Fukushima Meltdown Might Have Come With Earthquake, Not Tsunami

formfeed writes "As the data from the Fukushima reactor is being reviewed it looks like the meltdown happened much earlier: '[T]he fuel rods in the No. 1 reactor were completely exposed to the air and rapidly heating five hours after the quake.' Apparently, the earthquake had caused a crack in the containment vessel. Which means, that even without the generators failing, the meltdown might still have happened. With this new data, it seems a similar incident could happen in an earthquake zone even without a tsunami."

Comments

Uh... summary?

[zalas]

Article:
The operator of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant said it is studying whether the facility's reactors were damaged in the March 11 earthquake even before the massive tsunami that followed cut off power and sent the reactors into crisis.
Kyodo news agency quoted an unnamed source at the utility on Sunday as saying that the No. 1 reactor might have suffered structural damage in the earthquake that caused a release of radiation separate from the tsunami.
Summary:
Apparently, the earthquake had caused a crack in the containment vessel.

I'm not sure how the summary writer came to that conclusion... Shouldn't we wait for an actual report/finding before stating that?

Re:Uh... summary?

[Sollord]

Welcome to /. leave facts at the door along with all thoughts of compromise as your solutions and knowledge are always right on all topics

Re:Uh... summary?

[Kilrah_il]

You should be modded -1 Factual or -1 On-topic :)

Re:Uh... summary?

[Forty Two Tenfold]

nuclear experts

Not that I disagree with Gundersen, but one person does not a group make.

Re:Uh... summary?

[he-sk]

Here's a better writeup:

Mainichi Daily News: http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110517p2a00m0na008000c.html
taz (German): http://taz.de/1/zukunft/umwelt/artikel/1/tepcos-verteidigung-broeckelt/

According to these articles, reactor no. 1 experienced some kind of problem (sudden drop of pressure) 10 minutes after the earthquake and well before the tsunami struck. The crew then had some troubles with the cooling system of said reactor but the articles are pretty vague in that regard. This is according to TEPCO's own reports.

Anyway, I've always maintained that the assertion that the earthquake did no damage in Fukushima (and therefore other nuclear plants are "safe") was nothing but a myth pushed by nuclear apologists in their own self-interest. It's nice to see some factual reporting backing up my thesis, by the nuke operator no less.

Re:Uh... summary?

[Chas]

Remember the first rule of yellow journalism.

If there's no news to be had, generate an eye-catching, inaccurate headline.

Then make shit up.

"Kyodo news agency quoted an unnamed source"

This is essentially a license to freely spew anything. Regardless of the facts.

Now comes the time when they attempt to rewrite what actually happened, and replace it with a "nuclear horror" scenario.

Re:Uh... summary?

[ozmanjusri]

[reactors...] breached containment. [citation needed]

'Engineers from the Tokyo Electric Power company (Tepco) entered the No.1 reactor at the end of last week for the first time and saw the top five feet or so of the core’s 13ft-long fuel rods had been exposed to the air and melted down.
Previously, Tepco believed that the core of the reactor was submerged in enough water to keep it stable and that only 55 per cent of the core had been damaged.
Now the company is worried that the molten pool of radioactive fuel may have burned a hole through the bottom of the containment vessel, causing water to leak.
“We will have to revise our plans,” said Junichi Matsumoto, a spokesman for Tepco. “We cannot deny the possibility that a hole in the pressure vessel caused water to leak”.'

AFAIK, all the "leaking radioactive material" stories are about the spent fuel pond(s) not the reactor cores.

Leaking?

"United States government engineers sent to help with the crisis in Japan are warning that the troubled nuclear plant there is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely, and that in some cases are expected to increase as a result of the very measures being taken to keep the plant stable, according to a confidential assessment prepared by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission."

"The document also suggests that fragments or particles of nuclear fuel from spent fuel pools above the reactors were blown “up to one mile from the units,” and that pieces of highly radioactive material fell between two units and had to be “bulldozed over,” presumably to protect workers at the site. The ejection of nuclear material, which may have occurred during one of the earlier hydrogen explosions, may indicate more extensive damage to the extremely radioactive pools than previously disclosed."
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/world/asia/06nuclear.html?_r=2&hp

Re:Uh... summary?

[Anonymous Coward]

This was a big deal - level 7 nuclear disaster.

That's a fairly useless scale ( read up on the "criteria").
This is worse than TMI (which had barely measurable radioactive release), but nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl (AFAIK, so far).
Chernobyl had no sealed containment vessel, and the fuel was allowed to reach super-high temperatures which burned the graphite moderator directly into the atmosphere, where wind carried it for miles - which is REALLY REALLY BAD.

The containment vessel was breached.

Again, [citation needed].
See my links and quotes in this post.

The spent fuel rods became radioactive because their pools became depleted.

The spent fuel rods are always radioactive (at least until they decay according to the half-life of their fuel).

Plutonium has been leaking into the sea.

Plutonium? You sure it wasn't cesium or iodine?
Still radioactive, but not nearly has bad as Pu.
I can find a few links stating that plutonium has been found "outside the reactor building", but they don't got into much detail on the amounts.

Please provide a link if you've got one, it's hard to find unbiased info.

Re:Uh... summary?

[jafac]

Well, it was also fairly obvious given the following:
- Among the long history of safety procedure fraud at Fukushima, by TEPCO, were instances where repairs were performed using procedures that were not approved by standards, but signed off as otherwise. (therefore - plant infrastructure which may have been *designed* to withstand certain g acceleration forces of an earthquake in 1971, may not be able to withstand those forces 40 years later, after these un-approved, but fraudulently certified repairs.) - The article which mentions these variances does not provide specifics.

  - When Unit 1, and 3 exploded, the roofs of the building blew off. This indicates that the hydrogen had been generated in a reactor core at over 2200 degrees C, in the presence of water, and escaped the primary cooling system, venting into the reactor building's structure through the particle scrubbers, and exploded. A hydrogen explosion is not good, of course, but only indicative of a loss-of-cooling, at a minimum. Many experts will say that hydrogen generation is pretty much a sure sign of melting; it's not precise, but when you're in the ballpark, in a nuclear reactor, things can get very unstable very quickly, (like, milliseconds-quickly). None of these units had instrumentation, or controls, or active cooling going on. As hot byproducts are released - they have much lower melting points than the Uranium fuel, and they can migrate around, and collect in different states (or chemically react with eachother, and have a completely different set of properties - and these properties could be caustic, or explosive) . . . and cause hotspots, regions of high flux. (while some byproducts absorb neutrons and slow the reaction down). Pretty much all bets are off, as far as predicting what's going to happen.

Strictly speaking, hydrogen generation does not mean melting HAD to happen. But in this situation, it was highly improbable that melting wasn't happening in conjunction with that.
(and the hydrogen generation did not necessarily happen at the time of the explosions - the explosions happened later).

  - When Unit 2 exploded, the explosion blew out the side of the base of the building, through the condenser, in the primary cooling. This means that the hydrogen collected and ignited in the primary cooling system. This also means that there was enough heat in the condenser to provide ignition. This could have been due to excessive steam pressure, (compression-ignition) - with oxygen leaking IN through structural cracks. It strongly suggests that Unit 2 was damaged structurally, (the concrete torus), in the quake. It could be that thermally hot byproducts or corium caused the ignition in the RPV, maybe with an oxygen isotope (I don't know if this is possible or not, probably not), or dissasociated water,(weird isotope chemistry?) or the ignition source made it's way into the torus (which would mean, holey RPV+holey primary cooling = open core). I can't really say what the ignition source could have been, but the presence of oxygen is the crazy bit, and the simplest explanation is structural issues in the concrete (or connecting cooling pipes/valves).

I think it was pretty idiotic and foolish (okay. . . unprofessional?) for TEPCO to state, in the immediate aftermath of the first hydrogen explosion, that they knew that the RPV was intact. They couldn't get instrument readings, or even a visual inspection for many days after that explosion to even get a half-assed confirmation of that statement. It was this kind of fumbling around and PR mismanagement that does the most damage to the industry's credibility. It would have been better for them to state what they definitely knew - what data they had, and the range of possibilities that it could have meant. That first hydrogen explosion was absolutely the time to press the panic button and evacuate residents.

Re:Uh... summary?

[schwaang]

Nuclear is dangerous but Japan is in a difficult position because it has little in the way of natural resources like oil, gas and coal with which to generate electricity. There is also the "benefit", if you can call it that, of having the facilities to manufacture weapons grade uranium very quickly which allows Japan to remain a non-nuclear country but have the ability to rapidly arm themselves if the situation deteriorates that far.

Speaking of war, in all the press coverage of earthquake-proofing the reactors, I haven't seen a single mention of the potential hazards from nuclear power plants damaged by war. In the US we actively worry about terrorism, but a war in which bombs or missiles strike one or more reactors is a realistic possibility, and much more so in Japan.

With nuclear, the probabilities of leaks may be small, but the possible consequences are unacceptably high. And as each serious accident has shown, neither the risks nor the consequences are adequately understood.

Re:Uh... summary?

[Rei]

If the containment vessel isn't leaking, how is all of the highly-radioactive, plutonium-bearing water accumulating outside of the containment vessel?

Lots of very respected sources are reporting that there was damage to the containment vessel in reactors 1 through 3, quoting multiple figures in the government and TEPCO. I'm going to trust their ability to cross-check their reporting more than your "linked report" which is just a second-hand summary of news reported by one source, not some official document.

Re:Uh... summary?

[Rei]

To me this does seem like a major design defect. The reactors were designed to withstand large amounts of lateral acceleration, but not as much as the earthquake cause. It is somewhat understandable that such a large tsunami was not anticipated but this is not the first magnitude 9 earthquake since accurate record keeping began.

But you see, that's not acceptable. You can't just account for known unknowns. You also have to factor in the risk of unknown unknowns. It's simply not good enough to say, "We've never seen a tsunami that big, so we'll just assume that one won't happen" when you're dealing with something with such huge consequences in the event of a failure.

A couple years ago, in the city just to the north of me, the Cedar River flooded. Floods happen, right? Yes, but it was something like *ten feet* over its previous record stage, with records dating back to the mid-1800s. The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season broke half the records in the book for a hurricane season, some by huge margins. Same with the tornado outbreaks in April (two massive tornado outbreaks in a single month, each record-setting). And on and on. We have more than ample evidence that previously standing records, especially localized records, can get blown away. If you can't build with this realization in mind, and if a failure has such severe economic consequences, you shouldn't be building.

Misleading Title As Usual

[borrrden]

Nowhere in TFA does it say that the earthquake caused the damage to the reactor that led to it melting. Also, I doubt it is even possible for it to melt in the 40 - 50 minutes it took for the tsunami to arrive. It first has to evaporate or otherwise evacuate the water inside the reactor, and then heat up to about 2800 C to melt. What the article is saying is that the rods had melted much sooner than initially thought. The timeline changed, not the reason. They are also looking into possible complications that may have occurred in the initial hour (there is another report that the cooling systems were manually shut off after a pressure drop, as per the instructions for such a scenario), but nowhere does it suggest that the earthquake, and not the tsunami, caused the crisis. The closest it comes to that is saying that the earthquake may have "damaged" the reactor, but gives no speculation on the effect that it would have had on the cooling system. A crack in the containment vessel without any cracks in the reactor pressure vessel would not have been an issue.

Re:Misleading Title As Usual

[thePig]

It need not melt in the 40-50 minutes as you suggest. When the tsunami came only the diesel generators failed. The battery backup was still working. Only when the batteries wound down was the effect of the tsunami felt - i.e. generators were offline. So, there was ample time for the meltdown due to structural damage to occur.

I am not sure about your other points - only pointing out that the timeline need not be as stringent as you were mentioning.

Re:Misleading Title As Usual

[Mindcontrolled]

If they lost cooling at the moment of the quake, they'd have to deal with roughly 10MW thermal. Heat of vaporisation for water is about 2kJ/g, so at 10 MJ/s we get vaporization of 5 kg/s. For 40 minutes between quake and tsunami, we have 2400 s, giving us 12 tons of water evaporated. That is definitely lower than the whole content of the RPV, so we won't get a dry core and total meltdown there, assuming that there is no other path for coolant loss than evaporation. Partial exposure of the rods with partial melting is still possible, though.

Re:Misleading Title As Usual

[rrohbeck]

If there was a crack at the bottom of the RPV, the pressure would have pushed water out rather quickly.

Re:Misleading Title As Usual

[DrBoumBoum]

No, the batteries provide nowhere near the power required by the cooling system, this was explained on slashdot a few weeks ago by a guy working with the pumps (sorry no time to find the comment now). The cooling system consumes a large amount of the total electrical output of the plant (something between 10 and 20 percent, again from memory), no battery setup can provide this amount of energy. The batteries are only used to power the instrumentation and control mechanisms (valves etc).

Re:Misleading Title As Usual

[Fierlo]

Except that decay power is about 7% or so right after shutdown. I'm not entirely sure where you got the 10 MW thermal. Unit 1 is a 480 MWe reactor. If you generously assume a 50% efficiency (it wasn't)...

480/0.5*0.07 = 67.2 MW thermal

More likely it's in the mid 30s (or even low 30s) for efficiency, so you end up around 96 MW thermal immediately after shutdown.

Re:Misleading Title As Usual

[Mindcontrolled]

Yeah, that was a brainfart - I wanted to shoot for order of magnitude only, so I originally planned to set 10% of total thermal power. That somehow got garbled into 10 MW. So I undershot it by a factor of 10. You are right, with losing about 150 tons of water, the core would probably fall dry within the hour given a loss of circulation immediately after scram.

Re:Misleading Title As Usual

[radtea]

By way, as a noob and an AC, the link isn't in html - maybe some moderator will fix it.

You REALLY must be new here... /. mods have one job: to create misleading and false headlines and ensure that summaries are less accurate when they are posted than when they are submitted. In this case, they have for some reason replaced "pressure vessel" with "containment vessel", presumably to make it clear to absolutely everyone that they know nothing about the technology of nuclear power.

That's an excellent link, though, and the data indicate that the scenario described in the article is pretty unlikely--the water level is clearly stable until significantly after the tsunami. No amount of fiddling with the calibration on the gauge is going to affect that: the curve is flat, then starts to fall an hour or so after the tsunami.

Re:Misleading Title As Usual

[Hartree]

Depends on what part of the cooling system. The main cooling pumps indeed do take a lot of electric power.

One of the backup systems, the RCIC, uses residual steam pressure to inject cooling water into the reactor. The valves and controls for that system require electric power, but batteries can supply that.

Re:Big news

[atari2600a]

Wait this report says nothing of the sort kinda what the fuck.

Quality of sources

[DarkOx]

While I am not sure about the quality of this article and its unclear how some of these conclusions are reached should this events be corroborated later this is a big deal. If true it kinda throws out some of the hey it stood up to way more than was ever expected, these things really are safe narrative.

Re:Quality of sources

[DrBoumBoum]

I know it's bad but I like to repost and ponder in insight over the content of one the very first comment that was posted about the disaster:

It's funny because what is happening in Japan is exactly why Nuclear Power is SAFE!

An earthquake 7 times more powerful than the biggest it was built for hit, and all that happened to the reactors that didn't shut down cleanly was a small amount of radioactive noble gases, which decay within minutes. Even if the cores DO melt, they're safely contained in ... wait for it... containment chambers!

People don't realize the amount of engineering that goes into nuclear to make it safe.

As I always say: containment chambers indeed!

Battery Power

[mdsolar]

There is a detailed diary here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703509104576330531564264132.html

"Documents released by Tepco Monday showed the isolation condenser— an emergency cooling system installed on Reactor No. 1 before the quake as a final resort in case of a total loss of power—worked only sporadically, if at all. Tepco officials explained that somebody appears to have manually closed the valves on the condenser soon after the March 11 quake—but before the tsunami hit about an hour later—to control the fluctuating pressure inside the reactor. Reopening the valves required battery power, so those valves likely couldn't be opened because the tsunami damaged the backup batteries.

If the valves hadn't been shut, things might have turned out differently. Temperatures in the reactor climbed faster than initially expected, causing more and faster damage. Tepco admitted this week the problems at Reactor 1 were far worse than originally thought. Its new projection shows fuel may have started melting rapidly only five hours after the March 11 quake. By 6:50 a.m. March 12, the fuel was likely in a heap at the bottom of the vessel. "

Battery power was lost apparently.

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Nuclear energy is safe. Every accident that ever happened is just a unique occurrence that could NEVER happen in *insert country of residence*. And when it's going to happen anyway, it's the fault of anti-nuke activists because they wouldn't let us build new and improved reactors. We would have totally built those despite the massive profit margins we have with the old ones. Honest!

Cheap, Defective Containment Vessel

[Doc Ruby]

Mitsuhiko+Tanaka was an engineer who led Fukushima's building of the reactor vessel. He told Japan's government following Chernobyl's explosion that he had helped TEPCO cover up the fact that the reactor vessel was damaged during its manufacture. Japan's government ignored him and continued to relicense Fukushima for many years past either his warning or Fukushima's designed lifecycle.

This is the problem with nukes: the people in its industry and government cooperate to protect the corporate profits rather than the public even when those two interests are in conflict. Regardless of technical solutions to technical problems (which cost money and are ignored when the corporation can get away with it), the problem that's proven impossible to solve is the failure to properly regulate the rich essential monopolies owning or running the nuke plants.

Which is a problem not just where earthquakes and tsunamis are the particular risk. It's a problem in countries like Russia, Japan and the US.

That is the risk that nuke boosters never admit: the risk of human error in the regulation and oversight, not just the engineers. These nukes are too risky for our corruptible industrialists and government people to be trusted with.

"There's no difference between theory and practice - in theory. In practice, there is a difference." - Yogi Berra (paraphrase)

Re:Cheap, Defective Containment Vessel

[antifoidulus]

Unfortunately this isn't an isolated incident in Japan and really the only question was when, not if, something like this would happen. It's a pretty open secret that government has been in bed with TEPCO and the like for quite some time now, and that most "inspections" were mostly rubber stamp affairs. Hell, as recently as summer of 2003 there was a shutdown of a large number of reactors in the Tohoku region because it was found that managers were intentionally papering over gross safety violations. You would have thought that would have spurred the public into action, but it really did nothing.

You also have cultural issues at play. People like to point out how there was virtually no looting after the tsunami, and rightly so, but the downside of that same culture is a lack of whistle-blowing. Japan is still in many ways a Confucian society, and as such there is very little in the way of whistle blowing. And even when there is, people tend not to believe the whistle blower over his "superiors" at work because well, they are his superiors......

That being said, I would be willing to bet Japan goes from the rich country with the worst nuclear safety record to having one of the best. The Japanese throughout history have been a society that is very poor at initiating change, but the best at adapting to it, unfortunately it takes a huge shock for them to really change anything. Case in point, their air safety record. Japan used to have one of the worst air safety records around, but thanks to a string of major accidents in the 60s, and one huge accident(deadliest single airline crash in history) in the 80s, they now have probably the best air traffic safety records on the planet. There have been no passenger deaths in Japan since 1994, and there has only been one fatal incident involving a cargo jet. Considering the amount of air traffic both in Japan and from abroad, that is pretty damn impressive. Doubly so when you consider how small the airports are and how many flights they have to get in and out. The airline industry suffered from a lot of the same problems the nuclear industry does, rubber stamping, no whistle blowing etc. Hopefully this will serve as a wakeup call to the Japanese much in the way the major air accidents did.

Re:Cheap, Defective Containment Vessel

[foniksonik]

Actually it's more likely you just couldn't find a CEO anymore. Shareholders want profits, a CEO won't keep his position for long if always spending them on "safety".

Re:Cheap, Defective Containment Vessel

[radtea]

Yep, we can't trust our government or companies to do anything competently. For our own safety, we should clearly ban:

Nuclear plants are unique amongst these things in that their failure modes are:

1) rapid
2) complex
3) expensive

The speed comes from the energy density of the core, which is many orders of magnitude higher than for any other power source. A typical nuclear plant contains something like the equivalent of 100,000 boxcars of coal in its fuel rods, and while only a tiny fraction of that can be released over a reasonably short interval, only a tiny fraction has to be released over a relatively short interval to ruin the core.

Reactor kinetics are complicated and the cooling and control systems more-so. Complexity is a bigger issue in second and third generation designs--one could even say that the whole point of fourth generation designs is to engineer out as much complexity as possible. However, there is always going to be a fairly high level of complexity for anything beyond the "nuclear battery" type reactors (which to my mind are probably viable sources of energy in the long term.) The high energy density and consequent rapid pace of events during failure mean that the humans involved in the process are going to frequently make bad choices.

The cost is the big problem: a failure in a coal plant results in some nasty chemicals released into the environment, maybe some people burned in a steam explosion or the like. But it is very hard to create a coal plant disaster that writes off the capital investment or exposes the operator to the kind of widespread liability that nuclear disasters do.

So anyone who is not innumerate realizes that the risk-cost/benefit trade-off for nuclear power is very different from most other technologies. The benefits are significant, but a long, long way from "power too cheap to meter", which was the original promise of nuclear power. The costs are having an event like Windscale or Chernobyl or Fukushima every decade or two. For numerate people, the trade-offs involved are not a slam-dunk on either side.

Re:No.

[jez9999]

I know Americans aren't very familiar with good regulation, but geez.

Your argument amounts to, 'because it's financially preferable to keep old nukes running, we can't trust government to make sure new, safer ones are built'.

So, are you saying that nothing potentially dangerous should be built unless there will always be a financial incentive for people to build safer versions all the time?

Unit 4 explosion from Unit 3 hydrogen

[mdsolar]

You can get to the whole article from a google search I think. The most interesting thing from the article you linked for me was this:

"According to Tepco, hyrogen produced in the overheating of the reactor core at unit 3 flowed through a gas-treatment line and entered unit No. 4 because of a breakdown of valves. Hydrogen leaked from ducts in the second, third and fourth floors of the reactor building at unit No. 4 and ignited a massive explosion."

Time for some slashdotters to eat crow

[Agent0013]

I wouldn't say that I am anti-nuclear, but I do think it can be dangerous. Especially with the corner cutting that a lot of corporations try to use to save money. I was struck by this news on how many times I saw a pro-nuclear slashdotter post how the power plant had survived the earthquake just fine. Many people were saying how it was an amazing triumph of engineering that it could withstand the quake that was ten times what it was designed for. If only they had put the pumps up on stilts or someplace where the tsunami would not have caused the damage, everything would have been just fine. I guess that was just a bunch of wishfull thinking now huh? Sure, I understand that at the time it had looked like it survived the earthquake without damage. But you end up losing some credibility and start to look like a fool when it turns out you were completely wrong because you didn't yet have all the facts.

What bothers me (the zycronium fuel rod claddings)

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always been a big nuclear supporter of safe nuclear power, and, by safe, I mean ones where the core can reliably melt down to puddle with very minimal impact on the environment around. The thing that bothers me is that I used to believe our current nuclear plants could do this. I am no longer convinced. Indeed, I am openly concerned this is not the case.

In the four cases of partial core meltdowns we have now seen (the Three Mile Island reactor and the three Fukushima reactors), the zicronium fuel rod casings have shown themselves to be a major liability. In all cases, they reacted with the hot steam to produce hydrogen gas, which has then posed a non-insignificant threat to the containment structure. In the case of the Fukushima reactors, we saw this actually happened to unit 3, and on day 3 of Three Mile Island incident, there was significant concern that an accumulated hydrogen bubble would explode damaging the containment structure.

I realize that one in four (25%) is not yet enough samples to exactly pinpoint the probability of containment failure due to the explosion of accumulating hydrogen gas. However, combined with the fact this has been a major concern in all partial core meltdowns experienced so far, it is a figure we should all be concerned with. Containment failure due to hydrogen explosion is not an insignificant failure mode during meltdown, and I have yet to see it mitigated to any reasonably acceptable level.

So, to the nuclear industry out there. Zycronium cladding for the fuel rods is currently used in pretty much every installed reactor. I realize it was chosen due to its low neutron-capture cross-section, but, in operation, it has shown itself to be a significant liability during partial meltdown. It is time to go back to the drawing board and come up with an alternative that does not have this problem. Even if that means a degradation in performance. Until I see this happening, you have lost my support.

Re:Thorium reactors wouldn't have been affected...

[ColdWetDog]

Thorium reactors wouldn't have been affected by an earthquake either. Their inherent safety, the abundance of reactor material and the cost effectiveness totally trumps existing nuclear designs as well as solar and wind power for ultimate sustainability.

Except for the fact that commercial Thorium cycle reactors don't exist just yet - it's a great idea.

Re:Keep in mind

[DrBoumBoum]

That's false, the earthqake was of intesity 9.0 with an epicenter about 150 km from Fukushima; the resulting ground acceleration was within (theoretical) design tolerance at unit 1. What is really amazing is (choose one or more): that the reactors were not able to withstand the damage, that TEPCO had been notified about that by the IAEA in the past, that it had simply ignored the warnings and that there are still people praising them for the robustness of their engineering.

no sane military ...

[garyebickford]

As we have seen lately, the keyword there is 'sane'. Unfortunately, sanity is not a prerequisite for having an army, running a country, or starting a war. (Sanity may not even be particularly useful in those scenarios.) Some parts of the world seem to my untrained eye as a basically a contest to see who's the craziest b.....d in the neighborhood. Whoever wins becomes boss - for a while.