Posted on 03/18/2011 10:18:43 AM PDT by Scythian
The boss of the company behind the devastated Japanese nuclear reactor today broke down in tears - as his country finally acknowledged the radiation spewing from the over-heating reactors and fuel rods was enough to kill some citizens
'In hindsight, we could have moved a little quicker in assessing the situation and coordinating all that information and provided it faster.'
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
apparently it is also modified.
normally the diesel generators for the water are set up INSIDE the building so they are protected.
These were outside where a tsunami could get to them.
I wonder what other variations exist.
Wow! That’s sounds pretty cold!
Right after that quake and primary tsunami the plants operators were reporting that the reactor containments were intact, the building and the cooling systems they housed were intact, and there was still a source of power even thought the generators had been flooded.
There was a race to get more power either through new generators or to reconnect the plant to the grid before the batteries ran out. They failed and the batteries ran out depriving the cooling systems of power to function. Then the reactors got very hot and various gasses built up inside the buildings. Then they exploded and it has been all down hill from there.
For the Japanese not to anticipate a scenario where they would be reduced to battery power for more than eight hours smells to me of a corporation wanting to cut corners on safety.
Yes. The company in Japan govt cut corners.
The biggest problem is the delay in asking for help to get gas turbine generators to get the cooling pumps going.
Where is this joke International Atomic Energy Agency? The useless Dept of Energy? Everyoen should have had a plan or realized that getting those cooling pumps back on had to occur as fast as possible - no mater what.
Why were they using MOX fuel and this BS about leaving old rods in cooling pools? Alsothank you enviros for Yucca Flats, NV and tens of billions wasted on that so our spent rods sit around at the local power plant. .
To be fair, after an almost unimaginable natural disaster beyond the level for which their reactor was designed, there was a practical limit to what could be accomplished in those eight hours. I am impressed with these people, many of whom lost their homes and some of whom lost their families, who are working under horrendous conditions and well outside the parameters for which they trained in order to fulfill their obligations to their community and to save what can be saved.
There is also a physical limit to what they could have done. The uranium and plutonium have for all practical purposes stopped reacting, but that does not solve the problem. Since the heat of concern is generated by residual decay (the decay of shorter half-life isotopes inside the fuel rods - the uranium and perhaps plutonium if this is a mixed oxide reactor decays to other elements to generate power, but those elements decay over the next few days/weeks/years and release the heat of concern), they could not have cooled the rods off all the way in so little time. In fact, the rods in storage have been cooled continuously since they were removed (I haven't heard that date), and they just generate more heat. The physics prevents them from accomplishing more in eight hours because the heat that is causing a problem now wasn't there back when they had battery power.
As for not foreseeing the tsunami, they planned for one, but this quake and tsunami were bigger than they planned for. I can't blame them much for that mistake - moving the reactor further from the ocean introduces other risks that seemed much more likely than a national record earthquake and tsunami.
It happens in the US too. The falsifying of records, some level of crony-type corruption, even mob involvement, in the nuke biz. Still, the standards are high. The plants have to operate well — that can’t be bribed away.
The price mark-up on equipment certified for nuclear system use is very high. Yet one piece of equipment, nuke certified, looks just like one not nuke certified. Creates a motive for fraud when the supplier thinks he can get away with it.
You can’t correct or improve this with regulation, btw. Having many regulators can actually differentially favor the corrupt. It takes a culture of high standards and strong engineering and ethics.
Japan has had an earthquake, tsunami, nuclear reactor crisis....and their stock market is down a WHOPPING 12% since the quake.
The media has Japan down to bankruptcy, insolvency, evacuate the planet, run for the hills, sky is falling again...
God bless the Japanese.
Prayers for those who labored, and still labor at the plants.
Where does that 400,000 figure come from? Sounds like a heck of a lot of bodies to hide.
Yes, let’s ignore the 7th largest earthquake in history, 1 full unit on the moment scale than the design conditions, which created a tsunami 1-1.5m higher than design conditions.
You have excellent 20-20 hindsight, by the way.
greater than the design conditions
The rest of my thoughts on this are unprintable and I am sure the He is not please with those thoughts
“...I have done a lot of reading about Chernobyl and everything I read pointed to this. Elena said in one of her articles that the USSR gov’t only admitted that 30-40 people died when the actual number is way over 400,000...”
400,000 dead from Chernobyl?
This is from an article published yesterday at Real Clear Science:
“...In 2006, 20 years after the accident, a group of eight UN agencies, including the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization, assessed the damage in a study incorporating the work of hundreds of scientists and health experts from around the world.
It turns out that two decades after the fact, the death toll had not reached the tens of thousands that were predicted. In fact, fewer than 50 deaths could be directly attributable to radiation from the disaster, almost all of them among rescue workers who had been exposed to massive amounts of radiation on the disaster site at the time of the fire and its immediate aftermath.
In addition, nine children in the area died of thyroid cancer that is thought to have been caused by radioactive contamination, but even among the nearby population, there was neither evidence of decreased fertility nor of congenital malformations that could be attributed to radiation exposure...”
They designed for an 8.2 earthquake, which two weeks ago I would have said was a reasonable standard. They had diesel generators (until the tsunami washed them away). The diesels were outside the containment because they decided that was safer than extra holes in the containment chamber to vent the exhaust, again, a reasonable engineering decision. I can't argue with that choice. They anticipated doing without reactor or battery for more than eight hours; what they underestimated was the degree to which a disaster beyond what they were told to plan for could wipe out all of their redundant systems for such a long period. The corporation and its planners fell short, but this was an unanticipated disaster. I don't think they would do that for profits, not with Japan's history.
Do you also fault the designers of the factories in Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were supposed to bomb proof their buildings in case of an American attack and failed? This earthquake/tsunami was far worse than the bombs we dropped on those two cities and more than ten times as powerful as the "worst case" disaster the reactors were supposed to survive. There may be other considerations in which the company or the engineers were at fault, but the reactor complex performed as designed or better in all respects . . . at least until the buildings blew up.
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