Fukushima Cooling Knocked Offline By... a Rat

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Fukushima Cooling Knocked Offline By... a Rat

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday March 20, 2013 @07:30AM from the rats-of-nimh-are-running-our-nuclear-reactors dept.

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."

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No giant rats? by Haoie · 2013-03-20 07:36 · Score: 2

And here I am thinking all radiation makes stuff grow really big, really fast.

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1. Re:No giant rats? by Tablizer · 2013-03-20 07:40 · Score: 2
  
  a Mutant Ninja Rat
  
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2. Re:No giant rats? by phobos512 · 2013-03-20 07:47 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  RoUS's?
3. Re:No giant rats? by rmdingler · 2013-03-20 10:31 · Score: 2
  
  Donnie Brasco.
  
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Happens to me all the time... by hamster_nz · 2013-03-20 07:43 · Score: 3, Informative

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...
1. Re:Happens to me all the time... by gman003 · 2013-03-20 07:51 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Well, your stove hopefully isn't containing radioactive waste.
2. Re:Happens to me all the time... by Sarten-X · 2013-03-20 08:10 · Score: 2
  
  Rats, naturally.
  
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3. Re:Happens to me all the time... by DNS-and-BIND · 2013-03-20 08:18 · Score: 2
  
  You can't keep rats out. They get in. They are smart and tough and are capable of amazing feats of ingenuity. They are one of humanity's oldest enemies for a reason.
  
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4. Re:Happens to me all the time... by Immerman · 2013-03-20 08:39 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Nah man, they may be a bit parasitic but they're not enemies, they love us - no other species creates nearly the mountains of delicious food waste and cozy warm walls to live in. Sure, they extract a bit of a tithe in grain and property damage, but in exchange they clean up a lot of our waste and share all sorts of cool things like bubonic plague that we might never discover on our own..
  
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if only it by HPHatecraft · 2013-03-20 07:50 · Score: 2

were this radioactive rat: Pizza!!
They didn't say radiation release after 4 days by hawguy · 2013-03-20 07:51 · Score: 5, Informative

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).
1. Re:They didn't say radiation release after 4 days by hawguy · 2013-03-20 08:22 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Mistakes, bugs or rodent problems are understandable. But c'mon, we're talking about nuclear power here. I expect at least some redundancy and fail-safety. Unless we're talking about some soviet era facility, I guarantee you that you'll never hear about such a problem on any other nuclear power plant in the world. It's like they didn't learn anything from two years ago. And Tepco is one of the most well-funded companies in Japan. Lack of money and staff shouldn't be a problem. As a guy who lives in Japan I hate Tepco. Thanks to them my power bill is freaking expensive and yet they can't even do a decent job. What a disgrace to Japan.
  How much redundancy do you need in a system that stays at safe levels for 4 days after a failure?
  I can see having full double or triple redundancy for systems that will result in unsafe conditions in hours or minutes, but for 4 days?
2. Re:They didn't say radiation release after 4 days by hawguy · 2013-03-20 08:55 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but is not Fukushima in fact a Soviet-era reactor, or nearly so? They could potentially perform massive refitting of the plant, but that's expensive, you're already complaining about the current energy prices
  You are wrong. The reactors are Fukushima-I are all USA design BWR's (designed by General Electric, several were manufactured by GE). I'm not sure that "era" means what you think it does...Unless by "Soviet-era" you meant the period of time that the USSR existed? That would put most of the nuclear plants in the USA in the "Soviet-era".
3. Re:They didn't say radiation release after 4 days by ls671 · 2013-03-20 09:01 · Score: 2
  
  Did you install cat 5 cables with rat repellent ?
  http://www.okidensen.co.jp/en/prod/cable/lan/mouse_lan.html
  
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4. Re:They didn't say radiation release after 4 days by wjwlsn · 2013-03-20 13:10 · Score: 2
  
  The technology and goals were actually very different. In the US, you had regulator-imposed general design criteria that said things like "thou shalt have a void-coefficient of reactivity that is negative" and "thy shutdown systems shall be fast acting" and "thou shalt have diverse and redundant safety systems" and "when the shit hits the fan, thou shalt contain thy fission products".
  In Soviet Russia, reactor design imposes criteria on YOU! Design reactor for maximal plutonium production and easy removal of fuel ---> minimal containment, minimal redundant systems, positive void coefficient, control rods that have graphite followers. So, when you begin to lose control of the reactor and you insert control rods, the graphite followers go in first, spiking reactivity and power, which causes your coolant to flash to steam, increasing void fraction, and because your void coefficient is positive, power goes UP even more instead of going down, and then the few safety systems you have don't work because you shut them all down or they suck to begin with, and then reactor (not containment, REACTOR) goes boom and chunks of FUEL and FLAMING GRAPHITE are forcefully ejected into the air.
  So, then, why did Fukushima fail so badly, even though it had fast-acting shutdown systems, a negative void coefficient, diverse and redundant safety systems, and a containment design that satisfied all of the regulations that existed at the time? That's the real story here, and its moral has a lot to do with the idea of "beyond design basis" accidents and designing to be more robust than required by regulation.
  
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5. Re:They didn't say radiation release after 4 days by The+Master+Control+P · 2013-03-20 14:05 · Score: 2
  
  So, then, why did Fukushima fail so badly, even though it had fast-acting shutdown systems, a negative void coefficient, diverse and redundant safety systems, and a containment design that satisfied all of the regulations that existed at the time? That's the real story here, and its moral has a lot to do with the idea of "beyond design basis" accidents and designing to be more robust than required by regulation.
  The Mark I and Mark II reactors installed at Fukushima 1-4 were part of an effort by GE to design lower-cost reactors that could be afforded by nations that weren't rich like America (in the 50s/60s post-WWII era, that was "everybody else"). This is where things like the now-infamous suppression torus originated.
  
  One of GE's own engineers resigned because he was certain that the design was not safe. Analyses conducted in the late 1970s concluded that the Mark I would almost certainly result in disaster in the event of sustained power loss - and it did.
6. Re:They didn't say radiation release after 4 days by sjwt · 2013-03-20 14:39 · Score: 2
  
  Not as well as running live wall voltage in a parallel would of =>
  
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7. Re:They didn't say radiation release after 4 days by wjwlsn · 2013-03-20 15:38 · Score: 2
  
  Analyses conducted in the late 1970s concluded that the Mark I would almost certainly result in disaster in the event of sustained power loss - and it did.
  Yeah... unfortunately, the containment failures at Fukushima matched the models pretty well. I've posted it before, but the following document is illuminating... see the section titled "BWR 3/4 Perspectives", including the parts regarding station blackout (SBO), transients with loss of coolant injection, and transients with loss of decay heat removal (DHR).
  http://www.osti.gov/bridge/purl.cover.jsp?purl=%2F205567-BJIEKT%2Fwebviewable%2F
  I still don't understand why TEPCO didn't install hardened containment vents back in the '90s. If they had, things would have gone very differently. They must have known about NRC Generic Letter 89-16.
  https://forms.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/gen-comm/gen-letters/1989/gl89016.html
  The other thing I don't understand is why Unit 1 didn't handle the situation better than the others. It should have because it has an Isolation Condenser instead of Reactor Core Isolation Cooling... I'm not sure that anyone has yet explained what happened with this.
  
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A little humility by onyxruby · 2013-03-20 07:55 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.
1. Re:A little humility by hawguy · 2013-03-20 09:36 · Score: 2
  
  Agreed, politics is by far the greatest impediment to deploying small scale nuclear reactors. I'd love to see small scale nuclear reactors deployed on a wide scale, it's the best green technology that we have. If you get down to it you /could/ fit one of those in a clean room. I was speaking more metaphorically than literally in this case.
  I think you're on the wrong website - I flippantly ignored the point you were making and corrected something you said, and you didn't call me any names, and even agreed with something I said in a later post.
  I think that Slashdot protocol requires that you make a derogatory comment about my mother, or at least attack my virility and/or sexual orientation..
Not true. by sunking2 · 2013-03-20 08:01 · Score: 3, Funny

It was a Rodent of Unusual Size.
1. Re:Not true. by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-20 08:10 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  I don't believe they exist.
So rat is the new term? by 140Mandak262Jamuna · 2013-03-20 08:09 · Score: 2

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?

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Spent fuel pools by dpidcoe · 2013-03-20 08:26 · Score: 2

Obligatory XKCD: http://whatif.xkcd.com/29/
Nuclear power fears by sl4shd0rk · 2013-03-20 08:36 · Score: 2

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.

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a rat named Shredder? by GodfatherofSoul · 2013-03-20 09:05 · Score: 2, Funny

Last seen training irradiated juvenile turtles to kick ass with medieval Japanese weaponry.

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Re:R.A.T by K.+S.+Kyosuke · 2013-03-20 10:11 · Score: 4, Funny

This was clearly a Trojan Mouse.

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Springfield Nuclear Power Plant is full of them an by Joe_Dragon · 2013-03-20 12:16 · Score: 2

Springfield Nuclear Power Plant is full of them and mr burns will not pay to clean them out.
Are you pondering what I am pondering? by der_joachim · 2013-03-20 18:07 · Score: 2

Pinky?

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