TEPCO Unveils Plan To Deal With Fukushima Crisis

RedEaredSlider writes "Tokyo Electric Power Co. unveiled its plan for dealing with the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. TEPCO said the radiation levels should drop over the next three months. It will take about six months for the reactors to achieve 'cold shutdown' in which the temperature of the water inside the reactor is less than 100 degrees Celsius (212 F). The current plan for cooling the reactors will mean injecting nitrogen into the reactor pressure vessel. All four damaged reactors experienced hydrogen explosions when water, heated by nuclear fuel, turned to steam and reacted with the zirconium alloy cladding of the fuel rods. Hydrogen, when exposed to oxygen, combusts. Nitrogen is an inert gas, so TEPCO hopes that it will prevent further explosions."

Comments

Best laid plans

[divec]

I wonder WTF their contingency plan is if a big tsunami hits now ...

I strongly believe we know how to set up technical systems for safe nuclear power. However I'm extremely sceptical of the idea that we know how to set up social / administrative systems for safe nuclear power. It's too easy to hide systemic weakness behind secrecy, or too embarrassing to identify and fix present failings, or the debate gets too polarised and ideological so people, politicians and regulatory systems lose sight of the actual safety issues because of the headline effect etc.

I wouldn't be quick to blame money or corruption or unscrupulous people, either. The key problem is secrecy -- even without malice, familiarity makes you blind to system flaws -- we software people know this very well. Only total transparency can ensure that flaws do not get hidden. On the other hand I don't know how this can be reconciled with security against sabotage.

There's a need for a sober, measured debate about all this and it's a pity that a few fundamentalists (on both sides) are making this impossible.

Re:Best laid plans

[Solandri]

Generally I'm agreed. However, safety measures need to be scaled to the actual level of risk involved. Due to the high-publicity nature of nuclear accidents, the nuclear industry already faces much stricter safety standards than any other energy technology. The radiation alarms at nuclear plants will trigger if you bring in certain substances anyone can buy at the corner drugstore. Per TWh of electricity generated, wind and solar have killed more people than nuclear. Coal kills hundreds of times more people each year than Chernobyl did. And the deadliest power generation accident in history was a hydroelectric dam failure. Yet people accept all those risks without a second thought. It's only nuclear which gets raked over the coals.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't be trying to improve nuclear safety. But if our goal is to save lives, our money and worrying would be much better spent improving the safety of the other power technologies, instead of concentrating on the one which generates the most media coverage when there's an accident. The latter is the very definition of hysteria. Level of fear generated is a lousy metric to use for risk assessment (though it is a legit measure for PR).

I wonder WTF their contingency plan is if a big tsunami hits now

This is something I've been harping on over and over though it hasn't been getting as much favorable moderation here. When people do risk assessment, too often they only consider independent events. The risk of a generator failing to start is (say) 10%, so just put a half dozen generators there and you have 99.9999% reliability, right? This fails to account for the possibility of a single event, like oh, I dunno, a tsunami? wiping out all your generators at once. Likewise, the probability of a two large tsunamis is not just the probability of one large tsunami squared. If an earthquake generated a large tsunami, it's almost certain to generate several large or larger aftershocks (technically the 9.0 quake was an aftershock to an 7.2 a few days prior). And along with it comes a high probability that one of those aftershocks could generate another large tsunami. So important structures in tsunami-prone regions should be designed to withstand two successive tsunamis. Not just one.

Re:Best laid plans

[lennier]

rather than building newer and safer design

There's a big unstated "if" in that phrase, and that's that newer reactor designs are in fact safer.

I mean, technically, on paper, sure, these third and fourth generation designs em>sound safer. Passive cooling, foolproof, failsafe, etc, etc. It's all very nice and clean and clinical. On paper.

But weren't last few generations of reactors also supposed to be literally failsafe? Never in a thousand years would we see the types of accidents we've had five or so of in the last forty years? We were assured that by people who literally swore on their childrens' lives that it would be perfectly safe.

And of course, the only way we can tell for sure if these new designs - which of course are going to be "lighter" and "cheaper" because they'll have smaller containments - is to build them and run them. And then there'll be pressure to rapidly deploy them. Oh, what does that remind me of? a little thing called the "boiling water reactor" which was a second generation model improved from the old clunky pressurised water systems and didn't need the big heavy containment, because it had this neat "torus" to suppress leakage?

But these new reactors are different you say? Of course they are. They're built by the same companies who made the old, inferior, should never have been deployed ones? Gee, now that's an odd coincidence. I'm sure there's nothing to it. I'm sure we can trust this new generation of nuclear advocates in exactly the way we couldn't trust their fathers.

Lie to me once, shame on me. Lie to me twice... don't let the spent fuel pool blow up and contaminate your farmland on the way out.

Re:I'll say it...

[Kjella]

Question is, would a public-run utility design and build nuclear infrastructure to within the letter of the law or would they 'overbuild' for safety?

If safety margins are needed the safety margins should be in the law, not expecting everyone to overbuild. Just like building codes design for worst possible load and then some - basically you can have the whole place stacked with people doing line dancing and the floor still won't collapse by 100 people jumping simultaneously.

Re:Morons

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but in various contexts. What you have to understand here is that the nuclear apologists, having exhausted their initial denial options: it's overblown (er, yes it blew)! it's not chernobyl (nope, and it might get worse than chernobyl due to all that used fuel stored onsite)! the release is mostly iodine (so was chernobyl)! the containment vessels held (nope)! it was a black swan (sorry, but that wasn't the biggest tsunami to his japan in the past two centuries)! the radionuclide are mostly diluted into the ocean (where they will bioaccumulate into the predator species we like to eat)!

So now they're moving on to blaming the plant operators, becuase, you know, nuclear power is pure and beautiful and the technology itself cannot have systemic flaws. Next they'll seize on some tangent and argue that to death amongst themselves in order to avoid occupying their minds with the fact that the business of running nuclear plants is as corrupt, short-cut ridden, and plagued with short-term outlook as any other business.