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Japanese Court Rules Against Restarting Ohi Reactors
AmiMoJo writes: "A Japanese court has ordered the operator of the Ohi nuclear plant in Fukui Prefecture, central Japan, not to restart two of its reactors, citing inadequate safety measures. The plant's No. 3 and 4 reactors were halted for regular inspections last September. Local residents filed a lawsuit asking that the reactors be kept offline. They said an estimate of possible tremors is too small, and that the reactors lack backup cooling systems. The operator, Kansai Electric Power Company, has insisted that no safety problems exist."
First this and now Godzilla is on the rampage again.
In this corner, we have the experts who have stake to lie to you.
In this corner, we have a bunch of local idiots being baited by some agenda-driven journalist who is likely to twist facts and probably doesn't understand nuclear safety anyway, so probably thinks non-issues are terrifying while making serious issues out of other things he knows are non-issues.
Who will prevail?!
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That failure took the combined effort of one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded AND a massive tsunami. Even if the safety measures in place were deemed 'adequate' they would never be able to stop that. The safety measures in place have worked fine in that country for the better part of a century, this is overreacting on the grandest scale.
Japan has started to exploit the many Trillions of cubic feet of natural gas trapped in methane hydrates. Clearly that's a better alternative than restarting a power plant that's been operating safely for decades.
How many people has the nuclear power industry killed exactly? For extra credit, compare against coal which has had to pick up the missing supply in Japan.
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
Once-a-century disasters are something to plan for. There was a host of badly designed pump systems - and business processes. It's not unreasonable to fix them given the cost of their expected failure.
The earthquake took the plant off-line not the Tsunami.
The plant safely began shutdown when the earthquake occurred. Damage that cause failure was entirely due to the Tsunami. Other reactors nearby that experienced the same earthquake but were not hit by Tsunami, shut down safely, as designed, without incident. The plants and safety systems were not designed to operate through a tsunami hit, and hence, the inevitable outcome when the tsunami hit. Shame on Japan for siting those plants in a Tsunami zone with inadequate protection and design.
Those who blame the earthquake for the safety systems failures are either ignorant, or outright and intentionally misleading. Which are you?
The major thing leading up to the meltdowns was human error, both in the emergency generator rooms / power conduits not being waterproofed, and the decisions regarding what to do with the reactors during an emergency situation. There were other plants that had gotten swamped, but did not suffer meltdowns, all due to waterproofing the emergency generator rooms; If I remember correctly one plant that was swamped and survived had quite literally finished the waterproofing only a few weeks prior.
Not only that, but the reactors most likely could have been saved even after the tsunami hit. The problem was the operators ( rightly, or wrongly ) were too afraid to depressurize the reactor vessels so passive low pressure emergency cooling measures could operate, these would have lasted long enough to get pumps and / or generators on site. This decision not to depressurize was due to public fear of "wah, small amounts of short lived Iodine and and noble radio gasses would escape with the steam" mentality and lead directly ( unknown at the time. the operator actions were quite reasonable and understandable - it is only hindsight that tells us what the best action should have been ) to the larger scale and broader spectrum radio-isotope release.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
I'd prefer not to include Chernobyl since it was literally a catastrophe waiting to happen. A reactor with no containment building, really? Nothing like that ever got built outside the Soviet bloc. Even if included, deaths per gigawatt hour from nuclear barely amount to a rounding error when compared to fossil fuel.
I'd say as things are, coal is just as long term a solution in Japan as the nuclear plants. There just aren't that many workable alternatives. Natgas plants perhaps, but recent investigation suggests that methane leaks in production and distribution are probably enough to render greenhouse gas emissions similar in magnitude to coal. Nuclear power has risks of course. Unfortunately the world has magnified those risks a great deal by collective failure to deploy newer and safer reactor technologies. Case in point: Fukushima Daiichi. Generation I plants with known serious failure modes. There's no earthly reason Gen I plants should still be in operation. For comparison, how many businesses are depending on 1960 era computer systems, and how many people drive 1960 cars as primary transportation?
Apportioning the blame for this, in my opinion divides roughly in thirds between corporate sloth/greed, government fecklessness and societal ignorance/paranoia.
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
What the operators were forced to deal with after the Tsunami is not nearly as relevent and the fact that the Tsunami left the plant with no emergency power and water intrusion quickly disabled and remaining systems that were battery backed. This was the case because the plant, nor its safety systems, were designed to withstand the Tsunami.
After the tusami, operators indeed were left with such a deteriorated situation that they were forced to make decisions that they should have never had to make to start with.
If my tires are rated for maximum 50 mph, and I'm going 90 mph and lose control, and I tried to swerve and wind up hitting a tree, the problem was not that I swerved the wrong way, the problem was that I put the vehicle in situation it was not designed to safety handle.
What the operators were forced to deal with after the Tsunami is not nearly as relevent and the fact that the Tsunami left the plant with no emergency power and water intrusion quickly disabled and remaining systems that were battery backed. This was the case because the plant, nor its safety systems, were designed to withstand the Tsunami.
Actually it is quite relevant. The plant could have been saved, and large scale radio-isotope release could have been avoided in the condition the plant was in after the tsunami. The low pressure emergency cooling was not affected by the tsunami, it was not used due to public fear of radiation, and the requirement that some radio-gasses would needs be released when the vessels are depressurized.
Does that mean the operators made the "wrong" choices? We can't know with 100% certainty, but all indications are ( and scientifically backed up in several published papers ) that it would have been the better idea to depressurize the vessels and use the several days worth of passive decay heat capacity of the spent fuel pools and suppression rings that is the backup built in for just this type of emergency. Gravity fed coolant was on hand, the LOC accident then would not have occurred and the fuel would not have melted. The net result would have been significantly reduced amounts of radio-isotopes released ( and all of them gone within ~1 week at most ) and no need for long term evacuation and cleanup.
If my tires are rated for maximum 50 mph, and I'm going 90 mph and lose control, and I tried to swerve and wind up hitting a tree, the problem was not that I swerved the wrong way, the problem was that I put the vehicle in situation it was not designed to safety handle.
It's actually more like you blew your tire while going 55 because your speedometer was slightly off, and saw two fields: one empty but appears to be behind a steep ditch and the other with a few trees in it but has a very shallow ditch. You steered towards the field with the shallower ditch due to fearing rolling the vehicle when encountering the steep ditch.
You ended up hitting one of the trees in the field, but later found out that the ditch in the empty field was just as shallow as the one bordering the field with the trees.
At the time you made the "right" decision. Looking back at it with better data, you made the wrong decision; the empty field would have been much better.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
Actually the Japanese are burning more LNG with some extra coal to replace some of their nuclear generating capacity. In the 12 months up to March 2013 TEPCO burned 23 million tonnes of LNG and 7 million tonnes of coal to generate electricity, in comparison in the same period ending March 2011, just after the earthquake and tsunami they burned 19.5 million tonnes of LNG and 3.5 million tonnes of coal. LNG has twice the energy of coal tonne for tonne.
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/news...
As for coal as a long-term solution the Germans plan to be still generating at least 40% of their electricity from coal and lignite by 2050. That seems quite long-term to me. I doubt very much the US will have stopped mining coal in South Dakota and West Virginia to burn in power stations by then either. The Japanese don't have any significant amounts of native coal left to burn, no oil and no gas so they have to import it. Uranium is cheap, their nuclear generating plants are still in place ready to restart and their balance of payments are in the crapper for the 22nd month in a row mostly due to buying carbon instead.
The solution to the problem is to either design the plant to withstand the tsunami, or don't put it where it will be hit by a tsunami. The solution is not to expect the operators to make the right decision when they don't have the needed functional systems to do their job correctly. You stated
The low pressure emergency cooling was not affected by the tsunami
This is absolutely false. While there may have been some functionality of the system left after the tsunami, it was not designed to operate under those conditions and it those limited functions were not available for very long, and therefore was not effectively operable is any reasonable sense. Not to mention all the other systems and redundancies that were no longer available. That is not fault of the operator or any decision they made. It is entirely, 100%, the result of being hit by a tsunami that the plant, nor its individual safety systems, was designed to handle.
This is absolutely false. While there may have been some functionality of the system left after the tsunami, it was not designed to operate under those conditions and it those limited functions were not available for very long, and therefore was not effectively operable is any reasonable sense.
You should review your sources, there are several factual errors in play here.
1: The low pressure emergency cooling was not damaged, it was fully functional but not used. The emergency coolant was available, and the heat sinks were also available. No external power would have been needed, these systems are gravity fed and designed as a last redundancy for situations where every other option failed. The reason this system was not used was mainly fear of radio-gas release and point 2.
2: it is the fault of the operators for every decision they made. They made the decision to blindly trust what they should have know were ( potentially, and in this case literally ) compromised sensor units and did not due any physical checks. I don't have the papers in front of me, but I believe it was unit #1 that actually melted first due to a stuck valve ( maintenance issues, not tsunami issues) and not dumping steam to the suppression ring and subsequently boiling dry within 6 hours. This should have been noticed if there had been physical checks of the systems. Sensors also indicated water levels that where meters higher than actual, again physical checks(temps and volumes of steam blow-off) and some simple math would have shown closer to true estimates - Decay heat should have been roughly 10-12% of full power generation, and the known volume of water in the vessel + loops can tell you the kJ's of heat being put into the water by how much water was being turned to steam / hour and at least estimates of how much water SHOULD be in the condensers VS how much water really WAS in the condensers. The first real reactors we had used less instrumentation to run than what they had available.
3: There are also other logical fallacies in your argument: You can never make anything "proof" against another force, only resistant. If something is not "proof" against the other force it shouldn't be built? We should never build anything then, we can't make it large space object impact proof.
As for the Fukushima daiichi plant, it was quite resistant to the tsunami, the reactors + reactor buildings themselves did not sustain significant damage until the actual meltdown and hydrogen explosions. It was only the emergency generators that really weren't up to snuff ( and there WAS power available from units 5-6 which had functional generators, just no easy way to route cable to units 1-4 through the muck and debris ) Again see points one and two for how this could, and in an ideal situation should, have been able to prevent the catastrophe.
Does this mean that there could / should have been more done? Of course more should have been done, both France and India sent out reports to the whole nuclear community detailing swamped emergency generator rooms over a decade prior to the Tohoku-Oki event, the very reason most other plants had waterproofed their generator rooms and survived relatively unscathed. I said specifically that this was part of the human error in the disaster.
I can't comment on the plant being built on higher ground because I don't know the reasons why the particular place it was built had been chosen, but higher seawalls may have helped, but may not have. As far as my research has shown, for this area of Japan this was a freak occurrence. There was some evidence that other areas on the coast had seen tsunami events this large, but nothing concrete until data from this tsunami actually correlated to suspected paleo-tsunami evidence. Maybe we will find out that this magnitude event does impact the coast there more often, in that case it is true it should not have been built there; but that is using post fact data.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
If you include Chernobyl, it has killed quite a few.
According to Wikipedia 60 deaths were caused by Chernobyl.
^You cannot operate injection without power. All power was quickly lost. It doesn't matter if the piping is intact. The system is not operable without power.
Regardless, the entire condition was outside of the plant design basis. You have to understand that simple concept.
Yes, its possible had the operators acted differently to mitigate the tsunami damage, the fuel melt may have been prevented. But that is not a cause. There reason the operators did not have the proper instrumentation to deal with a post tsunami wipe-out, is because the plant was not designed to cope with that event.
Had the plant been designed to cope with that event, emergency power sources would have been located in safe areas with protected feeds. Safety equipment would have been located above tsunami levels, and the plant would have had any extra needed instrumentation to perform the necessary operations during that event.
BTW, you can prove that a structure can withstand a force. It is quite easy and common.
Well, this is the point I disagree on for several reasons:
1: The plant actually was designed to specifications of the largest projected tsunami and / or earthquake - the reason it had 9 meter seawalls and survived the earthquake with no damage. The non-waterproofed stuff was a major mistake as seen by water getting past the seawalls ( as well as the France / India reactors a decade prior that had similar issues and basically told Japan to fix these major flaws). While it was partially luck that some of the buildings had been undamaged, much more was preserved because of good design. The reactor buildings themselves, for example, were undamaged. The violence of this particular tsunami was not predicted, even by the seismologists who study the Japan trench; they didn't think it could capable of building enough stress to cause such a large megathrust and resulting tsunami as large as it did.
2: Actually the procedures for this type of emergency cooling ( including venting of radio-isotopes upon vessel pressure release ) is standard emergency procedures and trained extensively for. They basically ignored their emergency training and tried to do anything possible to avoid venting any radiation, which eventually failed.
3: We may have to agree to disagree, I have actually written a paper on the tsunami and its results at Fukushima ( as yet not complete enough to publish, feel free to write your own to refute it when it is ) so my viewpoints are pretty well set in stone from the data I have. If you can come up with some hard data and arguments in your cases favor I will certainly listen to them and adjust my views accordingly.
4: this is why I love slashdot, the occasional actual technical discussion between all the frosty piss and goatse AC trolling.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!