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TEPCO Confirms Partial Meltdown of No.2 and No.3 Reactors
blau writes with an article in NHK World. From the article "The operator of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant says findings show that fuel meltdowns may have occurred at the No.2 and No.3 reactors within days of the March 11th earthquake. But it says both reactors are now stable at relatively low temperatures."
TEPCO is also now blaming the tsunami for most of the damage rather than the earthquake.
The big losers here are the population of Japan who can't get a straight answer about the risk to their health. I cringe to think of the birth defects and illness this will cause.
The reactor meltdowns were unintentional, but the CYA done by TEPCO executives should be considered criminal.
Good luck to Japan on building something that will last 10,000 years to contain that mess. You tiny island depends on it.
Yeah, radiation is tragic. Like that time we used it to kill the cancer that would have killed my grandmother. That was truly tragic, oh wait no the complete fucking opposite.
Even Chernobyl did not cause the level of issues you are claiming.
The Germans are notoriously picky about that sort of thing. Give us the number, or compare it to the levels allowed for a French nuclear worker or a US nuclear worker. Of course livestock are being destroyed, they can no longer be sold and as such are not worth feeding. It is not still burning, and it will not make it through the concrete slab. That is why it is the last level of containment. This was a huge disaster but there is no need to act like it is the end of Japan. It still has not killed anyone, and probably never will.
Fossil fuels are more dangerous.
Nukes can be done safely, they just weren't in this instance, and the designers of this plant are directly to blame for that.
As I've watched the news about Fukushima, I have wondered if by trying to avoid fuel meltdown, did they make matters *worse*?
I admit, I really have limited knowledge about what went wrong or could have gone wrong. I'm definitely not a nuclear engineer.
But, from the news, it seems like the biggest source of problems was caused by hydrogen explosions. The hydrogen explosions happened because steam from the cooling water, under high heat and pressure, interacted with the Zircalloy fuel cladding, which caused the oxygen to bind to the alloy, and the hydrogen to become H2 gas, which could then build up in the pressure vessel (and ultimately the containment when it was vented from the pressure vessel into the containment, I think?).
This, then, finally ignited, causing the explosions, causing damage to the containments, causing radioactive release.
So, now, my question is, why not just evacuate all the water and steam from the reactor, so that there's no (well, very little - you probably couldnt' remove 100% of the water) hydrogen present in the reactor, then just let the fuel melt to the bottom and harden into a non-critical mass? What's so terrible about the fuel melting down? It happened at TMI, and didn't become a major disaster?
Is it possible that the cure was worse than the ailment, in this case?