Third Blast At Japan's Fukushima Nuclear Plant

iamrmani was one of several people reporting updates on the Fukushima Nuclear plant that has been struggling following last Friday's disaster. A third explosion (Japanese) has been reported, along with other earlier information. MSNBC has a story about similiar reactors in the US. We also ran into a story which predicts that there won't be significant radiation. But already Japan is facing rolling blackouts, electricity rationing, evacuating the area around the plant, and thousands dead already.

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Re:Journalism

[vlm]

Sorry to dampen you optimism, but these reactors are going to be totally useless after this. The reactor vessel will almost certainly be beyond repair and it is central to the entire plant. Economically it would be easier to just build a newer design of plant.

They were planning to build two new reactors onsite, # 7 and #8. They'll probably end up with new ABWRs to replace the old clunkers. Note that a single ABWR outputs as much power as three BWR-3s or two BWR-4s so yanking three 40 year old dinosaurs does not necessarily mean they need to build three new ABWRs to take their place... My guess is they'll get one.

I'm hardly on their board of directors but most likely instead of adding 2 new ABWRs they'll probably simultaneously build the currently planned two, decon the old units 1 / 2 / 3 and build a nice new ABWR on top of the old site of 1 / 2 / 3.

Its is possible, that after this excitement, they'll yank all the old BWR-4s and the one decent BWR-5 and replace the whole works with ESBWRs. A pity GE gave up on the SBWR... That design would have been pretty much inherently safe in this situation. Of course I'm a little fuzzy on dates, I think the SBWR design was done a decade or two after the BWR-3 and BWR-4 were built at Fukushima and I don't remember why GE gave up on the SBWR design anyway (maybe the navy or other govt considered it too "sensitive", despite the navy's fondness for PWRs?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents#Reactors