Posted on 03/15/2011 8:13:35 AM PDT by SE Mom
Latest news from Japan:
From the BBC-
1456: Tepco says it may start pouring water from a helicopter over Fukushima Daiichi's reactor four in the next few days, to cool the spent-fuel pool.
1439: A 30km (18 mile) no-fly zone is in place around Fukushima, says the IAEA.
1436: The IAEA says Monday's blast at Fukushima may have affected the integrity of the containment vessel - there are fears of more serious radioactive leaks if happen.
1435: Following earlier reports, it appears there has been more than one strong aftershock in Japan - AP reports two tremors measuring over 6.0 within three minutes of each other.
Twitter-
-US Geological Survey counts 451 aftershocks since the initial earthquake struck Japan Friday. 238 of them registered magnitude 5.0 or more.
-Despite situations in Japan & Libya, spksmn Jay Carney says Pres Obama's 5-day trip to Brazil, Chile & El Salvador starting Fri night is on.
-FLASH: More U.S. military personnel in Japan testing positive for low-levels of radiation, relief missions to continue - Navy 18 minutes ago via web
Japanese Earthquake Update (15 March 18:00 UTC)
15 March 2011
Announcements, Featured
The IAEA can confirm the following information about the status of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
Unit 4 was shut down for a routine, planned maintenance outage on 30 November 2010. After the outage, all fuel from the reactor was transferred to the spent fuel pool.
Units 5 and 6 were shut down at the time of the earthquake. Unit 5 was shut down as of 3 January 2011. Unit 6 was shut down as of 14 August 2010. Both reactors are currently loaded with fuel.
As of 00:16 UTC on 15 March, plant operators were considering the removal of panels from units 5 and 6 reactor buildings to prevent a possible build-up of hydrogen in the future. It was a build-up of hydrogen at units 1, 2, and 3 that led to explosions at the Daiichi facilities in recent days.
The IAEA continues to monitor and seek information on the status of plant workers, reactor conditions, and spent nuclear fuel at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
Do you have a Japan or Asia ping list- please let them know this thread is here if so. It makes it a little easier to keep track of developments and we try to cross post other articles on FR that are related.
I beg to disagree. Hydro is evil. It disrupts the river, it changes eco systems and keeps fish from spawing. Evil, evil, evil...
Or so your average leftist enviro-whacko will tell you.
Who’s the other dude in that pic?
An underground location might have possibilities for man-made reactor as well.
I think our planet can tolerate man-made nuclear reactors carefully constructed and judiciously managed.
I'm a fan of nuclear energy, just not one of piss poor engineering when the consequences of a major failure are so great.
So this IAEA thread is to say that Daiichi / Fukushima I Unit 4 is the only unit with fuel in the spent fuel containment pool?
I thought otherwise unless the report that said the pools 5 and 6 were heating up and it really meant instead that the cores of 5 and 6 are heating up from their cold shut-down state.
I sorely wish some responsible party with reputable knowledge would present a better unit-by-unit status report on the SIX units at Fukushima I and the FOUR units at Fukushima II. Fukushima II appears to be functional and safely shut-down with residual cooling functions working.
Ok- so am I correct in saying 5 & 6 are like 4 -having spent fuel?
I absolutely hate environmentalists with a passion. There is not one single energy source that they will get behind except for the one that does not yet exists. They loved wind and solar, until we actually started to build them, then they blocked it. Same with hydro, same with tidal, etc... Thos scum sucking libs will not be happy until the population is a million people and we are all living in caves eating algae.
I don't know, I think you have to consider the nature of the system you are dealing with and its design life. I did an audit for a now-decommissioned research reactor and looked at their operational records. It never failed to SCRAM when called upon. Never. Not. One. Time. Ever. Granted, it is a simple system, but that is the key to its reliability. Turn off the current, and gravity effects the shutdown. Gravity doesn't fail. Would the system have ever failed? I don't know, I guess, maybe if they ran it long enough so things were crumbling into dust. Certainly everything has that kind of endpoint failure. But for the practical lifetime of a system, I think it is possible to have essentially a perfect safety record. LWR technology, at least from the viewpoint of public safety, comes as close to that as anything we have out there.
Many thanks; scads of info to glean, and my photographic mind ran out of film two decades back!
I have to admit, you have the lib/left mindset down to the brass tacks. Here is to praying greater than 50 percent of the nation’s population knows what you know.
The information they’re providing on Unit 4 conflicts with the plant status information provided directly by TEPCO. Wonder which is accurate?
It may be that they have spent fuel in storage in the pools and fresh fuel in the cores. That could very well be. Evidently Unit 4 did a complete core offload for some reason.
Ah, but there’s the rub, you have qualified a time frame and thus have to say that there is a statistical probability of failure in a certain period of time... MTBF.
Even Gravity will eventually fail but not in a time frame we should be concerned with. An asteroid may hit, the Sun will Nova, the magnetic field will shift (it already has more than once) but will any of these things happen in a time frame important to us now? Probably not.
You said:
Gravity doesn’t fail. Would the system have ever failed? I don’t know, I guess, maybe if they ran it long enough so things were crumbling into dust. Certainly everything has that kind of endpoint failure. But for the practical lifetime of a system
I married into an extened family full of them. Ugh. My wife, her parents and two others being the exception out of 60+ (Old school Irish-Catholic) :-)
That's what I've been saying for three days. It doesn't make sense that they can't keep any water in. Sure, there's steam that's escaping but there's much more going on that's causing the no water situation. The generator/pump problem just doesn't ring true. First they couldn't keep water in the container whatever and now there's water problems in the pools. Water doesn't just get up and jump out of the pools so the only other way out is down through a crack in the foundation.
But we don’t seem to KNOW the actual status of fuel storage pools throughout the plant?
I guess it doesn’t matter because it is what it is and we can’t do anything but watch this drama play out.
The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency says the coolant level has fallen in the No.5 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
But the tsunami damaged a diesel generator for circulating the coolant, allowing the pressure in the reactor to rise.
As of 9 PM on Tuesday, the water level was 2 meters above the fuel rods. That was 40 centimeters lower than 5 hours earlier.
The Agency says it can adjust the water levels by using the No.6 reactor's generator, which wasn't damaged by the tsunami. Workers are currently pumping water into the No.5 and No.6 reactors.
I am under no illusions that these plants have an infinite lifetime. I know enough about embrittlement and displacement damage to know that you aren't going to run a decent-sized LWR, even with a low-leakage core, much beyond about 80 years. So if you can keep the failure rate low enough that you can manage that kind of timeline with essentially zero chance of a catastrophic failure, you're probably in a good position to make it.
BTW, one of my jobs as a consultant was to design a nuclear plant with essentially all replaceable components, including the pressure vessel. Looked great on paper. I tried to sell it to Circle Bar W but they didn't go for it, they were into IRIS at the time. Maybe I should dig those plans up...
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