Slashdot Mirror
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."
Humans are not entering the "containment". They are entering the reactor building. Reactor building was damaged - especially the top floods. It was not damaged at the bottom, where the cooling equipment is.
Reactor 1 is being tried first because the building as the least amount of radiation. The robot that went in measured about 40-50mSv/h. This is reasonably low and can be brought down further.
The reactors are not in cold shutdown because there is no water cooling. They *could* achieve cold shutdown quickly by water in faster, but it would not help the situation. They need to repair the recirculation pumps and find the leaks and plug them. They also need to find out if there is any hydrogen in the reactor vessels and to deal with that. These 2 reasons is why cold shutdown mode is very BAD right now - they had to slow down water pumping to prevent pressure from dropping as that could cause air to be sucked into the reactor and hydrogen could burn (explode), if there is any hydrogen there.
Don't second guess them now. They are doing things very carefully.
TEPCO failed at not having prepared for the scenario when the plant suffers complete blackout, including all backups being flooded. That's all. Had they had prepared for this scenario, this would not have happened. Period. Now they are dealing with consequences and I'm certain that plans will now be in place that no nuclear reactor will melt even if they lose all cooling - ie. external emergency cooling will be setup before coping batteries die.