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Why Tokai No. 2 Nuclear Power Plant Survived March
Kyusaku Natsume writes "In a potentially damning report, the Japanese government panel probing the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown has learned that the nuclear power plant Tokai No.2 avoided station blackout thanks to making a 6.1 m high seawall, but TEPCO failed to do the same in Fukushima. From the article: 'The tsunami that hit the Tokai plant on March 11 were 5.3 to 5.4 meters in height, exceeding the company's earlier estimate but coming in around 30 to 40 cm lower than its revised projection. After the tsunami hit, the Tokai plant lost external power just like Fukushima No. 1 did, because the sea wall was overrun, knocking out one of its three seawater pumps. But its reactors succeeded in achieving cold shutdown because the plant's emergency diesel generator was being cooled by the two seawater pumps that survived intact.'"
Translation:
Researchers: Your walls are too low.
Japan Atomic Power: Oh, okay, we'll fix the wall.
Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO): Hmm, whatever.
Then the tsunami came. Japan Atomic Power's wall was good enough. TEPCO's wall still was not good enough.
Fukushima had multiple hardware failures, correctable design problems, and crappy management. The failure was not just due to a low seawall.
1. Reactor 1's cooling system likely failed due to the quake, not the failure of the backup diesels. This opinion is based on analysis of the remaining sensors, that indicated the reactor was having problems even while the battery-powered cooling was still running. The existing plumbing and wiring had been embrittled from 4 decades of operation in a quake zone and proximity to, well, a nuclear reactor.
2. Design flaw and hardware failure: locating the backup diesel generators in a basement under the reactors, such that they were guaranteed to flood if water entered the area.
3. Design flaw: locating the spent fuel pools directly above the reactors in the same buildings, such that if the reactor had a little problem (hydrogen explosion, or moderated prompt criticality), said fuel would get blown sky-high, which it did in the reactor 3 explosion.
4. Design flaw: no externally located terminals for "connect portable generators HERE", and no rationalization of Japan's two different electrical standards (it's a fucking nuclear power plant that will blow up if not cooled, so support both standards, guys).
5. Management failure: All reactors should have been flooded with seawater immediately after the quake, as soon as the situation on the ground at the site became clear. This might have averted the hydrogen explosion by keeping the reactors cool enough to not oxidize the zirconium fuel-rod cladding. Local personnel correctly identified the situation, remote management denied permission to flood the reactors with seawater (because that basically ends the reactor's productive life). Eventually a local guy did so anyways.
Remain calm! All is well!
i don't know about "so many disasters", so much as "1 major disaster, 1 medium disaster caused by a much bigger catastrophe and 1 small gas leak and messed up but contained core".
it's not good, but it's not bad either. you write like the world is a pulsating green wasteland without so much as cockroaches surviving.
i agree that greed will fuck up anything. it's up to the engineers to design these things as greed-proof as possible. that's just another safety feature. to that end, i'd rather a new gen reactor designed with a modern nuclear engineer's cynicism than one built in the era of "Peaceful Atoms" and almost sickening faith and optimism.
Translation from original Japanese:
2009:
Researchers: Somebody set up us the seawall.
Japan Atomic Power: Main wall turn on.
Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO): All our time are belong to us.
2011:
Researchers: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO): For great justice.
Someone want to translate the summary? Or is this to be more evidence of lousy content and even worse editting? "as learnt" really?
I am the one that submitted the story, but I found my mistake until I saw the story posted. English is my third language. I'm sorry, I will buy everyone a pack of Ned Flander's eye soap.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
There is one simple way that would have prevented the tsunami from taking out all emergency generators.
To comply with international standards and have at least four emergency generators per reactor placed around the reactors with adequate spacing between each of them to prevent common cause failure. For purely geometric reasons (to keep the distance between each other) at least one per reactor would have to have been behind the reactor buildings on higher ground. Which exactly how spacing alone mitigates common cause failure.
It would also have been helpful had TEPCO installed Passive Autocatalytic Recombiners in their reactor buildings to catalytically "burn" the hydrogen before it can reach combustible or explosive concentrations. (Those do their job by hanging on the wall. No power required.) Or if they had hardened and filtered containment vents.
Both of those measures were implemented in Sweden, Germany and France some time after the analysis of the Three Mile Island accident, which quite accurately predicted how Fukushima Daiichi turned out, which was deemed unacceptable. Hence the additional safety features. I'm not saying that those are the only countries that implemented such measures, but with those I'm sure. And I stopped making assumptions about those things seven months and two weeks ago.