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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)
Is anyone else besides me annoyed that Fukushima keeps on overshadowing this incredibly catastrophic tsunami?
The summary even fed them a line to make a quip about...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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'?
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.
>> 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!
>> 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?
Actually, the Fukushima Accident has shattered the credibility of nuclear power more than any of us could ever do, so we'll just let the details speak for themselves.
May the Maths Be with you!
Qué?
+1
The ieee story i strongly biased. they make too much suppositions and "if"'s. The earquake alone damaged much systems also, and containments were broken before the tsunami. Many pipes were ripped away, so probably not a single drop of water arrived on the molten fuel in the first attempts.
aaaaaaa
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.
GP doesn't know the difference between cue and queue; went halfway.
Interesting; you claim that anti-nuclear "fucktards" are actively preventing the shutdown of nuclear power plants? The operators want to shut them down, but anti-nuclear fucktards won't let them!
And these same "fucktards" are responsible for the Bush administrations' re-licensing obsolete plants that were scheduled for decommissioning? They mounted a letter-writing campaign to Dick Cheney, I guess - Don't close those plants, Dick!
I find your ideas intriguing, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter, which I assume is called "Violent Paranoid Fantasies Weekly".
halfwit, n. a careful idiot
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
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.
One of the largest tsunamis in the last century, which killed over 10,000 people, also lead to an industrial disaster with 5 fatalities (none of which were related to radiation). How does that in any way "shatter the credibility" of nuclear power?
(Source: http://thenewamerican.com/tech-mainmenu-30/environment/9537-no-fukushima-radiation-deaths-no-surprises)
Is 1563649 a prime number?
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
Nuclear fission power plants are not economically viable in a free and fair market
What free market? Nuclear primarily competes with coal, where the main costs (pollution) are entirely socialized.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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'
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
Nuclear fission power plants are not economically viable in a free and fair market,
Yes, they are. However, in a closed market, where public pressure can block a sensible business decision, where lawsuits will be filed to drive up costs as a deterrent, then you are right, nuclear fission power plants are not economically profitable. If you had the $10,000,000,000 to build one, you'd make more putting that into other investments.
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.
Yeah, but are you talking about coal subsidies, oil subsidies, corn subsidies, or nuclear subsidies, and could you rank those in order of which they consume my federal taxes? You'll find nuclear isn't at the top of the list, and the government spends lots of public money on private profits all the time, since long before nuclear and long after as well.
Learn to love Alaska
Interesting; you claim that anti-nuclear "fucktards" are actively preventing the shutdown of nuclear power plants?
The claim was that they are actively preventing the improvement of obsolete plants by replacing old ones with new ones, which (for a given load of electricity, does mean that the fucktards are actively preventing the shutdown of unsafe nuclear plants).
The operators want to shut them down, but anti-nuclear fucktards won't let them!
Yes! The operators say:
I want to shut this plant down. I need to build a replacement. I will build a nuke to replace a nuke, but the new one will be cheaper and safer. I'll shut down the old one as soon as the new one is built. Will you let me shut down the old one by building a new one? Nope. Then you are actively blocking me from shutting down the old one.
Learn to love Alaska
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
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!
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?
One of the largest tsunamis in the last century, which killed over 10,000 people, also lead to an industrial disaster with 5 fatalities (none of which were related to radiation). How does that in any way "shatter the credibility" of nuclear power?
Yes, People are looking at the Fukushima site, seeing what happened there, and saying "How do I get a piece of this action?"
This was a completely avoidable problem. The failures were human. You simply do not build a power plant on the shore of an area that is a dead lock for huge Tsunami action.
It would have been stupid to build a normal plant there. It's only made much worse by building a plant with such an energy concentration.
So to answer your question, You have a plant built in the wrong place, the plant is ruined, the immediate area is ruined, and we'll see about the future . The cleanup is going to be crazy expensive, and you're cherrypicking fatalities as the concept retaining credibility?
Industry doesn't want fatalities, but they don't really care about them. They surely do care about the messy aftermath of this disaster.
I believe that if we do not start building more nuc power generation, and soon, we can look forward to an end to our way of life, and a return to the middle ages, both in population and look and feel. One of the most important things we'll ever do. That's how Pro nuc I am. But the problem is there are too many people trying to polish the turds of this disaster. Instead of telling us "there there, its not really so bad" when people can watch the videos and look at the photos, we need to be saying "How do we keep this from ever happening again?"
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You're right, the government does subsidize other energy technologies.
The difference is that nuclear has been subsidized for half a century (and still can't turn a profit without ripping off taxpayers who don't want it) while renewables are a relatively new investment that the majority of taxpayers actually want to see developed.
If you oppose all such subsidies that's a different argument than the one we're having now. It's a good argument and well worth having, though; if the government stopped all corporate welfare the price of oil would skyrocket and lots of our problems would be solved relatively quickly by pure market forces. I personally don't believe that any market should be entirely unregulated, but I suspect that what the US government does to distort energy markets is actually worse than doing nothing.
If the US government wants to financially sponsor energy technologies, it should do so in the universities and not in private industry. Corporate welfare is bad for business, it props up buggy whip makers and eliminates opportunities for entrepreneurs.
"where the main costs (pollution) are entirely socialized."
Don't forget all the environmental damage from the coal mining industry - strip mining, mountain-top removal mining, etc.
I hear some saying, "But wait, nuclear plants require mining too - Uranium must be mined".
The difference is that one tonne of Uranium has the energy equivalent of something like 2 million tonnes of coal. Now, you have to mine more than one tonne of ore to get one tonne of enriched uranium, but it still requires much, much less mining.
If we used more efficient reactors (like a fast breeder reactor, or a LFTR - liquid fluoride thorium reactor), the reduction in mining would be far, far greater - in fact, it's estimated we could power the entire world using just the Thorium "tailings" from the mining of Rare Earth Elements used in modern electronics, electric cars, and other high-tech systems.
If we used fast breeder reactors, the U.S. could power itself for around 500 years, maybe longer, with NO additional mining, just by re-using our existing inventories of nuclear "waste" and "depleted uranium".
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.
It's nice to see some intelligent responses instead of the same tired nuke-shill talking points for once.
You're right; there is no free and fair energy market.
I personally believe the existing empirical evidence that nuclear power isn't competitive, but unless we get rid of all subsidies and impose true cost accounting on all dirty, obsolete energy sources we can't really know with absolute certainty.
A difficult problem, though, is that costs of conventional nuclear fission plants are both front- and back-loaded. A functional economic system has to accommodate the reality that unethical players will always exist. You don't want to build a system that rewards greedy bastards, but you do want your system to easily survive them. An unethical player can build a fission plant (taking the up front costs) and then run it until it fails, reaping enormous profits and spending them immediately on politicians, hookers and blow before the back end costs come due. The length of time a fission reactor can be reasonably expected to run before failing makes it a good gamble that such a player will be elderly or in a retirement home long before that happens. So he can safely plan on letting society pay the back end price, just as society pays the externalized costs of burning coal. This appears to be the strategy embodied in the 2005 Cheney national energy policy, but hopefully I'm wrong about that.
I don't know of any successful thorium reactors or fast breeders. Fast breeders have been remarkably failure-prone in practice, none of them delivering on their bold promises in actual profits, and thorium is a fantasy technology at this point.
It would be a great idea to heavily fund research into these technologies (and also LENR, and algal production of biofuels) within the University system, but subsidizing private companies to build unproven designs with tax dollars does not make any economic sense at all. It's once again socializing risk and privatizing profits, which is a stupid and destructive policy given that the taxpaying public has clearly expressed a strong dislike of nuclear power.
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.
It's cheaper and more economical to build a methane-fired power plant than to build a nuclear fission facility.
If the power companies wanted to shut down their aging, unsafe installations they could have a highly profitable power plant running in a tenth of the time, at half the cost of building a new nuke.
Your narrative does not fly.
Your statement is a lie. The cheapest (theoretically) running costs are in nuclear. The fuel is essentially "free" compared to all the plants that burn things. The utility could come back with "well, we'll happily build a burning plant, so long as you accept the 20% increase in rates from the increased operational costs." And the anti-nuke crowd will complain about pricing increases for increased costs, while blocking the "cheaper" alternative.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
The Tokai Nuclear Power Plant experienced almost exactly the same conditions a Fukushima, but was only mildly affected. It has resumed operation. The difference is that the national Japan Atomic Power Company which runs the Tokai plant headed warnings that the dikes around the plants were not high enough, and extended them by 1.2 metres. The private Tokyo Electric Power Company which ran the Fukushima pant did not.
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Wait a sec... where did I get that JAPC was nationally owned?
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Yes, certainly you can prepare by raising the walls. But that is the sort of thing that can fail a lot easier than just natural height. Anyhow, good point.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.