TEPCO: Nearly All Nuclear Fuel Melted At Fukushima No. 3 Reactor 255
mdsolar (1045926) writes "Almost all of the nuclear fuel in the No. 3 reactor of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant melted within days of the March 11, 2011, disaster, according to a new estimate by Tokyo Electric Power Co. TEPCO originally estimated that about 60 percent of the nuclear fuel melted at the reactor. But the latest estimate released on Aug. 6 revealed that the fuel started to melt about six hours earlier than previously thought. TEPCO said most of the melted fuel likely dropped to the bottom of the containment unit from the pressure vessel after the disaster set off by the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami."
So.. what? (Score:5, Insightful)
This article really doesn't explain why this finding matters. TEPCO themselves said they do not know how this will effect the decommissioning process for the reactor, if at all. The only thing that seems to be different is that they now believe some of the fuel is still inside the pressure vessel, and it's not clear that they didn't already know that to begin with. It doesn't seem like anything will really change until TEPCO actually sends people in to get a look at it.
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Re:So.. what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe we can start to talk about nuclear risk more pragmatically.
Ha. Hahaha. Ha.
Yeah. Also, maybe we can go down to hell and make some snow angels. Then get on our swines and fly off to a peaceful middle east.
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Well, yeah, that describes the lowest level of Dante's hell...
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right now, we have th
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Well, if we could get a majority of people to start talking about risks and costs rationally it would be wonderful. As it is, you've got people criticizing solar plants because a few birds got fried. Never mind whatever problems the solar plant replaced. I think the risk/rewards on nuclear are acceptable but trying to get people to talk about nuclear in a rational way is difficult.
Idiot speaks: "So.. what?" (Score:5, Interesting)
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A large amount of radioactive material was released into the ocean where it will remain in the food chain for decades.
what isotopes are you talking about.. Some of this stuff is centuries before it goes away... Oh, and never mind that in Japan they currently occupy the only two locations where nuclear weapons have been used.... So, I'm not so sure this is as totally bad as folks claim.
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Hmm, 1.3 billion cubic km of ocean, at 3 ppb uranium naturally...
So, the ocean has, as a matter of course, ~4 billion tons of uranium, of which 0.72% is U-235. So 28,000,000 tons of U-235 in the ocean naturally.
So, if the reactor in question had a MILLION TONS of fuel (trust me, it didn't), it increased the natural radioactivity on the oceans by less than 4%.
A more realistic number woul
Re:Idiot speaks: "So.. what?" (Score:5, Insightful)
So you think all of the radioactive crap that got dumped into the ocean is going to be magically dispersed evenly throughout the globes oceans?
Or more likely it's going to bugger up seafood local to japan for decades to come.
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Much of the leakage was cesium which reacts violently with water forming a cesium hydroxide solution. So yes, it will disperse nicely.
Re:So.. what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, and maybe we can talk about about abortion pragmatically too . . .
The average member of the public has an emotional, visceral reaction to things such as GMO, global warming, nuclear power, et cetera. You might as well be talking about abortion, because Joe Sixpack doesn't understand things like nuclear physics, cost-benefit analysis, risk analysis, et cetera.
After September 11th, the average American was more worried about being personally harmed by terrorism than bad driving, even though outside of a few major cities, the risk of dying in a terrorist attack was almost non-existent.
That is why there is such a disconnect between the public and scientists (and the scientifically literate) on these matters. It's easier to scare someone about strangers molesting their children than it is about their children dying or having a worse life because of global warming, even though the former is a remote probability and the later is almost inevitable.
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Everything is "debatable", but what scientifically literate people believe about global warming is very far removed from public opinion, just like it is with evolution, nuclear power, GMO, and a host of other scientific subjects.
Also, there is really no scientific debate any longer in refereed journals as to whether:
1) The greenhouse effect is increasing due to human activity (actually, there was never really much of a real debate about this).
2) The increase in the greenhouse effect has become the primary l
Um... (Score:2)
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eh. [wikipedia.org]
Any difference looks a lot smaller than the markup I've ended up paying for things like going through an energy co-op instead of straight from the generating company.
Re:So.. what? (Score:5, Insightful)
eh. [wikipedia.org]
Any difference looks a lot smaller than the markup I've ended up paying for things like going through an energy co-op instead of straight from the generating company.
Those numbers are almost meaningless. The nuclear numbers for the most part don't include the cost of cleanup operations
like what happened in Japan or Chernobyl. They might include a little bit paid to the government for disaster recovery but that
would quickly get used up in a real disaster. Likewise coal doesn't include environmental damage and oil doesn't include all the
military needed to keep oil stable. Even solar and wind have some negative affects. We do need to talk about cost but we
need to talk about ALL the costs not just the operating costs but all the externalized costs as well.
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Unfortunately the price of Coal fired power is meaningless for the same reasons. The price of the cleanup of the pollution is not included. Even natural gas powered plants produce enough CO2 to warrant a cleanup cost. Sure, the cleanup is nowhere near the plant, and it might not be now (like nuclear) but in the end someone will pay.
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Don't worry about CO2, the plants need it to live, the more there is, the more they grow.
Re:So.. what? (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't worry about CO2, the plants need it to live, the more there is, the more they grow.
I've heard this argument before and I know plants need co2 but is co2 really the bottleneck and does increasing
co2 cause plants to really grow faster to compensate? If co2 is the bottleneck and an increase in co2 causes
plants to respond in step and keep co2 stable them that's fine but that doesn't appear to be what is happening.
Co2 levels appear to be increasing so obviously this feedback loop is either not working or not working fast enough.
If a 5% increase in co2 causes plants to use 1% more co2 then we still have an increase of 4% so yes plants
might help a little but they aren't really a solution.
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CO2 causes acidification of the oceans, which is a much bigger problem than the greenhouse effect, and will happen much sooner than the point where atmospheric CO2 levels become toxic to humans.
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Re:So.. what? (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't need to talk about costs at all. Costs are measured in the monopoly money we call "currency", and subject as they are to the vagaries and panics of the financial classes, are not an indicator or metric which we should rely on when planning our energy policies.
We need to talk about watts, mega-watt hours, materials, hours of labour, and disposal of waste. We need to talk about physical things, things we know, understand, and can do in the physical world. Not about intellectual casino chips which are magicked in and out of existence like pixels in a video game.
Energy policy is a long game that humanity is playing with the forces of the natural world. Our (dysfunctional) systems of money are about as relevant as our spoken languages in this debate.
Re:So.. what? (Score:4, Funny)
Even solar and wind have some negative affects.
Do not anthropomorphize power generators. They don't like it.
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The total amount of radioactive material put out by a coal power plant is actually larger, per unit of energy produced, than a nuclear power plant. And in a nuclear plant, the radioactivity is confined; even disasters like what happened at Fukushima-Daichi only release a relatively small amount of nuclear material into the environment. Whereas in coal the radioactivity is open to the environment. That's not to mention all the heavy metals that coal produces. Enjoy the mercury in your tuna, courtesy of china
Re:So.. what? (Score:5, Interesting)
The total amount of radioactive material put out by a coal power plant is actually larger, per unit of energy produced, than a nuclear power plant.
No it isn't. The claim that it does can be traced to a single paper written in 1978 by a scientist at Oak Ridge National Lab. The paper only considered nuclear plants during normal operation. Yet more than 98% of radiation from nukes is released during accidents, which the paper ignores. The paper also ignores the biological characteristics of the radiation. Nukes emit radioactive cesium, iodine, and strontium, which tend to bio-accumulate. Nearly all the radiation in coal is thorium, which has no biological role, and just remains inert in the ash.
There are plenty of good reasons to oppose coal. But "radiation" isn't one of them.
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> Yet more than 98% of radiation from nukes is released during accidents, which the paper ignores.
Citation needed.
Unfortunately a lot of anti-nuke people have used Chernobyl figures as a 'baseline' for nuclear accidents, but Chernobyl was a single freak accident and it's impossible that something like that will ever happen again. The causes of the accident (lack of containment building, embarrassingly lax security procedure, out of date reactor design) simply do not exist anymore anywhere in the world. A
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Don't be so dismissive of Chernobyl and Fukushima as freak, one time events.
The causes you mention are proximate causes. The root cause was human stupidity, recklessness, greed, and folly. That's what sank the Titanic. That's what has caused hundreds of oil spills, including Deepwater Horizon and Exxon Valdez. It's what killed thousands of people in Bhopal. Upon inquiry, over and over we find that the operators had plenty of warnings and plenty of measures they could have taken to avoid problems. Th
Re:So.. what? (Score:4, Interesting)
Fossil fuels are depleted in carbon-14 so when they are burned, the amount of carbon-14 in our food is reduced. So, fossil fuels use cuts our radiation exposure. Not a good reason to use them, but the effect is opposite claimed in that paper, which is really a disgrace for ORNL.
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eh. [wikipedia.org]
Any difference looks a lot smaller than the markup I've ended up paying for things like going through an energy co-op instead of straight from the generating company.
[...] We do need to talk about cost but we need to talk about ALL the costs not just the operating costs but all the externalized costs as well.
Not just the costs, but also whether the energy is dispatchable.
Power sources which can be turned on and off at short notice - such as gas and hydro - are economically more valuable than ones which can't - such as coal and nuclear. (Some nuclear plants can be ramped up and down, but the capital costs are so high and the fuel costs so low that it doesn't win you much.)
Any of the above are considerably more valuable than sources which are both non-dispatchable and intermittent, such as wind and solar. (How mu
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Oh, Solar and Wind look ugly.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/PS20andPS10.jpg [wikimedia.org]
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/files/2010/07/wind-farms-1.jpg [telegraph.co.uk]
I'm glad coal and nuclear are so beautiful then.
http://assets.inhabitat.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2011/08/coal-regulations-537x331.jpg [inhabitat.com]
http://assets.inhabitat.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2011/05/RatcliffePowerPlantBlackAndWhite-537x384.jpg [inhabitat.com]
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Maybe we should also talk about the costs then? Nuclear is EXPENSIVE.
No. Nuclear is an economy on a different scale than than non-renewables.
It costs more going in, but you get more coming out.
If we could just stop the unwarranted fear of the technology from dictating public policy, it'd be even more economical.
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Nuclear is dying because it is just too expensive... not from FUD. Even if there was no opposition from environmentalists or fear in the general population, people wouldn't invest in nuclear power.
New nuclear plants cost about $10,000 / kw and their appears to be a negative learning curve so they get more expensive over time.
Solar and wind plants cost less than half that and are getting much cheaper very quickly... plus free "fuel" for the life of the plant and minimal decommissioning costs.
Add in nuclear f
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Nuclear is dying? Is that why dozens of new reactors are under construction worldwide and many existing power plants have been upgraded to produce more power?
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/current-and-future-generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide/ [world-nuclear.org]
It may not be the glamorous renewable energy source, or even the go to source of base power generation, but it still has a solid role in worldwide energy production.
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Nuclear is dying because it is just too expensive
Uhm. I think the stats provided above put a lie to that assertion.
Even if there was no opposition from environmentalists or fear in the general population, people wouldn't invest in nuclear power.
That would mean no obstructionist agenda hyper-inflating the price at every turn. As such, your 10K/kw would be a ludicrously high estimate.
Solar and wind are getting cheaper. But solar and wind CANNOT BE USED AS BASELINE POWER. PERIOD. Which means when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing you have to augment the grid for the power these sites are now NOT generating.
And guess who's got the in there.
Natural gas. Yet another ex
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in USA there was an uptick in something called a Lebron. I haven't figured out what it was, and frankly since the world didn't melt down, I figure it was irrelephant.
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No, I'm not sure if we're frightened enough. I think if you polled most american's right now, The number one fear would be gluten, followed by vaccines.
Actually, right now you need to put Ebola on the top of the list, but that's just for the next few days. Once the media stops covering it, your list is about correct.
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Maybe we should also talk about the costs then? Nuclear is EXPENSIVE.
Compared to natural gas? You got that right. At least for all the really old nuclear plants here in the US of A, which is why they are starting to shut them down
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As soon as we can discuss TEPCO being idiots for ignoring their engineers and not building the infrastructure as required.
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I think that's the syndrome where all of USA imports contain lead or other toxic chemicals.
In other random thoughts, this would a great way for Japan to get rid of their waste.... just export it super cheat to USA in all their products. Maybe in that generations PlayStation and call it the PS-235.
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Meh, it's an mdsolar submission - so the inference you're expected to draw from it is OMG TEH NUCULAR IS BAD!!ONEONE!
Tell me again how many people died as a result of radiation leaks at Fukushima.
And how many died as a result of the tsunami.
And compare & contrast the relative panic and news coverage of the two.
Bah.
Re:So.. what? (Score:5, Insightful)
The tsunami continues to be a very big deal in Japan. More so than the nuclear accident at the time, and rivalling it now. The thing is the tsunami happened and that was it. Things are being done to improve safety and rebuild, but for the people left alive there isn't much on-going danger.
Fukushima, on the other hand, continues to release contaminated material and water into the environment, continues to suck up vast amounts of money with no limit and no end in sight, and continues to prevent full clean-up and re-building in the areas around the plant.
Both were terrible tragedies, but in the end Fukushima is going to cost more and last a lot longer. It also lead to the discovery of problems at many other plants, and brought into question many of the assumptions that were made about safety. The tsunami raised safety questions too, but the solution is clear: stronger defences, earlier warnings, move away from some areas. The way forward for nuclear is not so clear, so there is still a lot of debating to be done.
Japanese people have a far better understanding of the issues than you give them credit for, and I'd go as far as to say many of them have a better understanding than you.
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Tell me again how many people will die next time a nuke goes rogue close to a 30 million citizens city in California.
X people will die (X greater 1) in car accidents trying to flee the city.
And a year later in a /. discussion you will explain us calm wordily: 'there was no death to the accident, the panic amoung the people fleeing, caused more deaths than the radiation! (Erm, no death, more than ... a contradiction)
You know, we use(d) to say in Germany: "What does concern me nuclear plants or nuclear power?
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Well, it probably makes no difference to the clean-up, but it does add to the take-away lessons from the disaster. It's an ongoing theme that TEPCO knew less about what was going on at the time than they thought or led us to believe. You have to set that against the overall good news that the failsafe designs of even this relatively primitive reactor mostly contained the accident. The principles of engineering are sound; management, not so much; at least not in a disaster.
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and the real bad news is... (Score:4, Informative)
oh, and in case you don't know the law... here it is. [npr.org]
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I wouldn't worry too much about Fukushima, per se.
It's the fact that the State Secret law passed days after the abandonment of the pacifist sections of the Constitution, at a time Japan desperately needs to get rid of masses of deadly radioactive material, that you need to concern yourself with.
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Since 'the incident' the police is knocking on doors of young couples living in the Fukushima area and in the fall out zones north east of it, telling the couples: " you know, you should consider to have no children" (Or move away to the far south or Hokkaido)
Yes, that is not at all or at least rarely in the news, certainly not in the west.
Japan is disrupted in a 'put head into sand', 'don't lose faith/face', 'but we have to do something', 'we don't know how to cleanup', 'we don't know how to punish TEPCO (
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Those noted nuclear apologists at the World Health Organization state that "up to 4000" people could die due to exposure to radionuclides released by the Soviets' stupidity at Chernobyl. But hey, everyone alive in 1986 will eventually die, so maybe we should just count everyone, right?
Meanwhile coal (like that sweet lignite that Germany is digging up now) goes on killing at least HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE EVERY YEAR*, yet people seem only to care about teh ebil raydeeayshun. Maybe the coal casualties
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Since 'the incident' the police is knocking on doors of young couples living in the Fukushima area and in the fall out zones north east of it, telling the couples: " you know, you should consider to have no children" (Or move away to the far south or Hokkaido)
Can you actually show this, or is this just the latest of the tall tales making its rounds on the anti-nuclear blogosphere? And anyway, even if it did happen in some form, all it would show is that people are afraid and giving each other potentially poor advice. It doesn't show that they're at actual substantial risk of harm, otherwise you could go around telling everybody to stay indoors to prevent them from being run over by cars (you know, this we can actually show to happen [cdc.gov]).
In Chernobyl the death toll over all is estimated to be a million, roughly. /. posters claim it was 3 or 5 ...
Ugh, not that rag again. Yab
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Erm, in what dream world do you live?
In the last 15 years we had roughly 1000 articles on /. that showed peer reviewed magazines can not be trusted as the reviewers either lack the skills or the knowledge or are bribed.
So the 'it is not peer reviewed' mantra, or how ever you want to name it, or the citation needed mantra, is just mood.
Actually there are real people living there, and if one tells me: the moon is yellow, then I believe him. Why should I not?
I don't need a peer reviewed magazine or paper to re
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Since 'the incident' the police is knocking on doors of young couples living in the Fukushima area and in the fall out zones north east of it, telling the couples: " you know, you should consider to have no children" (Or move away to the far south or Hokkaido)
Last I heard, it wasn't a big problem to get the Japanese to have no children. They have one of the lowest birth rates on Earth.
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Is anybody surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
In case of a nuclear accident, the industry will always downplay and deny everything that is not perfectly obvious. Has always been, and probably will always be. This is the main reason I do not trust nuclear power that is run for profit.
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In case of a nuclear accident, the industry will always downplay and deny everything that is not perfectly obvious. Has always been, and probably will always be. This is the main reason I do not trust nuclear power that is run for profit.
Whereas non-nuclear power that is run for profit has always been quite trustworthy.
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Non-nuclear power has well known consequences. An important one for coal is the release of mercury, lead and radon (!) into the atmosphere. Of course industry has downplayed it, but it is very easy to verify.
As for state owned power - it depends on whether you trust the system. If it is totalitarian, so is the management of power plants.
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Non-nuclear power has well known consequences. An important one for coal is the release of mercury, lead and radon (!) into the atmosphere.
Oh, and enough radioactive carbon-14 to make nuclear power look safe by comparison.
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In case of a nuclear accident, the industry will always downplay and deny everything that is not perfectly obvious. Has always been, and probably will always be. This is the main reason I do not trust nuclear power that is run for profit.
Right, because coal is working out so safely for us.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K... [wikipedia.org]
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I do not trust nuclear power that is run for profit.
Uh, was Chernobyl run for profit?
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In case of a nuclear accident, the industry will always downplay and deny everything that is not perfectly obvious. Has always been, and probably will always be. This is the main reason I do not trust nuclear power that is run for profit.
So Chernobyl was ok with you? Yikes, you might want to rethink that..
I think this means (Score:2, Interesting)
fuel at the No. 3 reactor began melting at 5:30 a.m. on March 13
I think this confirms that that they should not have flooded the reactor with seawater because the meltdown had already happened by the time they made that decision. They flooded the reactor on March 15th, as a last ditch attempt to prevent a meltdown. But it was too late to save the reactor since the fuel was already completely melted. So all the seawater did was let more nuclear material escape.
Or, alternatively, they should have flooded it with seawater days ahead of time. The tsunami was March 11th,
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Consider that we are only realizing this now though, years later. Lack of information was a huge problem at the time. When the plant was in crisis and people couldn't get near the reactors to check them there was a lot of guesswork.
The reason they didn't flood with seawater earlier was that they were pumping water in with fire engines. That was an established emergency procedure but failed to work because the cooling system was damaged and once again a lack of information lead to much of the water being syp
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Consider that we are only realizing this now though, years later. Lack of information was a huge problem at the time.
Yes, but that is a well known problem. In every core meltdown, lack of information has been a serious issue. Guess why? Because the sensors melt, too. An expert may be able to guess what is going on, but it is beyond the skill of a typical operator.
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I can accept that, but with reservations.
A lack of timely information lies at the heart of all nuclear accidents, large and small. It would seem to follow that to improve safety, you'd want to improve on sensors - the number, resilience and backups.
They were using helicopters, IIRC, which raises the question of what cameras and other sensors could have been used on those helicopters to fill in the gaps in their knowledge.
Did they try firing simple rockets into the reactor core? Something capable of carrying
Re: I think this means (Score:3)
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Meanwhile on slashdot the 5-insightful pro-nuclear shills were attacking anyone saying a meltdown was obvious. You can go look at the posts in the threads, they are still there for everyone to see how wrong they were then & now.
Pro-nuclear shills vs. anti-nuclear shills!
Film at 11:00!
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Cooling down a molten core to the point where it solidfies reduces emissions quite enormously, especially when the containment (such as a Mark I BWR containment), wasn't designed to stay fully sealed after a meltdown. Otherwise, when the hot molten core just sits there, more aerosols (maiinly Caesium) are created and eventually scattered in the environment.
When this containment was designed, back in 1958-1962, it was sufficient to ensure that there would be no catastrophic numbers of casualties after any po
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The containment buildings were supposed to contain everything, but they were damaged by hydrogen explosions. The hydrogen gas was supposed to have been vented, but the battery powered venting system stopped working after the disaster. Some consideration was given to venting into the atmosphere, but it was decided not to. A bad choice in hindsight, but they thought that their emergency cooling measures would work.
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The containment buildings were supposed to contain everything, but they were damaged by hydrogen explosions. The hydrogen gas was supposed to have been vented, but the battery powered venting system stopped working after the disaster. Some consideration was given to venting into the atmosphere, but it was decided not to. A bad choice in hindsight, but they thought that their emergency cooling measures would work.
I don't know much about Japan... but in the US most plant upgrades have been denied permits by the feds because of work done by organizations like Greenpeace. If I didn't know better, I'd think they were intentionally trying to cause accidents to further their anti-nuclear agenda.
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Nuclear power plants in the United States with operating licenses undergo a continuous process of upgrade and modification, will continue to do so throughout their operating life, and in some cases continue to receive upgrades after retirement if in safestore mode. Over the last 20 years enormous effort has gone into simplifying and
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fuel at the No. 3 reactor began melting at 5:30 a.m. on March 13
I think this confirms that that they should not have flooded the reactor with seawater because the meltdown had already happened by the time they made that decision. They flooded the reactor on March 15th, as a last ditch attempt to prevent a meltdown. But it was too late to save the reactor since the fuel was already completely melted. So all the seawater did was let more nuclear material escape.
Or, alternatively, they should have flooded it with seawater days ahead of time. The tsunami was March 11th, so perhaps had they made that decision on March 12th it would have been in time to prevent the worst of it? Ehh... maybe not.... the reactor foundation was probably already damaged by that point. :-(
Armchair quarterbacking something this complex is a tad ridiculous don't you think? This reactor survived one of the worst natural disasters ever recorded. People were freaking out, the government was threatening to take over the plant, and worst of all they feared the earthquake was so strong that it had broken the containment vessel. Thank God it survived mostly unscathed.
If there's one thing we can say in hindsight it's that there would have been almost no release of dangerous materials if there had been
Re:I think this means (Score:5, Insightful)
That is incorrect. ... the surrounding power pillions failed, shutting off the plant from external power.
The mag 9.5 quake was 450 miles away.
Ar the place of the reactor the quake was not even mag 6
The plant itself was damaged by far enough to be unable to produce its own power and cool itself.
And then the Tsunami hi tits emergency power.
So, claiming the 'plant survived' a '.... how was your words? Ah: "This reactor survived one of the worst natural disasters ever recorded." '
No, it certainly did not. It is smoldering in its ashes.
Not only was it NOT EVEN HIT, by the 'worst natural disaster', but it got destroyed by its wake (1 thousand times weaker than the a actual disaster/quake)!! Or actually as wake implies by the water of the tsunami.
Even if there had not been a tsunami, the plant was destroyed. What is so fucking difficult in accepting that? Sure, the emergency diesel power likely had prevented a 'disaster'.
But the plant never would have gone online again.
Claiming 'it survived the biggest catastrophe in mankind' is bullshit, and is a disrespect to the dead of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, or the simple earth quakes of the last 100 years.
Google/Wikipedia for it. The official death toll is never even close to the 'unofficial' one. And all those quakes certainly qualify your brain dead definition of 'biggest disasters naturally recorded' ... Fukushima was no such thing yet. It will be in 30 or 50 years when the radiation death will start piling up.
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You are right that the Tsunami was the issue here, not the earthquake, which the plant survived largely in one piece.
However, I take exception to you description of the plant as being "smoldering in its ashes". Not exactly...
The plant survived largely in one piece, sans the emergency generators and stuff that the sea water fouled. They have had some difficulties with keeping the reactors cooled and we have seen significant releases of radioactive materials into the environment because of the core(s) tha
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Design a system to be idiot proof, and they will simply design a better idiot.
Communications and knowledge were a problem (Score:5, Informative)
There were poor decisions and communication between various designers and operators. Take for example, the situation at reactor 1. After the generators started, the emergency reactor cooling condensers should have switched on to provide cooling. However, operators had found that they were very effective and being unfamiliar with their use were concerned that they would cause thermal shock to the reactor. Not familiar with the operation of this system, the operators decided to manually switch off the condenser system to arrest the temperature drop. They would then switch them on again manually as reactor temp rose again. This worked fine, until the generators failed, removing control and monitoring from this system.
Operators at emergency control, in a separate quake-proof building asked for confirmation of operation, but the control room could not give it. So,workers went out to inspect the reactor building for steam rising from the condenser stacks. They reported some steam rising, and it was assumed that the system was operational. However, the condenser system had never been used or tested since the plants were constructed 40 years ago. No one knew how they worked and how quickly they could cool the reactor, no one knew how much steam was produced during operation. It turns out that the workers sent out for reconnaissance saw only faint steam trickling from the stacks, consistent with the system having been switched off for many minutes, but still containing some residual heat. Had the system been switched on, the clouds of steam would have been so profuse and so dense that the it would have been impossible even to see the reactor building, let alone identify the condenser stacks.
On the assumption that the system was operational, other attempts to provide emergency cooling were suspended or delayed. A steam/battery powered pump system was available to deliver fresh water to the reactor, but without a heatsink (condenser) available, the reactor temperature rapidly rose and so did reactor pressure, eventually overcoming the maximum discharge pressure of the coolant injection system. After a few hours, the UPS controlling this system discharged and it also failed.
After 24 hours, reactor pressure unexpectedly dropped. Operators realised that this might permit external coolant injection and fire engines were called in. There was a huge delay, as the fire engines were unable to reach the site due to debris and some had been destroyed by the tsunami. Subsequent investigation showed that despite massive coolant injection, coolant did not rise in the reactor. The cause was thought to be due to damage to the reactor vessel or a pipe. In retrospect, it probably indicated damage to the reactor following meltdown of the fuel.
There were also design oversights in the emergency systems for the plants. One of the final backup schemes for reactor cooling was the ability to connect fire engines to the reactor to inject coolant. It subsequently became apparent that in units 2 and 3, this water didn't reach the reactor, and collected in a condenser unit instead. This was always going to happen, due to the way in which the water pipes were connected. There was a pump connected between the storage tank and the injection flow pipe. Under normal injection conditions, the pump would have been running, and any additional water from the fire engine would likely have gone towards the reactor, and this presumably was the assumption under which the water injection protocol was developed. However, under power failure conditions, the pump was unpowered. Due to the design of the pump - a rotodynamic (impeller) pump. this pump would have offered little or no resistance to reverse flow when unpowered.
Re:A few notes on the construction of the fuel (Score:2)
The media had a hayday trying to cover an event in deep coverup. What they reported revealed volumes.
They reported the Hydrogen Explosion. This was the first indicator to the public a major event happened. What the media does not know.
1 The fuel pellets are held in rods made of Zirconium. This is because it is transparant to the reaction and does not slow the reaction so it can be controlled by control rods.
2 Zirconium is flamable, even in water. It burns even better in water than in air. It breaks do
Stupid Website (Score:2)
As if asahi.com wasn't already borked from the canal story, we link to them again?
The man who saved Onagawa (Score:5, Insightful)
Great article!!! (Score:2)
This needs mod points!!!!
Re: (Score:2)
Mod parent up. Very informative.
This is why we need NEW reactors (Score:4, Interesting)
can not fail (Score:5, Insightful)
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The old reactors required ACTIVE work to stop them from melting down.
OTOH, the molten salt requires an ACTIVE system to keep it going and a simple passive one to shut it down.
BIG difference.
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Those of us who are old enough to remember the 80s, 70s, 60s even - we remember how each generation of nuclear power was supposed to be cleaner, cheaper, safer than the one before.
Yes, they were. And the reason they weren't is because those newer-generation reactors were never built. We had the first gen reactors built in the early 50s that were horrible, and the second generation (like Fukishima) in the 60s and early 70s which were much better than the first-gen, but still had some potentially nasty failure modes and required active management to be safe. And that's where we stopped. The third and fourth-gen reactors were never built. So, yes, we hear about all these new generations
Re: (Score:2)
I went to zion nuke plant when it was first opened in the early 70's. And as a schoolkid, I thought it was cool. BUT, it was killed back in the 90's. Why? Because a tech made a SIMPLE mistake. Now, he never caused a meltdown or even came close, BUT, he did manage to destroy ONE of 2 reactors. Because it was a dual reactor (shared the same steam generator to keep down costs), once 1 reactor was destroyed, the other could not be used.
BUT what was the real problem? It was because it was a gen 2 rea
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Explains the neutrons (Score:2)
Bad day (Score:2)
Here [youtube.com] is a very good documentary on how things played out.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Back when the accident happened, a significant number of Slashdotters were saying that no meltdown had occurred, that there was no significant structural damage, that no radioactive material would reach the sea, that the incident was overblown and that the plant would be largely still operational.
God, we're sure lucky to have someone so intelligent as you to save us from ourselves... lets review the first article on slashdot about Fukushima so we can let you revel in our combined humiliation:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
What's this? The post had meltdown right in the title? How could this be?!!?
Oh that's right, you're full of shit.
And just to make it clear, if you read through those posts... the Slashdot consensus at the time was the same as yours: The worlds over... big corporations just killed
Re: (Score:2)
An apology for not once, in all subsequent Slashdot debates, conceding that honest debate is superior to dishonest control
Why don't you set a good example for us?
Re: (Score:2)
Valid points. Can't help but note the same group is out downmodding any comment pointing this out.
sPh
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