Not so sure I buy the cabinet secretary’s excuse about not being able to forsee this. It is an older nuclear plant on a beach in a major earthquake zone. To be fair they had an 8 hour window to contain this when the plant was still on battery power and the cooling systems still worked.
The radiation now hitting the west coast is from the early leaks suffered by the Fukushima plant after the earthquake and tsunami last Friday, which actually occurred Thursday U.S. time. These leaks were minimal in comparison to the radiation emitted after explosions on Saturday, Monday and Tuesday tore apart the buildings housing the reactors.
In addition, the radiation currently being measured does not take into account radiation emitted by pools of deadly spent nuclear rods, which only began to emit serious amounts of radiation a few days ago.
We will not know the true level of the threat until the radiation particles emitted as a result of the three explosions that devastated Fukushima hits the west coast over the weekend and into Monday.
What? Your last statement would seem to indicate you don’t have the slightest idea what is involved.
Also, this *was* the 7th biggest earthquake in recorded history.
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.
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.
Japanese do think differently, especially on the world stage. It is rather an unknown catastrophes. Supposedly according too our engineers and scientist, the Japanese people are being told less than the truth. Their is more danger and lethal levels than the people are being told.
Pray for the people of Japan during this devastating time.
“To be fair they had an 8 hour window to contain this when the plant was still on battery power and the cooling systems still worked.”
A whole 8 hours eh.