Restoration at nuke plant disrupted, radiation fears spread to Tokyo

Kyodo News Japan ^ | 24 March 2011

[AwesomePossum]

...black smoke was seen rising at the No. 3 reactor building...surface temperatures...have topped the maximum levels...high-level radiation amounting to at least 500 millisieverts per hour was detected...

[Drill Thrawl]

And Big Sis over at DHS would use it to tell you that airport scanners aren’t all that bad.

[Balding_Eagle]

You shouldn’t engage in panic mongering.

You guys are making FR look like a bunch of Chicken Littles.

Cut it out.

A bunch of you owe the rest of us rational Freepers an apology for your out-of-control fear mongering.

[Drill Thrawl]

The backups can only do so much. If you take 5\6 off line to cool 3\4, the 5\6 overheats. It’s not as simple as just running an extention cord to your neighbors house.

[meatloaf]

Revel, you're way off base. Any water vented from the reactor goes into the torus. If the torus breaches, the water is still contained in the ... steel lined massively reinforced concrete containment building. This should give you an idea of the how large a containment building is. You can see the steel liner. This is a photo of a BWR reactor (400 tons) being set.

[blackdog]

A36 is 80,000 or greater.

[chimera]

Use of seawater in and of itself is not a deal breaker. Saltwater corrosion occurs in susceptible materials over a relatively long time. Materials used in the pressure vessel and vessel internals are very resistant to most corrosion mechanisms. If they want to salvage these reactors they will have to go through a cleanout procedure to remove residual minerals, sodium chloride, and other things, but chemical engineers know how to do that. The cleanup of the K-25 GDP in Oak Ridge was a greater challenge in many ways. You had things building up in that diffusion cascade for decades that had to be flushed out.

Lets calm down and see how this plays out. In the end, it is almost certain they will restart units 5 and 6. Unit 4 had the SFP problem and they will have to get that settled down. The Unit 4 reactor was probably not too badly damaged and probably can be salvaged. Units 2 and 3 had fuel in the core and they will have to get in there and check the extent of the damage prior to making a restart decision. Unit 1 was the oldest and had core damage so of all of them this is the one they will probably retire, most likely doing a SAFSTOR, like we did with TMI-2.

[GonzoGOP]

The backups can only do so much. If you take 5\6 off line to cool 3\4, the 5\6 overheats.

I looked up the old posts from last week. The gen-sets were knocked out, but the reactors were in cold shutdown for maintenance so they didn't need the additional cooling.

[StAnDeliver]

"Countdown to ‘radiation is actually good for you’ posters showing up."

RADIATION IS ACTUALLY
GOOD FOR YOU, NOOB

[FreedomPoster]

I think a BWR is a little more like a tea kettle than a coal / oil / natural gas steam boiler. Which over-simplifies things hugely, I’m sure.

[meatloaf]

I’m talking about the minimum tensile strength not the ultimate.

[Revel]

There is a time to be brave and time to panic. Of course the more rational the decision you make during that panic is going to increase the chance of survival. But simply ignoring all threats is a good way to end up dead.

You can drive 100 MPH on a windy road if you have no fear. Of course you are likely to end up dead from that.

You Guzzle a gallon of wiskey if you have no fear, but you will most likely die from that.

You can stay in a house that is burning if you have no fear, But that will kill you.

You can jump in deep water even though you can’t swim- you will be dead soon.

You can play with a ball of uranium if you have no fear, but we know how that ends.

And you can run to high ground in fear when a wall of water is rolling in and then you may well survive, as was witnessed in some of the videos from Japan.

Now I agree that if you are in a position to possibly change the outcome of a catastrophic event, and save lives, then you can choose to be brave, And risk yourself for the benefit of others. We call those people Hero’s.

I do not think that all fear is good. fear that interferes with the ability to love, for instance. But survival fear is- well- a part of how we have survived.

[NRG1973]

Book a ticket and roll up yer sleeves. Disappointment and the Japanese culture do not coexist. If this event took place on American soil, they would still be forming a committee to award contracts on authorized response teams only after they are SEIU approved.

I'm not knocking the Japanese because of a perceived inaction but because they have stubbornly stuck to the one strategy that is not working. they should have given the "water strategy" four or five days then abandodned it as its not working.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing every day and expecting a different result...thats appropriate in this instance.

[Balding_Eagle]

If it's such a little problem, I don't get (even more!) why we can't have nukes in this country.

The reason we can't have nukes is because a bunch of panty waist enviro-nazis have managed to whip up the public to think that even the tiniest amount of radiations kills.

And look around on these threads, a whole bunch of Freepers have allied themselves with the enviro-nazis in trying to stampede everyone into thinking the Japan situation is Armageddon.

They somehow think they are engaging in some harmless self-flagellation. Well, either FR is a little known website without influence, or, it is, as history has shown, an influential news discussion site.

If it's influential, it's time to quit acting like a bunch of emotional 40 year old Liberals.

[Revel]

Do you mean the ones that exploded and were blown to bits?

[FreedomPoster]

They just have to get this one cool enough (thermally and radiation wise) to dismantle it. Units 1-4 will never run again.

[GonzoGOP]

Lets calm down and see how this plays out.
(1) I'm quite calm, Note that I have been asking question in order to get information, not yelling chicken little.

(2) And it was a rep from Tokyo Electric on NHK last Wednesday that said once salt water was used the reactors would probably never be restarted. I was just going by that as gospel.

As for 5 & 6 as I said I looked it up and they were in cold shutdown a the time of the quake so the salt water might not be an issue in that case.

[Balding_Eagle]

This nuclear crisis is spiraling out of control.

Do you have any evidence of that?

[NRG1973]

That one is easy. Concrete holds in heat, and right now the problem is getting heat out. Right now they need to keep as much of that material where it is as they can, and that means keeping those containment vessels and fuel pools intact.

If its such a bad strategy to entomb the reactors then why did they dod it so quickly in Chernobyl?

The truth of the matter is that the longer they take entombing the site, the more radioactivity will be emitted. Japan isn't as big a Russia and doesn't have as much space to relocate people to. They need to get this situation under control.

[chessplayer]

“Countdown to ‘radiation is actually good for you’ posters showing up.”

They always do.

[FreedomPoster]

I’m pretty sure they managed to get one diesel generator running at 5 or 6, and have used it to keep active cooling going at those two plants. They did not have enough power from that genset to feed the other plants, which is why they’ve been working so hard to get grid power to the site. Once they had grid power, they took the 5/6 diesel gensets off line for all the obvious reasons.