Posted on 03/19/2011 7:08:20 PM PDT by SteveH
The sea wall protecting the nuclear reactors at Fukushima in Japanese was beached by a recent tsunami because its height was calculated with 1960s geology, according to Mary Olson, a scientist at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. If modern supercomputer simulations were rerun, then the current nuclear disaster could have been averted with more technologically advanced sea walls.
"It survived the earthquake—it was the tsunami beaching the sea wall that caused all the damage," said Olson. "The Fukushima Power Plant was built around 40 years ago, when plate tectonics was a radical idea. As we learned more about what causes large earthquakes, a re-evaluation was never done—if it had been then they would have seen that the sea wall was too low."
According to Olsen, similar sites around the world need to re-evaluate the height of their sea walls as well as their earthquake preparedness using the latest tectonic-plate simulations.
(Excerpt) Read more at smartertechnology.com ...
The plant was incredibly well engineered considering all that’s left of Taro are its 2 kilometer, 10 meter high tsunami walls.
Granted, Taro was hit harder.
Nuclear Information and Resource Service is a left wing outfit I’ve delt with in the past.
I suspicioned as much. The website (http://nirs.org/) was down when I tried to check it and I was in a hurry. It's up again and ... yeah I was encountering their stuff in the last few days, ... biased...
Anyway I took the article as a soft sell for buying IBM supercomputers. They are subtle. As a ton of bricks.
It really sucks when your seawall gets beached. Maybe as bad as when it's breached.
This is hugh. And series, too!
:-)
Laughing that “Smarter Technology” doesn’t know the difference between beached and breached; nor did the editor or interview guest...
Protecting against tsunami is just reacting to the current failure. It doesn’t address the real problem with this reactor design — it needs active management of coolant flowing through it, or else the reaction runs away and meltdown begins. Whether that coolant flow is interrupted because a tsunami wiped out equipment, or terrorists blew up the pumps, or the coolant source disappeared, etc. is really moot.
New reactors should be built using a heat-moderated design based on hydride fuels. In this design, as long as the water is flowing to produce steam for the turbines, the temperature stays relatively constant. If anything fails, so the flow of water through the reactor stops, the temperature rises only slightly. That is because the rising temperatures drives the hydrogen out of the hydride and the reaction slows down, bringing the temperature back down. It is impossible for these designs to meltdown. If the reactor vessel were ever breached, the hydrogen would all escape and the reaction would slow down with no danger of radioactive material escaping the containment.
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