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Fukushima Cooling Knocked Offline By... a Rat
necro81 writes "The cooling system at the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, responsible for keeping the spent fuel pools at an appropriate temperature, lost power early on March 18th. During the blackout, the temperature in the spent fuel pools gradually increased, although TEPCO officials indicated the pools could warm for four days without risking radiation release. Power was restored earlier this morning, and the pools should be back to normal temperature in a few days. During the repairs, the charred remains of a rat were found in a critical area of wiring, leading some to believe that this rodent was the cause of this latest problem. At least it wasn't a mynock — then we'd really be in trouble."
Lat? Like lateral something? I'm so confused ...
And here I am thinking all radiation makes stuff grow really big, really fast.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
There was me thinking that by 'RAT' it was a Remote Access Trojan that caused the disaster.
A freakin' huge radioactive rat! ;)
Every other year I have to remove fried mice out of my in-wall stove's wiring, In autumn they try to come in side and look for a nice warm place for winter. I guess they find the oven before they find the mousetraps.
This, however, never makes it to Slashdot...
a Chupacabra!
I dunno, it just doesn't add up. I smell a rat.
were this radioactive rat: Pizza!!
They didn't say that the pools would risk releasing radiation after 4 days, they said:
Tepco said it would have taken several days for temperatures in the pools to have risen above the safe level of 65 degrees Celsius, or 149 degrees Fahrenheit.
The company said that temperatures in the fuel pools would have remained at safe levels for at least four days.
A rise above "safe" levels doesn't necessarily mean radiation release. I don't think there's any danger of radiation release until the water boils down to a level where the rods are exposed (and presumably even in an extended power outage, additional purified water could be added to the pools to maintain water levels).
Rat induced power problems are not uncommon in large industrial plants. All it takes is an unsealed conduit cover while workers take a meal break, and a rat can slip inside. Rats wreaked havoc on network cables (both fiber and copper) at a building I once worked at -- many of the conduit runs were left unsealed by a vendor (or poorly sealed by foam plugs that eventually shrank enough to be displaced by the rodents) and the rats found them convenient for getting around the building (as well as a cozy place to live), and apparently they liked to nibble on cables or their feces+urine degraded the cables enough to cause failure. They ended up replacing almost all of the cables in uncapped conduit (and properly sealing the conduit this time).
Everyone panic.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
Image:
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/bild-890027-475494.html
Nature is very good at serving us humility in small bite size portions that can bring great things down. Events like this should remind us that we are mere stewards of the planet and that the rest of the ecosystem will happily take over the best laid plans we have if we let our guard down even a little.
No matter how well you design something nature can and will find a way to get in, and it is arrogance in the extreme to assume otherwise. About the only way to avoid something like that is to have a clean room environment, and I'm quite certain that you can't fit a nuclear power plant inside a clean room.
The Ninja Turtles are pissed.
It was a Rodent of Unusual Size.
Was fighting Oroku Saki.
Remember the bug that allegedly shorted out the vacuum tubes and triggered the coining "bug" as a term for errors in computation? Hereinafter all errors in nuclear power plant design and operation will be called a rat?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
James Herbert dies....coincidence!?!?!?!?
rewriting history since 2109
Not sure if that's just a lame joke, but that was not the cause.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Obligatory XKCD: http://whatif.xkcd.com/29/
When you are dealing with a potential calamity on the scale of Fukishama (or even Deepwater Horizon for that matter) the system needs to be able to rebound easily from instabilities such as fire, earthquake, overheating, floods or Rats. The biggest problem with Nuclear is you need guaranteed cooling for the system to remain stable -- and you can't get that to 100%. Ever. The entire system needs to shift over to one of the less problematic alternatives in order for it to gain wide acceptance.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
You could have easily established that it was in fact a joke had you clicked the link to verify:
Bill the Cat, or Bill D. Cat (according to the final Outland strip), is a fictional cat appearing in the works of cartoonist Berkeley Breathed, ... he was responsible for the Chernobyl nuclear disaster
the charred remains of a rat were found in a critical area of wiring
Hey, you gonna eat that?
He was willing to keep it real in protest.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Last seen training irradiated juvenile turtles to kick ass with medieval Japanese weaponry.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I don't think they exist.
I know who bill the cat was. But what is not clear, from that link or Gray's use of it, was if Gray was implying that a cat caused the disaster - which is most definitely not true.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Wow, people aren't getting Bill The Cat references anymore? Shit, I must be getting old...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
there aren't enough cats in power plants and labs.
Opus, Bill, and Bloom County rocked liked Slayer! Syndicated strips are presently & unfortunately going the way of dead tree newspapers. Back in the day, it was comics section first to check out The Far Side.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
At our datacenter, in the routine inspection of facilities we found a dead cat in the emergency power plant room. The poor thing managed to get inside the room and stayed under the warm engine block, but when a power failure triggered the power plant on it had his skin ripped off by the fan of the generator's diesel engine.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Springfield Nuclear Power Plant is full of them and mr burns will not pay to clean them out.
fights the nuclear power. More news at 11.
Holy crap, how did a rat get into the wiring? I repair food plants (and sawmills, printers, etc) for a living, and there is not one scrap of wiring (other than low voltage control wiring) that isn't armored with metal sheathing or in metal boxes. It has been code for decades. I find it hard to believe it's possible to install any wiring, control wiring or not that isn't armored in that kind of plant.
...than a giant green lizard.
This business of storing used fuel rods at working reactors needs to stop. Once they've cooled off enough for dry cask storage, they should go to dry storage in a mountain somewhere.
The US repository was supposed to be in Yucca Mountain. Early plans called for a second repository somewhere on the east coast, probably in hard-rock mountains in Maine or Vermont. There are mountain ranges that haven't done anything exciting geologically in the last 20 million years or so, and those are the best sites.
Pinky?
Geek runner, motorcyclist and professional know-it-all
Calvin & Hobbes fan myself, have the entire Bill Watterson collection on a sacred shelf in the home library.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Master Splinter is deceased. We should be grieving the thwarting of the age of the TMNT as Splinter will never be able to train the TMNT. Which anthropomorphic rat sensei will train the anthropomorphic turtles to defeat Shredder now?