out of the plant. But overall I’m confident that these plants were designed to get through a huge earthquake list this one without a major disaster.
Can they dump a bunch of graphite control rods into the reactor core and shut it down that way? Or have they already tried that by now? Just wondering.
“The Japanese nuclear generation plants are state of the art...”
Yes, and that is a problem for us. Our plants are 1970s technology or earlier. If this can happen to their “state of the art” plants, think of what an 8.9 quake here could do.
Read the safety reports from some of our plants and you won’t get much sleep. I saw a report online about a plant within 80 miles of me, and it wasn’t comforting in the least.
Did you happen to catch the caller to Mark Levin who was a nuclear engineer or scientist? It was pretty revealing. He discussed to containment units that these ones in Japan seem to have. Chernobyl didn’t have one.