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Blow-By-Blow Account of the Fukushima Accident
An anonymous reader writes "In the first few days of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, no one outside the power station knew what the hell was happening. In the 9 months since, information has come out in confusing bits and pieces. Now, finally, we have an authoritative account of exactly what went wrong in the first 24 hours of the accident. It's a harrowing tale of creativity, heroism, and catastrophe. One thing I hadn't realized was just how close workers came to averting the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl."
It was Dr. DOS ver 5.1
CP/M? TOPS-20? Hard to tell.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
QNX
Here come all the anti-nuke morons.
Is anyone else besides me annoyed that Fukushima keeps on overshadowing this incredibly catastrophic tsunami?
I may be wrong about this, but as I read it, the term "operating systems" (plural) seems to refer to the systems that actually operate the nuclear plant. Your question would make sense to me if the original article had read, "operating system" (singular).
Having said all that, I would guess Windows.
"No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up." -- Lily Tomlin
How long are we going to be using the phrase "worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl"?
I may be wrong about this, but as I read it, the term "operating systems" (plural) seems to refer to the systems that actually operate the nuclear plant. Your question would make sense to me if the original article had read, "operating system" (singular).
Having said all that, I would guess Windows.
You've been atomically WHOOSHED!
(It WAS a joke son, laugh)
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
All this was known previously, but you had to read through long reports to get the whole picture. This is a more dramatic summary.
The real issue with Fukushima is that the reactors survived the earthquake and tsunami. What caused the meltdown was loss of electrical power to reactors that required active pumped water cooling and valve control.
Coal or nuclear?
Not that I want to present a false dichotomy, but if you were "preference voting", i.e., listing your preferences in order, aside from the rest of the options, how would you order these two relative to one another?
Typically when you're talking about an Industrial Process, the "Operating System" is not a computer OS (Windows, Linux, Mac, etc). But rather, the actual system process (pumping water, generating electricity, etc) that is operating.
Jesus, what the hell kind of article summary is this? I RTFA, and it's all speculation and conjecture. Almost every word of it.
Three Mile Island sustained an explosion about ten times stronger than the explosions that blew apart the Fukushima Daiichi units. The Three Mile Island containment building involved in the accident sits completely undamaged over thirty years later.
This is the benefit of containment buildings which were not only built to contain radioactivity but also built to survive impact by a Boeing 707.
Why don't all reactors have strong, steel-reinforced concrete containment buildings? I see shattered, wooden studs on those blasted-out Fukushima Daiichi buildings.
Kriston
At 3:27 p.m. the first tsunami wave surged into the man-made harbor protecting Fukushima Dai-ichi, rushing past a tidal gauge that measured a water height of 4 meters above normal. At 3:35 another set of much higher waves rolled in and obliterated the gauge. The water rushed over the seawalls and swept toward the plant. It smashed into the seawater pumps used in the heat-removal systems, then burst open the large doors on the turbine buildings and submerged power panels that controlled the operation of pumps, valves, and other equipment. Weeks later, TEPCO employees would measure the water stains on the buildings and estimate the monstrous tsunami's height at 14 meters.
In the basements of turbine and reactor buildings, 6 of the 12 diesel generators shuddered to a halt as the floodwaters inundated them. Five other generators cut out when their power distribution panels were drenched. Only one generator, on the first floor of a building near unit 6, kept going; unlike the others, all of its equipment was above the water line. Reactor 6 and its sister unit, reactor 5, would weather the crisis without serious damage, thanks in part to that generator.
Blame the sea walls if you want, or the tidal wave, or the earthquake. But the disaster was not caused by a failure of the plants operating systems. The failure of the systems was only a symptom.
... or how close the designers came to creating the worst nuclear disaster ever?
I agree. Seems to me the weather was a factor.
Isn't this the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl? Should the summary read a bit more like 'averting a worse nuclear disaster than Chernobyl'?
Bananas!
Nuclear fission power plants are not economically viable in a free and fair market, which is why the US government uses taxpayer dollars to subsidize it. It's old, obsolete, lame technology that favors entrenched corporate interests and provides an excuse for the ongoing centralization and militarization of commercial power generation.
If you do no other research at all, PLEASE read this: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9740
In 2005, as part of the infamous Cheney sellout of national energy policy in closed-door meetings with entrenched corporate powers, the economic landscape for nuclear was completely restructured.
The Price-Anderson act, originally a "temporary" 10-year measure to encourage the development of a nuclear power industry, was re-enacted - this time until 2025. Libertarians paying attention will note that Price-Anderson is a direct affront to core Libertarian principles - it caps liability for nuclear operators and forces taxpayers opposed to nuclear power to subsidize preventable failures.
Per-watt subsidies for nuclear power were also enacted, in the form of 1.8-cent per kilowatt-hour tax credits from new reactors during the first 8 years of operation (costing a projected $5.7 billion in revenue losses to the U.S. Treasury through 2025). This subsidy is necessary in order for nuclear-generated electricity to stay competitive with methane-powered generators, because of the total inability of the nuclear industry to deliver on the "energy too cheap to meter" promises they've been making since 1948.
In the 1980s government audits of nuclear operators determined that many of them were not setting aside decommissioning costs as required by law. The 2005 energy bill retroactively makes this legal, providing strong disincentives to any responsible operator willing to plan for the future.
Occasionally you will hear claims that government over-regulation of the nuclear industry means that licenses and permits are difficult and expensive to maintain. In reality, the industry itself rewrote the rules for licensing application in the 1980s so that permits are cheap, long-lasting and do not require any real commitment. Later policy revisions go even further and reduce the total paperwork by two thirds as well as increasing the speed of review, removing barriers to approval, and increasing the time a permit is valid to 40 years.
Today, nuclear plant licensing is going strong. The period when no new licenses were applied for closely corresponds to the period when lack of taxpayer subsidies and the lapse of Price-Anderson made building plants economic suicide - and the fact that license applications revived almost immediately after the GWBush administration reintroduced them is strong circumstantial evidence that nuclear operators must fleece taxpayers in order to survive in the US market, just as they do in every other country that uses nuclear power.
If you believe in capitalism, free markets, or representative government all this should offend you. The White House and the neo-con wing of the Republican party forced an unconsenting electorate to sponsor a huge market distortion - potentially driving market-selected options out of the competition - in order for their corporate buddies to plunder the public pocketbook.
Just how hard is it to put a radiation symbol right side up? What a good way to destroy the credibility of your journalism by implying that you've done so little research into this that you don't even know what the symbol for radiation is, let alone what radiation and radioactivity are.
The data in that summary is cherry picked so it doesn't make bad PR for nuclear power.
For instance, they are careful not to mention evidence that rector one was damaged by the earthquake even before the tsunami struck:
http://www.asianewsnet.net/home/news.php?id=18975&sec=1
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-19/fukushima-may-have-leaked-radiation-before-quake.html
>> How long are we going to be using the phrase "worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl"?
True, just simply call it "The worst nuclear disaster"
aaaaaaa
It comes down to cost. Trying the plan for that last 5% of disasters that only happen 1% of the time is cost prohibitive. At some point, sad as it may seem, money does become more important than the consequences. I don't think Fukishama will be the last, nor the worst, disaster this population ever sees but it will make engineers a little more careful. For a while.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
*whoosh*
>> If the emergency generators had been installed on upper floors rather than in basements, for example, the disaster would have stopped before it began
don't think so.
What about earquake damage to these generators ? on upper floors there's more damage. ...
What about the fuel tanks for these generators ? washed away
What about pumps for cooling ? washed away
What about the sea water for cooling these generators ? clogged by debris...
Basically, you can not secure fully a nuke plant against an earthquake and tsunami.
aaaaaaa
"One thing I hadn't realized was just how close workers came to averting the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl."
It was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. It was very close to being worse than Chernobyl.
You're right; the disaster was caused by a normal event. Natural disasters have happened thousands of times in the past and will happen again tens of thousands of times in the future. They cannot be prevented and are mostly unpredictable as well (although we're getting better at the prediction part).
What does that say about the wisdom of building terrestrial nuclear power plants?
... you definitely need to read it. I will definitely plow through it soon.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
How about blaming poor design decisions? ALL of the generators in the BASEMENT next to the OCEAN. Sounds like a good plan to exactly whom?
How about the FAILURE of TEPCO to change out the electrically activated hydrogen filters for passive ones, like some their engineers and a bunch of outside consultants suggested years ago?
How about FAILURE of TEPCO and the Japanese Government to update their geologic risk assessment despite recommendations from internal and external staff on multiple occasions.
Yep, other than that, an act of God.
The failure of the systems was only a symptom
Yep, the symptoms of systems failure in design and planning. Hey, one out of three isn't bad....
If this is the best that a major industrial country can do with nuclear power, perhaps we're not ready to play in the big leagues just yet.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
How long are we going to be using the phrase
"worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl"
?
Until the next nuclear disaster bigger than Fukushima.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
What does that say about the wisdom of building terrestrial nuclear power plants?
We need to build a impenetrable force field around every power plant?
Yeah, I gotta say if your "joke" is apparently received poorly enough that you have to whoosh someone, the failure is yours, not theirs.
Best idea so far!
And make sure that bald guy from sector 7G is on the outside of the force field.
How about blaming poor design decisions? ALL of the generators in the BASEMENT next to the OCEAN. Sounds like a good plan to exactly whom?
Not exactly sure what your point is? Six of twelve of the generators were damaged by flood waters. The other 6 were perfectly fine, but it was the distribution panels that were damaged by the flood waters. Just like the distribution panels on the ground floor were destroyed by the tidal wave. Maybe next time they should float everything in the air. Oh, and Nuclear plants are built next to the ocean (and other bodies of water) for a REASON. But I guess you're smarter than all the engineers and architects who build these plants for a living.
How about the FAILURE of TEPCO to change out the electrically activated hydrogen filters for passive ones, like some their engineers and a bunch of outside consultants suggested years ago?
Hydrogen filters? Not exactly sure what you're referring to. I think you're referring to the hydrogen pressure release valves at the top of the reactor vents, which caused the explosions. Yeah, they could have change them out -- but it wouldn't have made a difference in the grand scheme of things. You would have eliminated the explosions, but you still would have vented hazardous materials into the air.... because there was no cooling -- which was the serious problem.
How about FAILURE of TEPCO and the Japanese Government to update their geologic risk assessment despite recommendations from internal and external staff on multiple occasions.
.... and how would that of changed anything? .... yeah, didn't think it would.
Yep, the symptoms of systems failure in design and planning.
"systems failure in design and planning" -- hmmm... get back to me next time you design an industrial process plant.
Oh good, the water pump is working...
My sig can beat up your sig.
Oh, and FWIW -- it wasn't a failure of the plant's operating systems, nor their backup systems. As the article describes -- every single one of the plant's failsafe mechanisms and backup systems performed flawlessly.
If the article wanted to be honest, it would have read "The disaster at Fukushima was caused by the tidal waves which took out the plant's emergency systems" or something similar.
Blame the sea walls if you want, or the tidal wave, or the earthquake. But the disaster was not caused by a failure of the plants operating systems. The failure of the systems was only a symptom.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the disaster was ENTIRELY the fault of the plant's operating/backup system.
If it wasn't for the operating systems being there in the first place there wouldn't be any radioactive material to have caused the disaster. If the backup systems had all been operational and providing power after the tsunami - there likely wouldn't have been a national+ level problem. What caused the backup systems to fail was entirely predictable (though very low probability of occurrence) and the plant was left exposed and vulnerable to this risk.
If you play Russian roulette (load 1 bullet into a revolver, spin the chamber, aim at own head, pull the trigger), what's to "blame" when you lose? Your argument would be to blame the bullet because it's what actually caused the damage and to argue you were not at fault even though you accepted the risk when starting to play.
I'd argue that you were entirely at fault for losing. While there is a low probability of the bullet being fired (or a large tsunami hitting the area), if the risk is deemed acceptable - the blame when something goes wrong should land on whoever made the risk assessment in the first place. A risk assessment for a nuclear plant should be looking at the once in several hundred/thousands of year type events, the tsunami that hit was well within what should have been considered in the design/safety reviews. See the Tokai No 2 plant - which upgraded its sea wall before the March 11 tsunami and it survived on its diesel backups.
I have one question though... the final words "the failure of the systems was only a symptom." A symptom of what? A symptom is generally an indicator of a bigger/underlying problem - so unless you are trying to say nuclear plant disasters are a symptom of environmental disasters I don't get the point of this. If this is the case, seeing that tsunami's have been around for millenia there should be historic examples of nuclear plant disasters as they are a (hopefully rare) symptom of a tsunami.
let's not forget fukushima CATASTROPHE is still blowing up, or what do you think your geiger is complaining about? ...
background complaints? prolly
How about blaming poor design decisions? ALL of the generators in the BASEMENT next to the OCEAN. Sounds like a good plan to exactly whom?
Not exactly sure what your point is? Six of twelve of the generators were damaged by flood waters. The other 6 were perfectly fine, but it was the distribution panels that were damaged by the flood waters. Just like the distribution panels on the ground floor were destroyed by the tidal wave. Maybe next time they should float everything in the air.
So you agree a different design would have saved the generators.
How about the FAILURE of TEPCO to change out the electrically activated hydrogen filters for passive ones, like some their engineers and a bunch of outside consultants suggested years ago?
Hydrogen filters? Not exactly sure what you're referring to. I think you're referring to the hydrogen pressure release valves at the top of the reactor vents, which caused the explosions. Yeah, they could have change them out -- but it wouldn't have made a difference in the grand scheme of things. You would have eliminated the explosions, but you still would have vented hazardous materials into the air.... because there was no cooling -- which was the serious problem.
A Hydrogen filter is something that filters hydrogen. A passive filter would have been able to reduce the amount of hydrogen collecting in the building even with the power out, OP seems to have some information that the filters they had were active/powered so once the power failed they stopped working which allowed the gas to concentrate and eventually caused an explosion, which in turn damaged the power delivery from the truck-mounted dynamo and the fire hose lines that were supplying water. If the explosion had not occurred/been less severe the temporary power cable or fire hoses might have survived which would have made a BIG difference on March 12.
How about FAILURE of TEPCO and the Japanese Government to update their geologic risk assessment despite recommendations from internal and external staff on multiple occasions.
.... and how would that of changed anything? .... yeah, didn't think it would.
LOL... please stop... this is the risk assessment that said a big tsunami will knock out power/backups, leave poor access to the facility, and may cause a full meltdown. Yea, listening to this report wouldn't have changed a thing.
"systems failure in design and planning" -- hmmm... get back to me next time you design an industrial process plant.
Ditto, you obviously have no understanding of risk or how to manage it.
It says little or nothing about the wisdom of building plants. You still do not have enough information (from that alone) to determine if plants are safer or more dangerous than alternatives. You must look at the rate of occurrence for large earthquakes (like 9.0) and above, and for other massive natural disasters. Then you must look at the distribution of plants and estimate the number of meltdowns. Then you must compare the harm of those meltdowns to the alternatives available at a cost which the public will accept (burning coal or natural gas).
You need two numbers here for comparison, in order to generate even the roughest estimate of the wisdom of building plants. You cannot arrive at an estimate by just saying "natural disasters happen and we can't predict where...", any more than you could determine the relative safety of (say) walking vs driving by noting that lightning strikes occur and kill pedestrians more than drivers.
Based on the geologic record of the site, and our understanding of plate tectonics, the probability of this event happening at some point in time was somewhere around 100%. The frequency of such events is such that one would be expected every few hundred years. If the plant is expected to operate for 20-30 years, this translates to a lifetime probability of 10% or so. That is a high probability, given such an event would definitely destroy the plant.
Simply do not build cities in locations which are susceptible to tsunamis.
Radiation is a manifestation of one of our most primal fears: The invisible killer. You can't see it or stop it, it just kills. That is extremely scary to people. Even more so because people understand the phenomena so poorly. Most people don't have the necessary science education to have a good grasp on how it works.
A Tsunami, though fearsome, is perfectly understandable. A big ole' wall of water comes and smashes things and drowns people. Fearsome, but easy to understand.
Without adequate cooling, those rods would become hot enough to melt through the steel pressure vessel, and then through the steel containment vessel. That would result in the dreaded core-meltdown scenario, which could lead to the release of clouds of radioactivity that would be carried by winds to sicken or kill masses of people.
Have to assume the rest is BS.
FTFY. And the answer would be: post-war Japan in the 1960s.
I've read before that conception to commission is a ten year process for a nuclear power plant, so much of the initial design would be early 1960s. I'd guess contracts for specialized machinery are being tendered by the mid 1960s. By then, procurement wheels in motion combined with slide rules and manual blueprints and uninvented fax machines put a big crimp on safety rethink. The logistics for this kind of project back then were immense.
By the mid 1970s there's no way a plant is designed like this. We're now forty years downstream from what the 1970s considered to be a good idea. TEPCO had subsequently reassessed with modern engineering resources, but dragged their feet deploying the required mitigation (some of the work had been completed and more was scheduled).
We pretty much kissed New Orleans good-bye because the Americans were just as stupid/stubborn. It was known that the levees were not adequate.
"Now, finally, we have an authoritative account..."
What nonsense. If you lived in Japan, like some of us, you'd have read plenty of authoritative accounts in Japanese long ago.
We are idiots for not spending $10,000 more to elevate electonics to the highest practical level. The pumps with electronics high enough worked. Same as Katrina where the pumps were submerged (not strictly a problem, but the electrics weren't protected or elevated). It wasn't a costly fix. But the standards are such that if you "plan" for a 30m wave by elevating electronics, you are expected to spend billions on other equipment to survive that as well. There's not a good process for designing failures at "minor" levels and allowing for degraded failure modes as the disaster gets worse. You pick the worst thing you want to survive, and design the thing to fail at disaster+1 in many cases (and in this case, it was *almost* survivable, a little more resiliency and there'd have been no meltdown).
Learn to love Alaska
New Orleans not a good comparison.
The important parts of New Orleans (the Bulk Material Port and the Oil terminal) were both well enough protected. The Port shipped out almost all of the US corn and wheat exports a few months after Katrina. IIRC the Oil terminal was running inside of six weeks.
The real problem with New Orleans is that the 'at risk' value was low. Katrina was urban renewal. New Orleans is better for it having happened. You are pissed at me because you know it's true. It's a terrible place to put a major city. Much less a city as corrupt and helpless as NO was.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yeah, I gotta say if your "joke" is apparently received poorly enough that you have to whoosh someone, the failure is yours, not theirs.
It wasn't received at all, the whoosh-ee was apparently incapable of comprehending it, hence the 'whoosh'. Everyone - except that guy - was able to understand that he was playing on the multiple meanings of the term 'operating systems'.
Earthquake - Tsunami, is done and over. All though many are off course still homeless and suffering in one way or another. Fukushima is ongoing, maybe the news reflects this?
As someone living in Japan and relatively close to Fukushima. I can tell you no one here has forgotten about the tsunami and the earthquake, it will be something that will live in our memories forever.
But even though the earth quake damaged my own house, and almost destroyed the neighboring house of my parents in law, my main worry right now is about the nuclear power plants in Fukushima, about whether or not the food is safe for my children. What kind of dose they received during the first couple of days after the accident. What they inhale when the wind is blowing up dust from the fields. And I although I am no nuclear physicist, I do work with several of them, and I have a decent understanding of the issues.
The earth quakes, you learn to live with when you live here. The nuclear accidents, not so much.
What every your opinon about nuclear power in general, the style of government in this country combined with the work culture of never questioning anything and the population accepting anything authorities tell them as truth without question, makes this country highly unsuitable for nuclear power generation, much more so than the tsunamis and earth quakes.
I lived in Europe close enough to the Chernobyl accident when it happened that we had to think about what was safe to eat and not when I grew up. I had hoped my children would not have to experience the same thing. But humans sure like to screw things up.
--
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
How about redesigning reactor vessels so that rods would be physically separated by a sufficient distance when loss of power occurs?
Perhaps a model where robotic arms push against giant springs to brings rods closer together, for the reaction to take place.
loss of control , or loss of power would automatically cause the springs to push the arms back and separate out the rods in space, thus stopping the reaction.
I am no physicist, and perhaps reactors would have to be gigantic for this to work, but it's an idea.
Systems are not just just taking a reactor offline. It has to remain safe afterwards. But when the generators fail because they've been drowned is about as much fail as you can have.
The total systems themselves had a fatal flaw. That wave height was the flaw. As far back as recorded history, Japan has been hit by Tsunami waves, they have left their marks on the land. There was a virtual 100 percent certainty that the area would be hit by a wave taller than the seawalls. the Seawalls are part of the system, the system failed. You make the mistake of looking at only one part of the system, that' is why so many systems fail.
People take a cavalier approach to the massive concentration of energy in those plants. One screw-up, and you have an unholy mess. Given that the shore was going to be hit with a tsunami, and the rapidly prohibitive costs of accounting for historical high water marks, any good system will likely site a plant at an elevation very unlikely to ever have a wave. So you take the historical data, add some safety factor, and site the plant along a river inland and above the disaster area. There th eearthquake could have hit, shook the plant, and the reactors would have gone offline, then the emergency generators would kick in, and since they would remain high and dry, the overall system would have worked on design, and cooled the plant At that point, everyone could have nodded to each other, and marvelled how well the system worked.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
We are idiots for not spending $10,000 more to elevate electonics to the highest practical level.
I figure you're at least two and probably three orders of magnitude too low on that guess. In addition, one of the reasons the electrical systems were probably as low as they could get them was because of earthquake hazard. The higher up important systems are, the more likely they are to get damaged by earthquakes IMHO. But because they already had seawalls, they didn't see the need to place that equipment up high.
There's not a good process for designing failures at "minor" levels and allowing for degraded failure modes as the disaster gets worse.
There's a whole discipline devoted to this very issue. It's called "engineering".
Have delivered my snark payload, there is merit to considering how this particular danger could be reduced in the future. I wouldn't be surprised to see widespread elevation of back up systems now that this particular threat has been revealed.
One thing to consider is flying in backup generators. If TEPCO had enough generators in a "safe place" (let's say inland and not subject to landslides or flooding) and large cargo helicopters to carry them in, they could have flown in and started putting these generators into service early on in the 24 hour period of the story. I can't tell how much backup power was needed, but Wikipedia mentions a 39 metric ton "set" that generates 2 MW and can be flown in on two (probably difficult) Chinook CH-47C trips.
The ability to deliver backup generators and start setting them up within the period of the battery power supply (something like 8 hours), might be one way to deal with a future Fukushima-like event.
Not exactly sure what your point is? Six of twelve of the generators were damaged by flood waters. The other 6 were perfectly fine, but it was the distribution panels that were damaged by the flood waters. Just like the distribution panels on the ground floor were destroyed by the tidal wave. Maybe next time they should float everything in the air. Oh, and Nuclear plants are built next to the ocean (and other bodies of water) for a REASON. But I guess you're smarter than all the engineers and architects who build these plants for a living.
Look, your sarcasms aside, the generator system didn't work. Your other 6 generators were "perfectly fin"e is hilarious. No they were not perfectly fine, they were not operable. I don't care if it was because of the control panel. It was about as big a failure as you can have. That there might have been 6 " perfectly fine"generators sitting there useless, is more of a reason to be angry than to celebrate.
Finally, who told you that Nuc plants had to be by the ocean? Most plants are not by the ocean. The ocean in a Tsunami prone area is just about the worst place to build a Nuc reactor, especially given that historically high Tsunami were higher than those walls built to resist the waters. It was going to happen.
That plant should have been inland, near a river, and higher than any historical Tsunami height, plus a safety factor. Lots of nice nuc power, and nary a big issue. Teh systems would have tripped the reactors offline, the generators would have kicked in to cool them, and at least they wouldn't have had that problem to add to the others.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
In the 1960's they knew the likely heights of Tsunami waves. There were historical accounts, and for those who think they were just dumb ancestors, there were gravel deposits left by previous Tsunami. Sorry, this was a fatally flawed design form the get go.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
In addition, one of the reasons the electrical systems were probably as low as they could get them was because of earthquake hazard. The higher up important systems are, the more likely they are to get damaged by earthquakes IMHO.
I don't believe you. Something in the basement of an unsafe building will be struck by falling things. Something on the top floor of an unsafe building will be more likely to fall. The failure mode is different, but the people on the first floor of a collapsed building would disagree with your statements of their safety. In fact, when they get to digging, the higher you were the more likely you are to live through it, since you are less likely to be crushed.
There's a whole discipline devoted to this very issue. It's called "engineering".
No, "engineering" is no longer building robust things, but building things as cheaply and weakly as possible without getting sued when something goes wrong.
The ability to deliver backup generators and start setting them up within the period of the battery power supply (something like 8 hours), might be one way to deal with a future Fukushima-like event.
The design was crap. If the generators failed and mains power were cut, then there would be an unavoidable meltdown. That's insanely delicate for a nuclear power plant. Battery power sufficient to get to a full-shutdown would be the *minimum* as waiting for some (hopefully operational) off-site generator to be delivered within 8 hours of a massive national emergency where the helicopters could be out pulling people from the water doesn't seem the best backup plan. But it's better than what they had, which was *no* backup plan. "we'll never lose mains and generators at the same time."
Perhaps your snarky engeineer comment should have been used on those who built Fukushima, not me.
Learn to love Alaska
When hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the phone system failed because the backup battery banks and generators were in the basement and were the first to be flooded. The actual telecommunication equipment was on the second floor of the exchanges and wasn't damaged. If they had put the battery banks and backup generators on any other floor except the basement, the phone system would of worked for the majority of the exchanges in New Orleans. Thought that maybe someone in Japan might of noticed this important piece of information for disaster planning...
Perfection has not been achieved which is why there are differences. Also there are none of the plants you describe built and tested so it's vastly premature to do the "pick a design or two and stick with them". There isn't even a completed example of the 1980s design of the Westinghouse AP1000 so we don't really know if it's good enough and we don't know what improvements will be inspired by the experience of running it.
They are not simple machines and are not governed by simple and easy to understand rules. Even the behaviour of the tubes at high temperature and pressure is predicted by about a dozen empirically derived formulas which don't match up at the boundaries of where they are applied.
Or simply eliminating the profit motive by having the government run the plant directly.
Like Chernobyl?
A French colleague told me that French nuclear reactors are built on rivers so that reactors can be passively cooled by flowing water. The same degree of passive cooling seems to have been provided by a thermosyphon on one of the Japanese reactors.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
What does that say about the wisdom of building terrestrial nuclear power plants?
We need to build a impenetrable force field around every power plant?
Good passive safety. Even if the diesels had kept working I would not have considered the situation safe. Convective cooling or a thermosyphon would be safer.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
While the official TEPCO story is still that the reactors survived the earthquake, there has been a contrary story since early on in the disaster.
For example:
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111025/full/478435a.html
Something in the basement of an unsafe building will be struck by falling things.
Unless it is buried or armored. My view is that falling is harder to engineer a defense against than getting struck.
The design was crap. If the generators failed and mains power were cut, then there would be an unavoidable meltdown. That's insanely delicate for a nuclear power plant. Battery power sufficient to get to a full-shutdown would be the *minimum* as waiting for some (hopefully operational) off-site generator to be delivered within 8 hours of a massive national emergency where the helicopters could be out pulling people from the water doesn't seem the best backup plan. But it's better than what they had, which was *no* backup plan. "we'll never lose mains and generators at the same time."
You can always buy more helicopters and the helicopters which deliver the generators can then be used for other purposes like saving lives. Plus, Chinooks would be a bad choice for picking people out of the water.
The plant probably was pretty nice for a 70s design, but it was still operating in 2011. I think this accident will provide a little more impetus to decommission obsolete reactors.
You can always buy more helicopters
No, you can't. I couldn't buy 1,000,000 chinooks to move generators tomorrow, no matter how much money I had. you can always buy one more helicopter from somewhere, but in the middle of a crisis like that, is that really the right time to break out a purchase order and call the factory to determine the lead time and hope they can get you your order within 6 hours?
Plus, Chinooks would be a bad choice for picking people out of the water.
Having some experience with rescue, I'd say you are wrong. But rather than argue with you about it as personal opinions, try looking it up:http://lmgtfy.com/?q=chinook+water+rescue
Learn to love Alaska
See http://allthingsnuclear.org/tagged/fission_stories for a growing collection of incidents that almost went wrong.
No, you can't. I couldn't buy 1,000,000 chinooks to move generators tomorrow, no matter how much money I had. you can always buy one more helicopter from somewhere, but in the middle of a crisis like that, is that really the right time to break out a purchase order and call the factory to determine the lead time and hope they can get you your order within 6 hours?
Obviously, you buy them before the disaster.
Having some experience with rescue, I'd say you are wrong. But rather than argue with you about it as personal opinions, try looking it up:http://lmgtfy.com/?q=chinook+water+rescue
That was a remarkably useless Google search. When I googled the term, "HH-47D" I did see that the Chinook variant (which goes by that label) was used for search and rescue.
This report begs to differ with your assessment.
Ignorance frequently leads to astonishment. I assume you work in the nuk-u-lar industry. Want to know more about the history of subterfuge in the atomic power industry? Read We Almost Lost Detroit. Many well meaning people thought nuclear power was safe. To quote Sinclair Lewis: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
That pattern of thought, combined with a general corporate mindset of privatizing profits and socializing losses, is what led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster . Yes - when you have TV images of reactor containment buildings blowing up one after the other, that's pretty much a disaster.
Ask Me About... The 80's!
Engineering solutions exist for every problem in the world
Price, quality, service: pick any two:
(1) a high quality solution provided quickly is expensive
(2) a high quality solution provided slowly is cheap
(3) a low quality solution provided quickly is cheap
In the 21st century, given the corporate mindset of privatizing profits and socializing losses, engineering usually delivers #3.
Ask Me About... The 80's!
fuck you shima
stupid japs with their silly words and language. glad we nuked those rice pickers.
There's something I seem to remember from the FD coverage, which seems to be completely missing from the IEEE article - wasn't there some additional emergency cooling system in Reactor one, called a torus or toroid - basically a big donut filled with water, which like, cracked and leaked all it's water so it didn't provide the emergency cooling it was supposed to?
If that's the case, isn't that a huge, huge omission from the article?
The fact of the matter is that having a sufficiently secure energy supply is a National Security issue. As such, it makes sense for the government to interfere and do what needs to be done to ensure we have enough energy supply which is independent of foreign sources, to maintain our national security.
I'm completely in favor of the government "interfering" in the energy market to ensure we have enough domestic energy.
Failure to do right in one instance does not justify doing wrong in another. The only tax-funded energy subsidies I strongly favor are for research in the public domain.
Obviously, you buy them before the disaster.
But if you have perfect foresight, there are likely better ways to spend the cash. When you need them, you can't always get them, you have to have proper planning in place before the disaster, in which case, larger walls would have been the cheapest way to protect the plant from this problem.
That was a remarkably useless Google search. When I googled the term, "HH-47D" I did see that the Chinook variant (which goes by that label) was used for search and rescue.
It worked for me. pages and pages of examples of the Chinook being used for water rescue. Haven't you ever watched a documentary on search and rescue? Lots of Chinooks used. Regardless, the point was made, even if you had to correct me rather than concede the point. I'll just take your whiny correction as "yes, I see I was wrong and was posting incorrect opinion as fact, which makes me a dumbass liar."
Learn to love Alaska
It worked for me. pages and pages of examples of the Chinook being used for water rescue.
Pages and pages of rescuing seals in a remarkably risky way. Then there was something about SEALs being rescued, etc. I simply couldn't be bothered to scroll through that stuff until I got to legitimate search and rescue examples. Hard to believe you looked at that search at all, even now. It's a matter of etiquette. If you're going to condescendingly throw out a google link, you should at least look at it.
But if you have perfect foresight
Since we don't, you don't need to even rhetorically consider that assumption.
there are likely better ways to spend the cash. When you need them, you can't always get them, you have to have proper planning in place before the disaster, in which case, larger walls would have been the cheapest way to protect the plant from this problem.
How much higher? You can't use perfect foresight either. And if it's not high enough, or the next accident or act of deliberate sabotage takes out all the generators on site, then what are you going to do?
How come my posts are supported by actual facts and your posts are only supported by your vivid fantasies?
http://www.thenation.com/article/159997/nuclear-dead-end-its-economics-stupid
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/radioactive-corporate-welfare/
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/nuclear-renaissance-is-short-on-largess/
http://www.economist.com/node/14859289
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv15n1/reg15n1-rothwell.html
Terrestrial nuclear fission plants cannot compete in the marketplace. They are a handout of government money to favored corporations.