Posted on 05/16/2011 1:29:19 PM PDT by Sprite518
Oh, I agree that they have a large clean-up job on their hand. A huge clean-up job, mostly because they have three reactors and a fuel pool to clean up, and the clean-up from the entire tsunami will, IMO, probably exceed $1T in costs, with Fukushima being a huge component of that.
TEPCO is toast, financially, because this isn’t the only nuke plant that is now shut down. Maybe in the aftermath, Japan can decide on one grid frequency for their nation.
A melted core is certainly not the situation one would want in any condition. My point is only that a) we’ve seen cores melt before, and b) the world didn’t end, and c) in the TMI situation, they had a huge amount of water down in the pit below the RPV.
I’m not trying to say that this is just hunky-dory. I’m trying to tell people to quit running in circles, screaming and shouting, rending their garments and carrying on in a higglty-pigglty manner, because we’ve had nuke accidents before. We’ve lived through them. We’ve had huge releases of radiation into the planet’s environment before. We’ve had reactors go prompt-critical and literally Launch. Off. Their. Foundation. That’s a neat trick. Killed three guys, and none of them from radiation either. One of them was impaled into the ceiling of the building by the reactor launching upwards.
We have places like Hanford that have much more contamination than Fukushima will likely ever cause, and we don’t see three-headed, red-haired stepchildren of the corn in eastern Washington.
Panic and hysteria don’t solve anything. The press loves to panic people, because it makes for sales and ratings. The green movement loves this because they get to stoke the fears of the ignorant. Neither the liberal arts majors in the press, nor the professional hucksters in the green movement are able to offer any credible idea where we’re going to get 10 to 15 quads of additional energy in the next 20 years. There are only three credible energy sources that can get us there: coal, natural gas (including CBM, shale gas and conventional NG) and nuclear. Wind, solar, biomass, et al simply won’t amount to anything other than footnotes in this discussion.
Fortunately, I don't believe the economy will be tipped by some hysterical web postings.
You seem to believe that, absent the nuclear reactor problem, Japan would be back on it's feat and humming away blissfully. But in reality, the nuclear power problems are still a small (but apparently entertaining) blip in the real problems they are trying to solve over there.
We just got permission to start flying through one of the northern airports. IT wasn't because of nuclear hysteria, it was because of damage by the earthquake and tsunami.
The power problems aren't the result of one nuclear power plant accident. It's not even entirely because of multiple other nuclear plants being shut down, some because of fear caused in part by histrionics over the accident. The power problem is caused by a large amount of infrastructure being destroyed. By the earthquake. And the tsunami.
Look at what happened in the world markets BEFORE anybody knew about the nuclear issue. Them track the reactions to both real releases of information, and hysterical claims. See which is hurting the economy more. And compare them to the real damage from the real disaster, the earthquake and tsunami.
I am not going to sit here and give you an economics lession
Believe me, I wasn't at all afraid of that happening. I'm not an economist, but I imagine I know enough that you weren't likely to give me a lesson, even if you happen to be an economist. And yes, I'm one of those arrogant smart-ass engineers who thinks they know a lot about a lot of things. Just kidding -- I know enough to know what I don't know, and to know how to keep an open mind and evaluate evidence.
Ever consider that Japan’s exports are going to plunge while they are going to have to do a lot of buying.
Again, that is a result of the earthquake, tsunami, and the widespread infrastructure damage to the northern half of the country. On the other hand, they are working very hard to get their industry up and running, despite the sensationalist fears of some to the contrary.
This is about more than ..oh no one died yet..or oh..the radiation level isn’t high 250 kilometers away.
Tens of thousands of peopld died. They had jobs, and families. Their houses are gone, their businesses are gone. This is putting a terrible strain on the economy. Depite the efforts of some to make it all about the nuclear accident, for the most part the mainstream media has behaved itself more than could be expected, and so the conspiracy theorists have to be content with youtube videos and blog posts.
Meanwhile, since your big bugaboo seems to be that TEPCO keeps lying about the accident, maybe you could explain how much better the economy would be now if they just had told "the truth" -- explain how their lies have done this terrible damage to the economy that you speak about?
Or maybe you could explain how their failure to follow appropriate safety measures 5 years ago led directly to the earthquake that took out reactor 1, or the tsunami that killed the power. What specific safety features and tests should they have been doing at the plant that would have prevented a magintude 9 earthquake from breaking a pipe?
Maybe you could show us the secret memos that show how they were told to build a taller berm to protect against a tsunami, but they falsified those records.
My point -- it's not enough to point to random failures of the company, and assert that because of those unrelated matters, they caused the accident, and the world would be fine if they had just not been so corrupt. Because so far none of the news reports have indicated a specific corrupt action that, if not taken, would have prevented this accident.
Which is why so many people (and from this thread you can see that they still exist, even if they stay out of a lot of the threads) look at your arguments and see nothing more than a pure anti-nuclear argument. Because absent specific evidence that TEPCO caused this accident, your argument really is that no nuclear reactor is safe enough.
Come back in 30 days. Until then don’t post to me.
My name is on every ping. Ignore them. Or not. So long as you say interesting things, I will likely respond to them.
It would not be the first nuclear problem caused by operator malfunction. TMI was, in part, caused by operator error. Chernobyl absolutely was caused by operator stupidity. Idaho Lab’s SL-1 incident was caused by operator error.
The list of accidents involving operator error that resulted in problems in nukes is long. Just in the US nuclear program, there are dozens of instances.
I think the reason why the debt markets see Japan as different than the US, Ireland, Greece, et al is that Japan’s debt is owed mostly internally, not to foreign creditors.
So if they were to default, who gets hammered? Well, themselves. They all bow to each other, apologize and reset.
Greece, however, is a whole ‘nuther situation, and their internal political situation is deteriorating by the day. They owe huge amounts to France and Germany, hence the bailouts for Greece to prop up the bankers in France and Germany.
I actually think the press has been pretty good on this story, maybe in deference to the real disaster that was the earthquake.
It’s blogs, and ambulance-chasing lawyers and special-interest-groups, and anti-nuclear activists. And some willing and unwilling enablers. Oddly, the histerics are probably making it harder for people to understand the real problems with the site — there has been some over-reaction on the pro-nuclear side to the over-the-top fear-mongering of the left.
For the core melt, it seems at this point that the biggest problem is that they won’t be able to remove the fuel from the containment vessel because it melted to the floor, so the long-term storage is going to be complicated. When they thought it might just be partly melted, I think they still hoped they could pull the fuel rod assemblies out after they put up their tent, and get them into spent fuel pools which are much easier to manage.
But you can’t discuss the hundreds of real concerns with the cleanup, because instead we are talking about how terrible it is that the fuel melted 20 hours earlier than we thought. Or worse, we are arguing over whether the solid concrete slab is “tipping over”, or wasting time reading conspiracy theories about them opening the doors to the reactor in the middle of the night because the “greater temperature difference” would help “flush out the high radiation” in the building. Seriously, that was one of our overnight discussions.
I’ve appreciated this thread, because I was beginning to think a lot of sane people had given up on these threads. Maybe it was just they are avoiding the ones with the wierd headlines, or just the hour of the day something gets posted.
Yea, I know something about economics. And most days when the market is open, I’m trading to make money.
Here’s how I see the problems in Japan. The reactors will be a huge cleanup cost, but that’s not what is going to do in Japan’s economy. What is going to hit them and hit them hard is the amount of electrical power they now have offline. You can’t run an industrial economy on rolling blackouts. Japan has a problem in that they have two electrical grid frequencies, and a limited amount of frequency conversion capacity between the two. They can’t do, as we and Canada do, wheel enormous amounts of power around the grid to supplant local capacity deficiencies.
The tsunami is the second biggest hit on their economy after the loss of power capacity. The island of Japan does not have much in the way of good ag land, and much of the farmland in this area was washed pretty hard with salt water. Pretend for a moment that there were no nuke problem in the area. The land is still contaminated with an infusion of sodium-based salts, which will prevent a wide number of crops from even germinating. I’ve farmed in ground that had high sodium levels... the only thing that can be done to ameliorate salt in soils is to irrigate or wait for rainwater to push the salt down below the root zone of the soil. That’s going to take at least a year or more for them. Want to see what salt does to farming? Check out the Imperial Valley in Southern California. Every acre-foot of water from the Colorado River brings in a ton of sodium on their soil. They have to wash that through and out their tailwater, which is then sent downstream to the Salton Sea. Greenies complain about the Salton Sea being ‘dead’ - well, duh, so is the Dead Sea in Israel, and for the same reason: High salt levels.
Japan can eventually deal with the salt infusion into their soil, but it will take time to push the salt down. At least one planting season will be lost on the flooded ground.
As to the world economic situation: The world’s economic and banking situation would be a wreck without Fukushima. We still have the IMF, the Fed and the ECB wrecking the planet’s major economies very competently without any help from a power plant disaster.
The systemic risk in the banking sector is probably higher now than it was in 2008, due to consolidation coming out of the mortgage melt-down. I don’t see any candidate for POTUS (other than Ron Paul) who correctly sees the Fed for being the cause of the systemic problems of easy credit. If you could wave a wand and fix Fukushima right now, it would make almost no difference to the banking systems and economies of the EU and US. None. Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain are dead men walking. Fukushima does nothing to them or for them.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110517p2a00m0na010000c.html
“”We’ve given up on venting operations (to lower reactor vessel pressure). The radiation is just too high.””
One of the engineers that helped develop the power system for GE indicated that they should have helicoptered in the necessary equipment. He even tried to contact them to help them. They were not receptive.
I speculate, with no real facts to back me up...that the reason we are seeing this massive data dump revealing what SOME here suspected long ago...is that the big money involved has had time to protect themselves as best that they can....and now people are finally going to get the info so that they realize just how bad it was and that TEPCO and Kan knew it.
http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3306489&postcount=7566
tsutsuji is Online:
Posts: 85
Re: Japan Earthquake: nuclear plants
http://www.zakzak.co.jp/society/dome...1643027-n1.htm tells the following : on May 15th boron was added to unit 3 but the temperature on May 16th is still high with 269°C instead of the required 100°C. A concrete wall is to be built surrounding underground floors to prevent contaminated water to leak into the earth (it is not clear which units are concerned). Reactor buildings at all 4 units (1,2,3 & 4) will be reinforced as a solution to the damages caused by the earthquake and tsunami.
http://www.chunichi.co.jp/s/article/...790154929.html provides a scenario for what happened at unit 2. On March 14th 10:50 AM pressure in the RPV rose to abnormal levels. Tepco performed venting twice, but because of some valve dysfunction, no pressure fall was confirmed. Then hydrogen leaked through welding cracks at the suppression chamber caused by the earthquake. The suppression chamber was damaged by the hydrogen explosion. An alternative view is that the explosion might have taken place inside the suppression chamber with oxygen flowing backwards during the venting.
Back-up cooling systems at Fukushima failed
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/17_04.html
The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has admitted that the reactors’ back-up cooling systems failed to function after the March 11th earthquake and tsunami.
Tokyo Electric Power Company on Monday revealed the plant’s operation records for the period following the disaster on March 11th.
An emergency condenser system at the Number 1 reactor functioned for less than 10 minutes after the earthquake. The failure lasted for 3 hours.
The utility suspects that workers manually shut down the system as pressure inside the reactor became so low that they were afraid of damage.
Another type of back-up cooling system at the No. 1 and 2 reactors lost power when the tsunami engulfed batteries.
TEPCO is still analyzing the data to assess the failure’s impact on fuel rods.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011 07:31 +0900 (JST)
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/17_22.html
Nuclear plant cooling system manually shut down
The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant says workers may have manually shut down the No.1 reactor’s emergency cooling system in order to prevent damage to the reactor. It says pressure inside the reactor had dropped sharply after the earthquake struck the plant on March 11th.
Tokyo Electric Power Company on Monday disclosed records of its operations at the plant.
They show that the reactor automatically halted operations after the earthquake.
The emergency cooling system was automatically activated but stopped about 10 minutes later and remained off for about 3 hours until after the tsunami arrived.
TEPCO says plant workers may have manually shut down the cooling system because pressure inside the reactor had dropped sharply from 70 to 45 atmospheres.
The system is designed to cool the reactor even if all external sources of power are lost, but the move to shut it down temporarily means that it did not fully function.
TEPCO says the decision may have been made based on a manual to prevent damage to the reactor.
It says if the system had worked, it may have had more time until the meltdown, so it will investigate developments leading up to the decision to turn it off and whether the move was correct.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011 13:18 +0900 (JST)
Now that makes a lot of sense. Always follow the money.
The reasons there were explosions in #1, #2 and #3 was because the cores melted. That is what created the Hydrogen. So losing the buildings at that point was mute. IMHO.
here is an interesting analysis
“It’s worth noting that modeling of the crisis indicates that meltdowns should have occurred at all three reactors (1. 2, and 3), given the length of time they were all without cooling. The modeling also suggests that without cooling the molten fuel would have melted through the bottom of the reactor vessel about 7 hours after the fuel relocated to the bottom of the vessel. TEPCO says that cooling water was injected in to prevent this. According to Figure 1, the injection of cooling water started about 10 hours after the water level dropped below the bottom of the fuel in the reactor”
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