Posted on 03/17/2011 10:14:24 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
New Power Line Installed At Fukushima Daiichi Plant: Govt
TOKYO (Nikkei)--Japanese officials have installed cables to supply electricity from Tohoku Electric Power Co.'s (9506) power grid to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, a step they hope will help inject water more efficiently into the facility's crippled reactors that are at the center of Japan's nuclear crisis, the government's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said at a news conference Thursday night.
Officials will try to connect the cable to the plant's No. 2 reactor on Friday, the agency said.
The No. 2 reactor's containment vessel was partly damaged in its pressure suppression chamber. The reactor building is emitting vapor deemed to have originated from spent nuclear fuel's storage pools into the air.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501), which operates the plant, will try to restart the No. 2 reactor's cooling system Friday by using the power supply from Tohoku Electric, officials said.
(The Nikkei March 17 online edition)
P!
That would an interesting project to work on say the least.
Good! It should be very exciting when the pumps kick on, but will get boring fairly quickly once a steady water supply is insured.
Man... Imagine powering that thing back up and all the alarms and sirens going off and sensor failures and warning lamps and computers rebooting into lord knows what state....
What a mess.
Jeeze, it takes 5-7 days to run an electric line over there? Isn't this complex on a bay that they could run a ship in there and leach off of the ships power plants? or is that not enough?
and the line is jsut run? it won’t be hooked up til tomorrow? Man they’re slow.
Hope this works out for them.
Indeed, will anything even work, including the cooling pumps, considering the pre-meltdown damage from the tsunami and then the post-meltdown damage from the explosions, etc?
You know how it is when you wait and wait for the power company to turn your electricity on and they forget your ticket.
Or maybe they have other problems there...
Yep. They had a 9.0 earthquake and a friggin’ 7 meter tsunami. That might slow things down a bit...
Unless I’ve got the times and dates figured wrong, it’s already tomorrow there.
I think you might be underestimating the obstacles that exist here. The earthquake/tsunami wiped out all the transmission line connections to the rest of the grid, and probably turned the terrain into a real mess. They probably had to clear a path before they set the first pole. They had to accumulate enough equipment - poles, insulators, crossarms, wire, etc. - to complete the task. They had to ready a position from which to start, hopefully with a separate circuit breaker for the new line. They had to ready equipment at the recieving end, after likely tsunami damage to substation equipment, circuit breakers, controls, and such.
It took Associated Electric in Missouri almost a year to rebuild the transmission lines in western MO after the ice storm of 2009. Granted, that was hundreds of miles of circuit, but it wasn’t just a matter of slapping a few poles in the ground and stringing wire.
There's going to be a lot of things that don't work, and a few things that do work. But at least they'll have substantial power available to operate big pumps that can move a LOT of water. And with any luck, they'll be able to use some of the existing piping in the damaged structures.
“Man... Imagine powering that thing back up and all the alarms and sirens going off and sensor failures and warning lamps and computers rebooting into lord knows what state....”
yeah, especially since the whole thing was wrecked and flooded by a 30 foot wall of sea water. Can’t imagine much of anything actually working, especially any of the electronics. Oh, and then they had all those explosions that blew up everything afterwards.
My guess is that the best they can do is get some portable pumps and fire hoses going.
The main thing is to get the spent fuel rod pools filled with water and kept filled, otherwise those things will heat up, melt, catch on fire, and then spew so much radioactivity into the area that workers will have to be withdrawn, and then the whole works will eventually meltdown.
Hopefully the few things that work will be the pumps and valves. A couple of sensors would be nice but I'd settle for the pumps and valves. :-}
I would appreciate knowing your source for those images.
Many I have not seen before...
Thanks in advance.
Boring would be awesome right now. I’d love to be bored. It would be a nice change from what I have been experiencing for the last week.
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