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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.
Poorly constructed sentence that last one, insinuating the deaths are related to the nuclear plant.
Is not the third explosion.
means number 3 which refers to the number 3 reactor in the plant.
Up to present there were 2 explosions in the plant and not 3.
As far as I can tell, TFAs are about the SECOND blast, which happened on reactor 3 of the plant. NHK has nothing about a third blast. Am I missing something? Was there a third explosion, on reactor 2?
A meltdown... into the bottom of the containment vessel.
Yes, it'll be a pain to tidy up, but it will be nothing like Three Mile Island.
Read http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/
Before commenting, try and understand the design and facts
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/
Much like Three Mile Island (which also didn't release any significant radiation), this will set nuclear energy back years. And with the carbon problem and increasing dependence on fossil fuels, we need it now more than every. Solar and wind aren't ready, and so much progress has been made in nuclear plant safety.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
(theorizing, former nuclear control room operator here from a plant of the same style, GE Boiling Water Reactor, as the ones with the problem)
They've at a minimum lost coolant to relief valve operation after they lost cooling due to loss of offsite (and local emergency diesel) power. They possibly also have some pipe breaks within the drywell containment structure. The relief valve operation is a form of "zero power" cooling unto itself, but you need to make up for the lost coolant somehow.
Nearly all emergency procedures that have a chance of keeping the plant intact depend on power being available, without power, you have to resort to destructive methods (sea water pumped in via fire pumps for instance) to keep things cooled off. Note also, that the equipment that would normally reduce or eliminate hydrogen buildup (the apparent cause of the building explosions) also require power.
While the earthquake was the root cause, the seawater being able to reach and apparently shutdown the emergency diesel generators onsite is why the problems got MUCH larger than what could have been.
Also, I would be interested to know how much this thing could raise the temperature of the worlds oceans by, if at all.
You're a retard.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
It's funny, because last week the republicans were talking up nuclear power, too... and now the media (what I heard this morning, anyway) is firmly planted in trying to show why republicans are idiots for pushing nuclear power when it was part of Obama's agenda, too.
Ahh, to politics and never letting a crisis go to waste, and to never letting facts about Three Mile Island and the current tragedy get in the way of a good story.
Stupid, sexy Flanders.
Nothing detectable on a whole ocean (I think). Even if the rods pack a big punch, you have around 1,260 billion billion Litre(or Kg if we assume it's pure water, even though it isn't) of water in the oceans. So you need around 5 million billion billion Joule to raise the oceans temperature by 1 degree Celsius. That's several orders of magnitude of the reactors ability.
First the Chernobyl clusterfuck turned nuclear power from The Answer To All Our Problems to A Scary Thing, then the non-event of TMI combined with some shitty old movie was enough to scare America off of it forever...now these events might be enough to damage nuclear power's reputation beyond repair with the rest of the international community. And what's left to take its place? All the fossil fuels you could ever want*, including lots of filthy, filthy coal.
The Chinese will probably push forward with their nuclear plans. On one hand, it's good that it will reduce the coal use of one of the planet's biggest energy consumers, on the other hand, China has a reputation for not giving a fuck about the environment or safety (they're in the middle of their Gilded Age after all), and the last thing anybody needs is another Chernobyl, plus any improperly set up Chinese nuclear waste sites won't get a super-funded cleanup any time in the forseeable future. Maybe they'd get some political prisoners to do the cleanup work to save costs on hazmat suits and decontamination gear.
*Until they run out
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I think the opposite. If Japan manages to get through this with only minor radiation problems (as so far) I think it will be a positive for nuclear energy. I mean, WTF more could you possibly do? A Mag 10 quake right under the reactor core? One thing that will come out of this is that both Japan and the US currently require backup power for the cooling system of only about 12 hours while the Eurolanders require 24-48 hours. There will definitely be a push to try to up this to 72 hours though of course practicalities may get in the way.
Hmmmm could it perhaps have something to do with the fact that the entire area lies in god-forsaken ruin?
That writeup was a godsend. So, if they've flooded the uncooled reactors with boric-acid and seawater nothing could possibly go wrong - and if they had been unmanned and allowed to meltdown, nothing would have gone wrong either. And the materials released in the radioactive steam decay completely within seconds.
Emotions! In your brain!
I hope it is like Three Mile Island - no fatalities.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
All of those people who died were killed by the tsunami or the quake. Okay, technically, there have been a VERY SMALL (like on the order of a few dozen) number of injuries and a few fatalities directly related to the reactors. But those were all among people who were actually *working in* the power plants.
Excellent link, thank you.
So many people think of "nuclear meltdown" as "nuclear explosion". Not the case. Meltdown is just that; Melting down of the fuel. Gravity dictates that this fluid fuel will go down, so meltdown is of very little concern to anyone except the reactor ops. Remember that reactor 5 at Chernobyl exploded because of their idiocy on several levels, not because of any fault with the plant (which would have functioned perfectly well if the operators had followed procedure correctly and vented the pressure vessel when required).
I say bravo to the Japanese. They've done very well throughout all of this. The deaths reported are a result of a 9.0 earthquake and linked tidal wave, not any nuclear incident, and that just goes to show how safe it is. Interesting factoid from the article; The reactors were designed to withstand an 8.3 Richter scale quake. As the Richter scale is logarithmic, they withstood a quake seven times their maximum. The only "Woops!" point was when they shipped in portable generators to replace the tsunami-swamped diesel backups... With the wrong plugs.
Seriously, read that article and turn off CNN / Fox. They're actually lying to you.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
it's japan, so we're talking about an argentina syndrome:
http://www.antipodemap.com/
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I live in Japan and have been following this news all day. The info in the headline and summary about the the reactors is complete incorrect. As to what has actually been happening:
First, the linked article is from 7 hours ago and is referring to the second explosion at Fukushima Daiichi of Reactor #3. The current situation as of 8PM Japan time was that the cooling system of Reactor #2 finally died and they just recently started filling it with seawater like the other reactors. This reactor is likely to cause another hydrogen explosion like the other two failed reactors before it. Also like the other reactors, this one may have suffered from some partial melting of its fuel rods.
Secondly, the article implies that thousands have died as a result of the problems at the Fukushima reactors. THIS IS NOT THE CASE! There have been reports of non-serious injuries and VERY mild radiation contamination but nothing that warrants any kind of panic yet.
Slashdot editors, please rewrite or delete this article, it is just spreading misinformation!
So, let's see. So far these plants have endured an earthquake 10 times what they were designed for (8.9 Richter earthquake. Design was for 7.9. Modulo distance/ground transmission from epicenter.), a 23 foot tsunami that took out backup generators and the switchyard taking out all but battery power, failures of the RCIC backup cooling system, and 2 massive hydrogen explosions that took out the buildings around the containments.
And thus far no significant release of radioactivity.
And we've got people saying the plants are fragile and unsafe?
What do you want? The North Koreans hitting it with bunker busters? A meteor strike?
Godzilla and the smog monster duking it out on the grounds?
Yes, they could just drain off all the water completely (so no more steam generation and no risk of pressure build up) but it would totally wreck the core since it would melt into its concrete containment system, then you'd have a big, broken mess left over (although with all the radiation contained) that you'd have to clean up.
This way they are hoping the core is not totally wrecked (although it will definitely be damaged and require extensive repairs before being used again, if ever), so that it is easier to clean up and reprocess the fuel, with the problem that because you are pumping water in there (at less than required flow rate) it's boiling off quickly raising the pressure very high and cracking to H2 and O2, which just love to react very exothermically - causing those explosions we have seen when they vent this pressure out into the atmosphere.
The best case is that they keep doing what they're doing, and try to minimise the chance of H2 explosions, so that it will be easy to dismantle the core when it is cold. If they just let it melt there will be no more hydrogen explosions, but they'll have a molten mess of fuel and reactor parts spread out inside the concrete containment shield that will be considerably more annoying to clean up (but still completely safe from an external observer point of view - it;s designed to fail this way in the event of a full meltdown).
I think the problem is that everyone is equating "meltdown" to mean "will explode like Chernobyl", which is not what happened there - the Chernobyl explosion was a catastrophic steam explosion like a pressure cooker exploding. The core didn't melt down until after the explosion happened.
These "little" explosions we are seeing in Japan are because they are releasing the pressure in a controlled manner - if they just left it (and disabled the safety systems) then it could face a similar problem to Chernobyl, with the reactor being destroyed by a steam explosion, with the crucial difference that the core of this reactor is totally shielded (Chernobyl's RBMK reactors were too big to contain without it costing a ridiculous amount, so the building was the secondary containment structure - and it fell apart like tissue paper, as expected).
It's also slightly different in Japan - the reactor is "off" so the uranium fission reaction has stopped, and it's just residual heat and decay product heat to be dealt with, so it's a relatively slow and controllable heating. In Reactor 4 in Chernobyl, the fission reaction was very definitely running - but was poisoned due to neutron absorbing products (the core was running at much too low power), and when these were gone, and with the rods all the way out, the reactor spiked to a massive level which flashed all the water in there to steam almost instantly, which blew the lid off the top - just like throwing an aerosol can onto a fire, or shooting it with an air rifle. They had no time to relieve the pressure.
Should the meltdown reach the sea, I probably won't be eating the local sushi for a while, some of those radioisotopes are either chemically nasty or fairly peppy alpha emitters.
Thermally, though, almost totally irrelevant. The three reactors that are running into trouble are a 460MWe and two 760MWe units. In rough numbers, I think that such plants might manage efficiency in the ~25% range, which would correspond to total heat outputs of 1840MW and two at 3040MW(under optimal, full-power operating conditions). 1 calorie is the energy required to raise the temperature of 1gm of water by 1 degree celsius, 4.184 joules. If we go with our(pessimistic) assumption that the meltdown mass is putting out heat equivalent to the reactor operating as designed, that means 1840 million J/s or roughly 440,000,000 calories/s. That would mean that, per second, at maximum output, the core would be good for raising the temperature of 440,000L of water by 1 degree every second.
More plausibly(because there is no way that a meltdown blob is going to come in contact with that much water that fast), it will superheat the water immediately surrounding it, generating some very, very toasty steam(some of which will lose energy to the surrounding water, heating it, some of which will escape into the atmosphere). Thus, a fair percentage of the thermal energy will into the atmosphere, or into overcoming the enthalpy of vaporization of water, which is fairly high.
Even if 100% of the thermal energy from all three crippled reactors went directly into heating water (7920MW or ~1.9 billion calories/s) it would be facing the ~1.34442 x 10^21 L of water in earth's oceans. That would provide ~1.4x 10^-12 calories/s for each Liter. If we make the (highly pessimistic) assumption that the reactor meltdown blobs would continue at full power for a decade(315 569 260 seconds), that would correspond to a 0.000445977891 degree (celsius) rise in world ocean temps.
Spilling the fun stuff that you find in a live reactor is a terrible plan. Wholly ill advised. Don't do it. Not really a thermal concern, thon,
Tree hugging hippies?
No.
Hysterical, science illiterate journalism?
No.
The greatest enemy of nuclear power is 1960s era nuclear plant technology. It is an active safety model, rather than a passive safety model:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Safety
The future of nuclear power, if there is any, is something like a pebble bed reactor, which is passively safe: all of the support equipment, all of the nuclear plant personnel: it can all fail and they can all leave, and nothing bad will happen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
The DESIGN PHILOSOPHY of 1960s era nuclear power is what is killing nuclear power as a viable alternative in this world. Yes, people react in fear and panic and hysteria. So? Did you honestly expect any other reaction possible amongst the general populace, ever? Panic and hysteria is a CONSTANT of humanity. Their impression of nuclear power has been, uh, contaminated, and that's just simple human psychology, there's no getting around that.
So I blame one group here: 1960s, 1950s era nuclear engineers. It is their fault why nuclear power is becoming politically unacceptable. They designed plants that needed to be actively safe. THAT is the real reason we are having problems in Japan now, why we had problems at 3 mile island, why we had problems at Chernobyl: someone has to be there, certain equipment has to work, or there will be trouble. BAD DESIGN. It's just a matter of time before operator error or a geological/ meteorological event causes the active safety system to fail. Nuclear engineers of the '50s and '60s honestly should have foreseen that. Nuclear plants, from the beginning, should have been designed that should something bad happen, the system just naturally gravitates to a harmless state. But in the 1960s, they put in plants that naturally gravitate to a harmful state, and require constant effort to keep safe. Really, really bad design.
Nuclear engineers from a half century ago genuinely failed us. They genuinely fucked up, and we are paying for their shoddy design. And so is the future of nuclear power. Because we have passively safe nuclear designs like pebble bed reactors now. But we may never see them in full use, ever, because public opinion has been poisoned, maybe irreparably. You can't blame the common man for that. He cannot shrug and forget being irradiated. But nuclear engineers, they should have known, they should designed better systems. It is their fault.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There's some interesting information buried inside that article too: they keep spent fuel rods in a pool in a nearby building or somesuch, that (if uncooled) will also melt. I saw pictures of such a storage once; it looked as if the fuel was gripped by industrial robot cranes and pulled into a "submerged" underground pool through a tunnel.
Emotions! In your brain!
It doesn't matter. Humanity will overreact as usual, and any failures of these old reactors will completely kill *any* public discussion of new nuclear tech for decades to come. Better hope there's some massive breakthrough in solar or wind or something else, because one door to energy independence was just slammed shut this week.
Hey all - I think this is a false alarm. If you translate the original article, this is what you get... (albeit a painful translation...)
It is hydrogen explosion indoor shunting appeal with unit No. the first Fukushima nuclear power generation 3
A big explosion got up with unit No. 3 of the first Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant of Tokyo Electric damaged by East Japan great earthquake disaster (Fukushima Okuma-cho) at about 11:00 a.m. on 14th. According to Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, I confirmed that a hydrogen explosion happened. The ex-Emperor preservation considers the possibility damaged both of a storage container made by steel covering up pressure vessel, it which a nuclear reactor is in to be low. The ex-Emperor preservation requested the inhabitants whom there was within the range of 20 kilos to take refuge in a building. According to Tokyo Electric, it is said that at least 11 get injured. This explosion is thought to be an explosion and the same kind that was blown off by unit No. 1 on 12th. The Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano spoke the big change with [the possibility that radioactive material is scattered in large quantities is low] for the data of neighboring radiation doses after having assumed it [it seems that the soundness of the storage container is maintained] at a press conference from 0:40 on the afternoon of 14th without being confirmed.
The emergency core cooling system that the unit No. 3 cools a nuclear reactor after an earthquake 1 running by departure from same source is a stop. With the unit No. 3, the state that pressure and water level in the furnace are unstable in continues, and the hydrogen which a fuel rod is exposed at one time and does it, and is easy to explode is considered to have occurred. From the afternoon of 13th, I injected seawater in a furnace and tried cooling, but the explosion happened in the middle. By the explosion that happened with unit No. 1 on 12th, the destruction remains in , and the abnormality isn't confirmed to a storage container and a pressure vessel. The ex-Emperor preservation considers that this explosion is confined to . According to the House of preservation, I considered that there were at least about 600 inhabitants in 20 kilos zone and called for refuge to the indoor. According to Tokyo Electric, it is said that I confirm pressure vessel, that I am not broken with the storage container either. It is assumed that the neutron flight isn't confirmed at the outskirts. The nuclear reactor is protected from the inside in pressure vessel, storage container, [a wall] of . But I become the serious accident equal to Chernobyl accident when a pressure vessel and a storage container are broken.
I think for living memory, many decades, is more likely.
The greens are going to be playing those videos on a continuous loop every time the word "nuclear" is used. It's pretty much irrelevant how safe the current designs are.
The global nuclear industry is effectively dead as of now.
Deleted
Major con? Power outages? Building a new plant?
What would have happened if they had wind power? Would the towers sustain under 9.0+ earthquake? Support the rushing waters? What about solar? Would the panels/mirrors hold against a wave of crushing water?
I'm not quite sure what sustainable power you are suggesting and what better outcome you are alluding to.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I see that Fukushima proves that nuclear energy is safe. Basically all what happened is that they have to decommission two old reactors due to earthquake. Now they can build better and safer reactors that will withstand even greater earthquakes and tsunami.
The real fallout that Japan needs to worry about is that they have permanently lost a substantial part of their capacity to generate electricity and won't be able to replace it anytime soon. The US and other countries with these high power nuclear plants should learn a lesson. It is better to build several smaller plants instead of a few megaplants. That way, if one of them is out of commission, it is not a total loss to the power grid.
The lack of power in Japan will be a significant issue as the country tries to react to the quake and tsunami and will hamper long term recovery efforts, too.
Worse than Three Mile Island? Just because it is billed as the "Worst Nuclear Plant release in US History" does not make it terrible. That statement literally says OUT OF WHAT HAS HAPPENED, this one trumped it. There were no significant releases other than noble gasses that would have decayed within seconds, the gas drillers are atomizing freaking radium226 into the air, and you think some irradiated NITROGEN is a problem? Try radioactive rain, irradiated garbage dumps that aren't designed to hold radioactive materials, and an irradiated water supply. Drink up. READ some
Those reactors are already destroyed. They will never be operational gain (it says that in the article I linked to).
Careful, reactors 1 / 2 / 3 were online hot and currently self destructing due to decay heat. On the other hand, 4 / 5 / 6 were off for maintenance and as far as I know are cold shutdown. They will be restarted in the future assuming they didn't take too much tsunami damage and/or explosion damage from 1/2/3 popping. You will not be too surprised to learn that 1 / 2 / 3 are the oldest reactors, some 40 year old clunkers. The newer design 4 and 5 are not too bad and 6 is actually pretty decent. And they're planning on building some new ABWRs 7 and 8 onsite. One new ABWR generates almost as much power as 1, 2, and 3 put together.
So the idea is to minimize contamination and damage to reactors 4 / 5 / 6. Remember only one of Chernobyls reactors melted down, the other continued generating power for a decade or something like that.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
As far as I understand it, there are three things to fix:
- Use a modern design, not one from the 1970s, so that a meltdown is avoided by physics and not engineering
You mean like the CANDU reactor? A design from the 1950s
Those reactors are already destroyed. They will never be operational gain (it says that in the article I linked to).
A complete meltdown will lead to a huge discharge of radioactive waste similiar to Chernobyl. That's what they are trying to avoid at all costs. The fact that the reactor is "off" is irrelevant.
No it won't - if these cores completely melt down they will be safely contained within the enclosing concrete containment (which is inside the building), and completely encloses the reactor.
If they melt down there will just be a puddle of fuel and melted reactor in the bottom of this structure, which is designed like a dish to spread it out thinly so it cools quickly, but it will all still be totally sealed inside.
There is no way it will be spread over hundreds of miles (or even just outside the plant itself in the local area), since it was designed to fail this way,
Think of it like a bar of chocolate inside sealed tin can. If you left it in the sun without pouring cold water over it, the chocolate would melt, but it would not escape from the can.
These reactors don't have concrete containment shields.
Not so, not even close. BWR model 3 (example is unit 1 at this site) had a mark1 concrete containment system and BWR model 4 (examples are units 2 and 3 at this site) could have been built with mark1 or mark2 containment systems.
A gross simplification is mark1 is a big concrete building with a little concrete building inside it and a steel shield inside that little building. In all the pics you can see the big building popped pretty much as designed and the little building inside it is still claimed to be undamaged. Mark1 designs look a lot like really tough office buildings; they look like a telco central office or a modern data center, sorta.
Mark2 is about the same but for a variety of boring engineering reasons looks like some really giant soda cans (or like a grain elevator). I don't see anything like that on site. I'm guessing either I haven't seen the right pic, or the ancient BWR-4s onsite have a mark1 containment system.
The newer stuff like the Mark3 look a lot like a swimming pool. I don't know if the undamaged reactor #6 is new enough to have a Mark3.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_Water_Reactor_Safety_Systems#Containment_system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_water_reactor#First_series_of_production_BWRs_.28BWR.2F1.E2.80.93BWR.2F6.29
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
"We aren't impressed that having made huge stores of poison, you haven't killed that many people YET. We want you to stop making huge stores of poison, period."
Darn me for doing that. I just get up in the morning and release the demons from the earth and set them on the peasantry. It just seems like the thing to do before I've had my coffee. ;)
Uh... You seem a bit breathless.
The coast of Japan is smashed, tens of thousands are missing with many of them dead, and you're more concerned about a potential radiological release?
Get a sense of proportion.
The core is already subcritical, adding boric acid just acts as a neutron sponge to capture thermalised neutrons (that are being moderated by the water they're pumping in). The source of these neutrons is the short lives radionuclides that form as part of the normal operating reaction, ie, not the uranium.
With adequate cooling you don;t have to worry about them - there aren't all that many, relative to the normal running of the reactor and normal cooling is enough to deal with the heat produced as these products decay, but cooling is an issue, hence anything they can do to limit heat sources is being done - and thermalised neutrons are an indirect source of heat (since they bang into things and cause fission events).
These reactors don't have concrete containment shields.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BWR_Mark_I_Containment,_cutaway.jpg
" Cutaway drawing of a typical Boiling water reactor (BWR) Mark I Concrete Containment with Steel Torus (suppression pool), as used in the BWR/1, BWR/2, BWR/3 and some BWR/4 model reactors."
(Reactor 1 is a BWR3, Reactor 3 is a BWR4)
The coast of Japan is smashed, tens of thousands are missing with many of them dead, and you're more concerned about a potential radiological release?
Get a sense of proportion.
It seems reasonable to say that a lot of those deaths, injuries and property damage were unavoidable though. It's simply not practical -- possible even -- to convince people not to build homes, roads or workplaces on low coastal land, especially if that includes 10 miles inland.
However, it seems fairly practical to avoid building things with potentially hugely dangerous failure modes, when there are alternatives. In know the alternatives seem unpalatable to some people, but the sour flavour of this alternative is harder to ignore today.
Electrical power is modern civilization.
Truly, we either need to evolve civilisation so that this is less true. Yes, there are renewable sources to explore, but at the same time, we should be looking at ways to reduce our energy needs. It's compatible with our basic desire to save money anyway.
As for stable power bases -- I don't know why there aren't more hydroelectric schemes (not generating power from a river-filled reservoir, but pumping water uphill when the sun's out or the wind turbines are spinning, and running it downhill through turbines when they're not). They use up a lot of land, it's true, but so do nuclear plants and fossil fuel burners -- and reservoirs are a lot more pleasant to hike around.
The thermodynamic laws that govern this universe? Don't try to win green-point by being more stupid than you really are, because all such points availible have been won already.
The problem is, what to replace it with? Coal has an even higher death and pollution rate, the worlds running out of natgas so forget that. That leaves, uh, going all "Pol Pot" on the population, I guess?
If we assume the market-driven-economists got it right, we should ensure that investors in nuclear power (and all the others) are held liable for the long term cleanup costs, and any emergency costs associated with their activities. The cost will rise; the cost of coal/oil/gas will rise. Alternatives will arise from the innovation of entrepreneurs.
Fingers crossed...
Yeah, a total overreaction, only 2 nuclear power plants are failing, of 6 reactors, only 2 are in partial meltdown; less than 200 people were irradiated, less than 200,000 were evacuated. Why is this even news? Sensational journalism makes me nauseous.
The Admin and the Engineer
I would like to understand clearly and concisely why it has not been possible after so many days to maintain levels of coolant.
It's because contrary to what all the overconfident pro-nuke techies that infest this site seem to believe: In the real world, shit happens.
IIRC it's not that the RBMK reactors themselves were too big, but that they were designed to have their fuel replaced whilst the reactor was running and keeping all the loading gear inside containment was space prohibitive. There's an awesome cutaway model here http://neutron.kth.se/gallery/power_reactors/Ignalina_model.JPG that shows the colossal crane/gantry above the core, along with what basically amounts to a shed roof covering the reactor core. Not pictured is the cooling pond, which sits parallel to the core (and takes up more space) that the spent fuel rods are dropped into.
Fitting all that folderol inside decent containment would be very expensive, because you now need at least twice the height and width of the reactor to fit everything in. So why bother? Allowing refuelling whilst the reactor is running meant a) you wouldn't need to close the reactor down to refuel it and b) you could make lots of weapons-grade plutonium very quickly. Weapons grade stuff requires very short fuel runs on a low burnup (exactly what you don't want in a reactor for power generation), whereas extracting P239 from all the other plutonium isotopes in "regular" nuclear wastes is exceptionally difficult. Since these reactors are expensive, lots of countries decided to cheap out and build dual purposed reactors which, after enough warheads had been made, could then be converted to civilian fuel loads. Hence you had a bunch of suboptimal design decisions taking place, such as the lack of containment on RBMK and other reactors. Yay for the cold war.
Not meant as a nitpick BTW, just thought people might find it interesting.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
"Thousands Dead" did not die from radiation or the nuclear plant.
Because it might have been cheaper to cut some corners with existing equipment than build a new reactor every time some scientist comes along with the next great thing? It might have been more profitable to do things the way they have been done, and when the sh*t hits the fan the nuclear industry can still count on their (highly moderated) forum posters to deny any problem.
This may also be a reason why some folks here don't trust the nuclear industry too much ...
If people were sane and less reactionary, this is actually quite the demonstration of how incredibly resilient it all was.
First off, humans being sane and non reactionary is hardly the default setting. Secondly, if you look at the before and after satellite pictures of the plant, it's apparent that structurally the system performed quite well. However, the little details like generator siting and aspects of defense in depth, not so much. So they may have nine out of ten things right, even with bonus points for being able to do this on such an old reactor system, but they seem uncomfortably close to losing local containment.
That isn't game over / go back to eating twigs and throwing rocks but its a very, very bad outcome in a densely populated area. Japan doesn't have the luxury of just abandoning hundreds, or even tens of square miles for decades to come. We shall see in the next couple of days just exactly how bad it will be. The only thing this conclusively shows so far is how bad assumptions trump good engineering.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Chill dude. Take an iodine pill.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
They could move away from Urainum which has longer lived radioactive byproducts and takes effort to prevent an explosive meltdown. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk
As the Richter scale is logarithmic, they withstood a quake seven times their maximum.
10^.7 = 5, not 7.
This Josef dude is one of the overly confident/underly prudent types. As an example that Josef suffers from this dangerous deficit, he put his name to a document saying nothing bad will happen. Since then, reactors 1-3 have been exposed to explosions, a spent fuel pool is probably exposed to the air, and reactor 4 building is reportedly on fire. The news is no longer talking about micro-sieverts, it's now milli-sieverts. The evacuation zone has been expanded to 30 km, and NHK is describing what to and what not to do. For example, if you have laundry outside, leave it and don't bring it in. Turn off all ventilation equipment, etc. etc.
Josef Oehlmen is the acme of hubris, and thanks to the web, that's exactly how he will be remembered, which is a fair and proper consequence of his personality flaws.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Right, with reactor 4 on fire, the roof blown off a spent fuel pool and the cooling water possibly boiling off, and one of the reactors apparently leaking cooling water -- no danger at all. Fanboi.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good