It depends. As Japan is on the good old Ring of Fire, a 9.0 is definitely not out of the question (obviously). However, there's statistically only one of them a year, worldwide. I'm not sure what the chances are that they would hit locally in various places, even on fault lines.
Do you have a source for this information? A quick glance here shows that using the high end of the estimates, there have only been 9 quakes of 9.0 or higher. I'm pretty sure we have been measuring earthquakes for longer than 9 years now.
a 9.0+ quake is very unlikely. It is even less likely that that quake would be in the vicinity of a nuclear plant. I think we need to wait for this situation to be sorted out. Then we will see how well the buildings survived the quake.
Since they need the ability they might work on HVDC transmission gear, but what market is there for this technology elsewhere? Just standardize national grids and you don't need to worry about it.
I believe that the spent rods are not permanently stored right next to the reactor. It is a short term storage for rods just pulled from the core. There is a communal long-term storage location shared among reactors 1 through 6 on the grounds, but not immediately next to the reactors. My common sense says that the cooler a spent rod is radioactively, the farther it can be safely transported.
It certainly would make sense to then take all the spent rods out of the communal Daiichi long-term storage and store them in a permanent location. I don't know the Japanese opinion on this matter, but it is damn near impossible in America to get anyone to agree on a place to store this waste. No one wants it near them. Even if we try to put it in the middle of an unpopulated dessert area, no one wants it transported near by them on its way there.
As much as I'd like to support Master Shake's new DB, there has been a better open-source DB for years now. Check out PostgreSQL if you haven't already.
Just to further illustrate how unacceptable 1/20 is: That gives us a 5% chance of a 1-in-1000 year event occurring at one plant in one year. Spread out over 50 nuclear plants in Japan (a think there are a few more than that but...) gives a 7.69% chance of no incident at all the plants or on the contrary, a 92.3% chance that at least one of the 50 nuclear plants will have one of these events EVERY YEAR. over the course of 50 years the chance that there is no 1-in-1000 year event is 2.04e-54% which means it is a near complete certainty that at least one of the 50 plants would have a 1-in-1000 year event in it's lifetime. Unless you want to change the odds, by assumptions such as if one plant avoids an event in a year, it is very unlikely that the plant down the road would have an event.
I have to agree with the GP on one point though. The issue was the tsunami. More specifically the tsunami knocking out the cooling systems. If these reactors had passive cooling systems that didn't need electricity, it wouldn't have been an issue. That isn't a simple bolt on for a BWR, but a different reactor design. The only easy way to improve existing plants of this design, is too harden the backup power and water systems.
When do you consider a location to be at risk for a 9.0? Obviously, a location that has had a quake that large would count, but I can count those quakes on my hand. Is Southern California at risk for a 9.0? Is the Eastern US at risk? We don't have enough recorded data to really know what fault lines will some day get extremely active. Then you end up over-designing every plant to withstand a 9.0.
This is really besides the point. The reactors current undergoing issues in Japan did withstand the Earthquake. The backup cooling failed afterward. That seems like a much easier problem to solve than building a structure that the Earth can't possible rend in half.
The book hasn't been closed on what is unfolding currently in Japan. Currently there are serious concerns regarding the spent fuel pools in reactors 4,5, and 6, which were offline during the earthquake. These spent fuel pools do not have the same level of containment and could be problematic.
This is by no means something I think people should use to stop nuclear power. I think we should look at it and determine exactly what plant designs were good, bad, and completely terrible. An incident like this should allow us to get BETTER nuclear power and not throw away a valuable technology.
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It depends. As Japan is on the good old Ring of Fire, a 9.0 is definitely not out of the question (obviously). However, there's statistically only one of them a year, worldwide. I'm not sure what the chances are that they would hit locally in various places, even on fault lines.
Do you have a source for this information? A quick glance here shows that using the high end of the estimates, there have only been 9 quakes of 9.0 or higher. I'm pretty sure we have been measuring earthquakes for longer than 9 years now.
a 9.0+ quake is very unlikely. It is even less likely that that quake would be in the vicinity of a nuclear plant. I think we need to wait for this situation to be sorted out. Then we will see how well the buildings survived the quake.
Since they need the ability they might work on HVDC transmission gear, but what market is there for this technology elsewhere? Just standardize national grids and you don't need to worry about it.
I believe that the spent rods are not permanently stored right next to the reactor. It is a short term storage for rods just pulled from the core. There is a communal long-term storage location shared among reactors 1 through 6 on the grounds, but not immediately next to the reactors. My common sense says that the cooler a spent rod is radioactively, the farther it can be safely transported.
It certainly would make sense to then take all the spent rods out of the communal Daiichi long-term storage and store them in a permanent location. I don't know the Japanese opinion on this matter, but it is damn near impossible in America to get anyone to agree on a place to store this waste. No one wants it near them. Even if we try to put it in the middle of an unpopulated dessert area, no one wants it transported near by them on its way there.
As much as I'd like to support Master Shake's new DB, there has been a better open-source DB for years now. Check out PostgreSQL if you haven't already.
Just to further illustrate how unacceptable 1/20 is: That gives us a 5% chance of a 1-in-1000 year event occurring at one plant in one year. Spread out over 50 nuclear plants in Japan (a think there are a few more than that but...) gives a 7.69% chance of no incident at all the plants or on the contrary, a 92.3% chance that at least one of the 50 nuclear plants will have one of these events EVERY YEAR. over the course of 50 years the chance that there is no 1-in-1000 year event is 2.04e-54% which means it is a near complete certainty that at least one of the 50 plants would have a 1-in-1000 year event in it's lifetime. Unless you want to change the odds, by assumptions such as if one plant avoids an event in a year, it is very unlikely that the plant down the road would have an event. I have to agree with the GP on one point though. The issue was the tsunami. More specifically the tsunami knocking out the cooling systems. If these reactors had passive cooling systems that didn't need electricity, it wouldn't have been an issue. That isn't a simple bolt on for a BWR, but a different reactor design. The only easy way to improve existing plants of this design, is too harden the backup power and water systems.
When do you consider a location to be at risk for a 9.0? Obviously, a location that has had a quake that large would count, but I can count those quakes on my hand. Is Southern California at risk for a 9.0? Is the Eastern US at risk? We don't have enough recorded data to really know what fault lines will some day get extremely active. Then you end up over-designing every plant to withstand a 9.0. This is really besides the point. The reactors current undergoing issues in Japan did withstand the Earthquake. The backup cooling failed afterward. That seems like a much easier problem to solve than building a structure that the Earth can't possible rend in half.
Field tests proved that the substance was indeed cocaine, but there was none left after said field tests.
The book hasn't been closed on what is unfolding currently in Japan. Currently there are serious concerns regarding the spent fuel pools in reactors 4,5, and 6, which were offline during the earthquake. These spent fuel pools do not have the same level of containment and could be problematic. This is by no means something I think people should use to stop nuclear power. I think we should look at it and determine exactly what plant designs were good, bad, and completely terrible. An incident like this should allow us to get BETTER nuclear power and not throw away a valuable technology.