Fukushima Nuclear Worker Accidentally Toggles Off Cooling Pumps

An anonymous reader writes "A Tepco employee carelessly pressed a button shutting off cooling pumps that serve the spent fuel pool in reactor #4 — thankfully a backup kicked in before any critical consequences resulted. The question remains just how vulnerable to simple mistakes (such as a single button push) are these spent fuel pools, filled nearly to capacity as they are with over 12,000 spent fuel rods? From the article: 'The latest incident is another reminder of the precarious state of the Fukushima plant, which has suffered a series of mishaps and accidents this year. Earlier this year, Tepco lost power to cool spent uranium fuel rods at the Fukushima Daiichi plant after a rat tripped an electrical wire.'"

Comments

Evidently not that vulnerable

[Anonymous Coward]

since a backup system kicked in to prevent any critical consequences.

Re:Evidently not that vulnerable

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the point is not that no disaster occurred, it is that a failure of the primary system happened for whatever reason. Remember that the backup generators failed during the tsunami. On a different day, this inadvertent power off might have been worse.

Ideally you have no unexpected failures, and at least one redundant backup.

The sad thing about all this is that at least one of the Fukushima reactors began to fail before the tsunami even hit the buildings (due to the original quake). Would a simple quake now bring the rest of the system to failure state? Japan is an earthquake haven.

Re: The Boss

[jd2112]

Didn't he write The Iliad?

Re:Wow ...

[Somebody Is Using My]

the U.S. Navy is one of the largest and one of the oldest operators of nuclear power plants (by hours critical) and has a spotless safety record

If you don't count there loss of the nuclear submarines USS Thresher and the USS Scorpion, the radioactive contamination of the USS Guardfish, or both the USS Puffer and the USS Proteus discharging radioactive water into the oceans.

Not to mention I am sure there are a number of other incidents that haven't been declassified yet.

I don't know how well the US Navy ranks amongst other operators of nuclear power plants, but "spotless" is not an accurate description. They may do very well comparatively and the overall harm may be minimal, but they have made their share of mistakes.

Re:Wow ...

[bobbied]

Keep in mind too, that the Navy is not interested in making a profit. It's goal is to keep it's resources available (afloat, underway and mission capable) under the most difficult circumstances. They can afford to have many times the number of people operating a power plant and they utilize their people to keep their plants operating sans automation. The Navy is not interested in being efficient either. They routinely power cycle their plants and burn though more fuel than they other wise would. They also are not risk adverse. In time of war, they would have no problem pushing their reactors beyond the design limits if the mission demanded it.

Electric power generation is about efficiency and safety. It's more efficient to automate and not pay operators, so they automate their plants, and operate within very narrow operating parameters. They are risk adverse and would rather scram a reactor and go off line than risk operating outside of their design limits.

The navy does have an enviable safety record. But what you really are saying is that the safety of nuclear power is really something to be trumpeted. Except for some research accidents, the worst US event in history was Three Mile Island and that was pretty much nothing. When you put Japan into the mix, things get more interesting, but who can really complain about that? The earthquake was well beyond design limits and even then the damage, while significant, is going to be manageable. It's just going to take a few decades for things to radioactively cool.