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TEPCO Readies Plan To Bring Reactor Under Control
Kyusaku Natsume writes "TEPCO has released details of their plan to bring Unit 1 of Fukushima Daiichi under control, to improve the working conditions inside the reactor building of this unit and install a new cooling system. From the success of this operation maybe we will know how they will address the emergency in the remaining damaged nuclear reactors."
Wonder what they plan to do about Unit 2, 3 and the spent fuel pool in 4?
Tim, Fix the damn fortune database already!
A disaster just fine. Only one of them had anything resembling an issue, and that was the transmission lines going down, which mean the reactor had to shut down.
Nothing major in danger there.
Yet there's little in the way of coverage out there.
At least the people are getting some attention.
That's just the very beginning - hook up an air filtration system so humans can briefly enter the containment. Then try to hook up a water level gauge for the reactor pressure vessel, so they can actually tell how much of the core is uncovered. Then they can think about what to do next.
All this work is taking place in partially collapsed buildings where explosions have destroyed the structure. Ordinarily, one would bring in big cranes with grabs and start removing debris. But they can't do that.
The situation remains dangerous as long as there are still many red blocks on the JAIF's status chart. Note that reactors 1,2, and 3 still have not reached cold shutdown, where the reactor core is below the boiling point of water, all steam has condensed to water, and pressure in the reactor vessel is down to one atmosphere. All the ad-hoc cooling measures aren't enough to get the core temperature down. Normal time to cold shutdown for a GE Mark I reactor is about a day. Even at Three Mile Island, it took only about two days to reach cold shutdown.
TEPCO failed at not having prepared for the scenario when the plant suffers complete blackout, including all backups being flooded. That's all.
That is not all.
They had 8 to 24 hours (I forget) to bring and connect additional power generators or charged batteries to the site before the existing batteries failed, but they didn't do it despite knowing what the stakes were.
They failed to vent the hydrogen from the reactor buildings. They thought to vent the vessels to the buildings but didn't vent the hydrogen from the buildings. This lead to significant avoidable additional damage from explosions and probably raised the amount of radiation released to the environment.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Feed&Breed / [*] Cooling the reactor core by feeding and breeding
I certainly hope they're talking about feed and bleed.... There no need breeding any more isotopes at this point.
Wow, Slashdot is lame, I pasted some japanese characters and slashdot does not render them properly. They are where the [*] is.
Looks like they've enlisted help from the Germans:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/383461/oh-lerrrrd
Good to see some international cooperation for once.
...in imperial Japan reactors control you!!!
In other places operators are expected to know the plant, take years before they are promoted to be operators and they are paid accordingly. If somebody is going to have to make quick decisions that can cost or save millions in production or repairs you want them to know what they are doing. At one time I was an engineer backing up the operators in a steel rod rolling mill but I did not have the Godlike understanding assumed by the poster above and the operator that had worked in every part of the mill for years before getting in that seat was most definitely the one calling the shots. I could change things all I liked to make good or crap steel rod but if I suggested anything that would endanger the gear it would be made very clear that I was not the boss.
Containment will be accomplished with reptile sequestration.
I shudder at the thought of the end result of Kamagurka and Herr Seele draw/paint/act/whatever about the Fukushima accident... intriguing though....
Or maybe I have my cultural references mixed up again.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Several weeks ago the failure of the Japanese reactors was "upgraded" to a Chernobyl level disaster.
In their photos for press page:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/news/110311/index-e.html
The air filtering equipment:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/news/110311/images/110505_1.jpg
Air ducts:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/news/110311/images/110506_2.jpg
Radiation dose measurements by worker inside reactor building:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/news/110311/images/110506_1.jpg
If these pictures had been available sooner I would have added them to the submission.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
I just want to carry on the proud slashdot tradition of saying 'see nuclear power is perfectly safe' every time fukushima is mentioned. The Nuclear shills are quietening down but we mustn't forget our heritage
I had the chance to attend a talk last week by an engineer who had worked on that kind of reactor and has been watching in great detail with a experienced eye.
She is most worried about unit 4, which has shown signs of criticality.
We're not out of the woods yet.
I thought the Japanese had the most advanced robotic technology in the world. I've seen Japanese robots demonstrated that could do amazing things. But the cleanup effort seems to have been stymied by the fact that the environment inside these buildings is too hot to send in workers. Isn't that exactly the sort of situation that robotic manipulators were designed for? If robots can tool around on the surface of Mars, picking up rocks and doing experiments on them, why can't they get into this plant?
I suspect the reason that so little progress has been made so far is that TEPCO is still trying to handle this "in house" despite the fact that they're obviously way out of their depth here. If the Japanese let their best technologists loose on this problem, I'm sure we'd see more imaginative - and effective - solutions than have been tried so far.
You can open a hole in the roof, as they did with buildings 5 and 6 later.
If they don't have the tools onsite to open a hole in those buildings at the top where the hydrogen would collect, then that was again poor planning and preparation.
The stakes are extraordinarily high, the response can be so.
And when you are looking at such a dire situation and the roads are trashed YOU CAN CALL A HELICOPTER if you need to. At the outside, they could have called the US military to fly a chopper in with tools they needed, even demolition charges and people to rig them.
They didn't concentrate enough on preventing disaster, they didn't seem to consider drastic enough measures given the stakes.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
You can get a 20' container with a 2MW Diesel generator in it. They aren't even very expensive (less than $1M). There were certainly some in the area, if they should have been commandeered for the task. These can be lifted by large helicopters I expect (can't find figures on this to be sure, a 6MW generator is 2x too heavy for a Chinook to carry, perhaps a 1 or 1MW generator is light enough. The US military certainly has several of these, they were several hours away but remember the batteries lasted for 8-24 hours. A ship may have been able to steam there from Okinawa in time and pulled up alongside with a long cable, but this seems less than 100% likely to me. Perhaps any old steam ship has enough power capacity to run the pumps if you can just get the power ashore.
They should have called several to the site IMMEDIATELY, arriving before the batteries died. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
As to do I want to send my staff up on the roof of the buildings to drill some holes? YES. Because I do understand what is at stake here. Are they at risk? Surely. But the stakes are very high, I would have had them up drilling holes in the building before I even vented the vessel. It's much easier to work BEFORE the site is radioactive, so I would have had them drilling holes already. They could do the job carefully and slowly with the right safety equipment instead of trying to rush around due to radiation exposure windows.
As to getting permission. They likely didn't have permission. But that's just not enough excuse. If you know what MUST be done, permission is a mere formality. I'd rather lose my job because I didn't have permission than let a disaster occur. It is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to get difficult permissions. People do get upset about venting small amounts of radioactivity. But they get more upset over 50 year 40km-diameter exclusion zones.
Again, my point is they were faced with an extraordinary problem with extraordinary consequences and they failed to take extraordinary enough steps. Perhaps they were more concentrated in minimizing the damage to the plant instead of preventing a meltdown and large-scale release of radioactivity.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95