Posted on 04/04/2023 10:25:16 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Images captured by a robotic probe inside one of the three melted reactors at Japan’s wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant showed exposed steel bars in the main supporting structure and parts of its thick external concrete wall missing, triggering concerns about its earthquake resistance in case of another major disaster.
An underwater remotely operated vehicle named ROV-A2 was sent inside the Unit 1 pedestal, a supporting structure right under the core. It came back with images seen for the first time since an earthquake and tsunami crippled the plant 12 years ago. The area inside the pedestal is where traces of the melted fuel can most likely be found.
An approximately five-minute video — part of 39-hour-long images captured by the robot — showed that the 120-centimeter (3.9-foot) -thick concrete exterior of the pedestal was significantly damaged near its bottom, exposing the steel reinforcement inside.
TEPCO spokesperson Keisuke Matsuo told reporters Tuesday that the steel reinforcement is largely intact but the company plans to further analyze data and images over the next couple of months to find out if and how the reactor’s earthquake resistance can be improved.
(Excerpt) Read more at ktla.com ...
If you want to read an AWESOME and entertaining book, read “Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters; From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima” by James Mahaffey.
He spent much of the last chapter talking about Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Besides being completely entertaining, it is highly informative yet technical.
I am trained in the handling and use of radiation and isotopes, and he had a whole chapter on military accidents which are, in the way he wrote it, stunningly funny. One of the incidents he talks about is The Mars Bluff Incident
The guy, in the bomb bay of a B-47 Stratojet trying to get the bomb release safety pin to engage while draped over the bomb (and while wearing no parachute) slipped and grabbed...of all things...the emergency bomb release handle. The bomb fell onto, and through the bomb bay doors with him on top of it, for all the world, looking like he was going to do a Slim Pickens routine before he managed to wildly flail and catch onto something as he was falling out!
When they realized what they had done, the pilot suggested they had enough fuel onboard to fly to Brazil...:)
Given what I used to do for a living, this was one of the most wildly entertaining books to read, on a serious subject. And extremely entertaining, too.
This nuclear power plant was designed to survive earthquakes and resulting floods. It failed because the Japanese placed the diesel tanks that provided diesel for the backup generators OUTSIDE the walls of the plant. The flood washed away the tanks so no generated power.
This could have been avoided.
Salt water, concrete, and rebar. Not good.
The FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) came out of the Japanese automobile industry, it’s a shame their nuke plant engineers didn’t apply it. Totally avoidable.
10 times the radioactive waste that was removed from Three Mile Island is a holyshit of Chernobyl proportions.
Look in and see what? Putin getting a kemo boost??
The only environmentally solution is:
1. Shut down all nuclear and coal
2. Put wind turbines everywhere
3. Become addicted to foreign gas and oil
Given the reactor will no longer be operated the issue with the reactor vessel pedestal isn’t a problem.
I read “Scorpion Down”...excellent book. Those poor guys. In her case, they think it was due to a torpedo having maintenance done somehow running hot and arming itself on the maintenance bench.
There are some who think it was sunk in retaliation for the accidental sinking several weeks before of the K-129 (raised in part by the Glomar Explorer) when she came down on top of one of our subs that was filming her underside from a few feet away, and the didn’t know she was there and dove suddenly, crushing her sail but crippling the K-129 which sank.
They aren’t going to recycle it?
Great book!
What struck me is the similarities between chemical and atomic accidents. Enough so I am LESS comfortable about atomic power having worked in the chemical industry for 20 years.
I remember that chapter. Talk about a case of the “Oh Damns!”
Being a former jet mechanic, I have always been interested in aviation accidents.
The commonality between nuclear, chemical, and aviation accidents is most often the deviation of human behavior from the processes and procedures and poor decisions, a desire to make the problem go away by “doing something” or a desire to find an easier way to do a job.
Sure, sometimes things happen that, well, just happen. But that is rarer.
Yep.
The Good Idea Fairy and Lazy Larry has killed a lot of people.
LOL, sounded like line from a training film!
Is there evidence that Pacific fish/Alaskan salmon are being irradiated by this?
You forgot “Pencil whip-it Pete”
You can’t recycle any radioactive metals.
Steel mills have a sensitive detector they use to check all scrap. Otherwise an entire melt would be contaminated.
Truckloads have been rejected. A driver I know went to a car wash with an outside hose setup and washed the road salt off the trailer.
When he went back to the mill the load passes.
if not for that, leaving only 6 hours of battery power, this would have gone down as one of the greatest engineering successes in history.
Experience a Richter Scale 9 earthquake AND THEN a 30 foot tsunami, and surviving??
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