Posted on 03/13/2011 6:32:06 AM PDT by BenLurkin
When San Onofre was designed several decades ago, scientific studies showed that the largest tsunami likely to strike the San Onofre area would measure about 25 feet. The wall was built 30 feet high for extra protection, Alexander said.
As for earthquakes, the facility was built to survive a nearby earthquake with a magnitude 7.0, Alexander said.
During the plant's planning stages, "The best science suggested that the nearest earthquake fault, which is five miles from the plant, could produce an earthquake something less than a magnitude 7 in the plant vicinity," Alexander said.
He added that it wouldn't take a major event to trigger an emergency response.
"The plant is designed so that if ground motion sensors on the plant property detect even slight movement, an automatic mechanism will shut the two reactors down," Alexander said, by inserting control rods into the reactor cores to slow and stop the nuclear process. If need be, those rods can also be lowered manually. A total shutdown would take several hours.
The San Onofre plant provides enough electricity to power 1.4 million homes in Southern California.
Alexander said the company holds full-scale drills -- along with local, state and federal agencies -- five or six times a year to prepare for earthquakes and similar disasters.
(Excerpt) Read more at ocregister.com ...
no no no thats not enough. We need it to withstand a 10.0 earth quake, a meteor strike, and a full nuclear attack all at the same time.
With coal powered electric plants all the Tsunami would od is put out the fire that run the turbines.
We have plenty of coal.
Get the EPA off their azz and we can have plenty of electric.
I don’t know if you can build something to make it through a 9.0 earthquake.
Japan will be the test of that
7.0 does seem a bit low as worst case for California
I don’t think the quake caused the failure. I believe it was the flood from the tidal wave that knocked out the backup Diesel generators that drive the emergency cooling system that caused the nuke to fail. Not good sentence structure, but you get the idea.
It doesn't need to survive, it just needs to remain safe.
I agree. You would think by now we would know the affect of the tsunami on the backup Diesel generators.
It looks like magnitude 9 is the new benchmark & maybe they ought to build that seawall five feet higher.
It should be noted that the Richter Scale is logarithmic. Each point increase represents a 10x stronger quake. So, the Japanese quake at 8.9 is nearly 100x stronger than the 7.0 that the California plant is designed for. I hope they picked the right number!
There are 4 or 5 other old SCE (gas) power plants right on the each around OC & LA. What about their durability?
Those plants are all old ones.
Breathing coal may not be as bad as the radiation one might get in a full-scale meltdown but it's a lot worse than what one gets when the nuke plant isn't.
And getting that coal is more dangerous to workers than keeping a reactor running and it's more likely to turn a community into a wasteland than a nuke plant.
I was going to compare Centralia to Harrisburg (Three Mile Island) but then Harrisburg is a wasteland too but not because of TMI but because of Democrats
I'll grant that a 9 magnitude earthquake followed by a 30-foot tsunami is more destructive to a community than coal power.
We’ve regulated ourselves into danger. We’re using old technology because building new modern energy generation plants is virtually impossible.
Instead Obozo wants to blow money on “smart grid” tech that doesn’t mean crap if a 50 year old power plant fails.
Electrical equipment built to spec for nuclear safety related duty must be rated Siesmic 9 and proven.
Been like that since the late eighties.
Smaller thorium reactors, smaller distribution lines and the future looks bright and clean. Not plagiarized from Joe Biden!
The relationship between wave energy and peak destructive force is not linear. That is why the volume control on your sound system is logarithmic too.
Precisely. Small, gravitational sodium cooled nukes have nothing in common with the technological dinosaurs run far beyond their design life, whose death throes we are witnessing.
I read on Drudge that the nuclear plant in Japan was scheduled to be decommissioned next month, so are the newer generation plants much safer?
Yes. For example, the Toshiba 4s does not require pumps for cooling. The fissile material is embedded in ceramic spheres so that it cannot melt down. It is smaller so that an effective containment structure is easier to construct. It can be removed from the site with a crane, put on a truck, and returned to the manufacturer for service.
Dittos
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