“Detecting radiation is not the equivalent of harm.” I agree! Isn’t Oyster Creek also a Mark 1 design?
I understand the redundant design used in a nuclear power plant. You left out the separation involved in routing cables for reduntant equipment via different cable trays.
The issue that caught the Japanese was the loss of power when the diesel generators lost their fuel supply. The point that the media missed is that the plants survived the earthquake and the tsunami with the exception of the fuel supply for the diesel generators except for that contained in the day tanks.
American nukes added hydrogen igniters after TMI to prevent explosions. The Japanese have their hands full. I’m confident they’re making progress. I’m sure the nuclear industry here will be examining the Japanese situation for lessons learned.
I’m wondering how many American nukes have a similar shelter for the spent fuel pools. The Mark 6 I’m familar with housed the spent fuel pool within a concrete building.
You're right, this is an industry that learns from experience. I am sure we'll see things like added redundancy for emergency power, such as hardened generator buildings, fuel lines, and storage tanks. What you won't hear in the press is that everything at Fukushima survived both the earthquake and the tsunami with some manner of functionality except the diesel fuel tanks and fuel lines. Something simple, like buried tanks and lines with waterproof seals will solve that issue.
But the press will take something like that and say "see, see, that company was stupid, the people are dumb, it's a poor design, nyah nyah nyah". That's the only "lesson" the media and anti-nuke kooks will take. It's easy to second-guess and armchair-manage a company. The truth is, those plants were designed for an earthquake twice as powerful as any ever recorded there, an a tsunami almost three times bigger than any for that region. Then they had an earthquake five times the design basis magnitude, and a tsunami twice as big as the design basis. No society can reasonably plan for such outlier events, unless you want to go back to living in caves and scratching in the dirt for survival.
Aren't these spent fuel pools primarily used for short term storage during fuel unloading and shuffling?
I had thought there were other pool facilities built on-site for longer term cooling in the US when the government started playing games with fuel reprocessing and then disposal storage. If not, it is an area of concern that will probably require investment based on what has been learned here at Fukushima.