Saturday 12 March 2011

Not Good

22 comments:

Raedwald said...

The only thing stupider than putting a nuclear plant on a fault would be a very rich man building a world-class museum filled with priceless and irreplaceable objects right on a fault. Oh hang on ....

CityUnslicker said...

They did not model a big enough quake. Hopefully the cement casing will hold! Very bad if it does not.

Mark Wadsworth said...

I'd go further and describe this as "bad", but I don't want to be alarmist or anything.

BrianSJ said...

See http://bit.ly/dXyWeH I think we are a long way from having the reactor to worry about.

Bill Quango MP said...

IIRC one of the the dangers at Chernobyl was all the water used to fight the fires collected in a room under under the reactor floor.
Then the floor began to melt and the thought was that if the reactor fell into this swimming pool then .. well then a big bang and not much else after that.

That's where all those coal miners got radiation poisoning, digging a tunnel down to the reactor.

Anonymous said...

This is why I have a gut feeling that nuclear is not the way forward. It's impossible to guard against every possible eventuality for disaster. There's always something not factored in (black swan event). I had always thought the problems could stem from burying nuclear waste (a fine legacy to our descendents) and I suppose an earthquake affecting a nuclear waste store could be equally ghastly. However earthquakes and terroroist attacks are just as likely onto the power plants themselves. It's just too inherently dangerous but there are a lot of vested interests who will argue for nuclear.

We now have 3 disasters: Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island and now this one. Will we ever learn?

Anonymous said...

Re: Will we ever learn?

You drive, fly and take trains despite the history of these. You also sit around in very close proximity to one of the largest nuclear reactor in our solar system.

Worried? Life is too short and you are too susceptible.

Anonymous said...

Years ago nuclear power was promised as a cheap unlimited form of power, it has proved to be a very expensive form of power taking into account decommissioning, that's why when Maggie tried to float it off it was a total flop, in the earlier years nuclear power was used to enrich fuel so that nuclear bombs could be manufactured. I know around London it is relatively earthquake free anyone happy about a nuclear plant situated in the London area.

rwendland said...

Reuters reported Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano giving a reasonable (if not complete) statement at long last, with a sea water cooling plan using Boric acid to prevent a criticality accident.

The big worry as I see it, is if the explosion damage and radiation release will prevent the ongoing cooling of the other two hot (and larger) reactors in the complex. They too had lost backup cooling power and systems. It may be a time for Japanese nuc workers to show the heroism that thier Chernobyl soviet brother workers showed nearly 25 years ago.

Also in giving the sea water emergency plan, seemingly no explanation was given about what they would do with the outgoing nuclear polluted sea water. Back into the sea? Or can they pond it and recirculate so we don't pour radiation into the ocean?

Beyond this showing the stupidity of building in a fault zone, it may show that building multi-reactor complexes is dumb.

rwendland said...

BTW concrete containment buildings normally use about two to three metre thick reinforced concrete, acting as part of the biological nuclear shielding.

That little puff in the distance we see on our TVs must have been quite an expolsion up close.

I would not want to be within 2 km of the steel containment of a fresh hot core, without that several metres of concrete in the way. I would have thought lots of nasty gamma and neutrons are pouring out of there. Lead jockey strap time, to say the very least. Some heros are in the making.

Electro-Kevin said...

What a mess.

How the hell do you put all this back together ?

CityUnslicker said...

glad too see this was not the reactor core and they have it under control.


I am not anti-nuclear, but building them on fault lines by the sea is surely pushing it?

Mr Ecks said...

Chernobyl was a piece of Soviet crap(no disrespect to the brave men who dealt with it). These Japanese reactors will not go into meltdown and even if they did, underground is the best place for material. Nuclear power is the safest form of energy ever devised. The real danger to mankind is posed by the green freak-show. It was those liars partly succesful attack on nukes that embolded them for the AGW bullshit.

alan said...

Writeups by a couple of pro nuclear web sites I follow.

http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2011/03/nuclear-safety-and-fukushima-dai-ichi.html

http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/article/earthquake_v._powerplant/

Bill Quango MP said...

Quite a few contradictory reports.
It seems its either

"All under control"
or
"A race against time."

No one knows yet.
Lots of scary stuff on CNN, some that seems just wise to do.
Issue iodine, get the army's chem/nuc squads on hand. Prepare for evacuation?
{Bet they never planned for that to happen after a Tsunami!}

Raedwald said...

Anon 2.55 - "Anyone happy about siting a nuclear reactor in the London area?" Yes, me! I've banged on for years that the best use of a bleak, hostile, ugly stretch of stinking marsh called Thamesmead would be to displace the few atavistic and primitive natives who have settled there and build a nuclear plant instead.

rwendland said...

Per my comment above, Reuters now reporting the emergency cooling system is no longer functioning at another reactor (Unit 3) at the complex ...

I may have overstated the direct radiation shine problem for this particular BWR design of reactor above. It seems the reactor pressure vessel is in a "drywell", so may be semi-underground. If so, the on-site workers are lucky as the soil will provide some protection from direct gamma and neutron radiation from the steel pressure vessel.

Sean said...

roof designed to blow up rather than blow down, thus save the core from further damage. steel structure left intact, good design safeguards.

Sean said...

anon, the most dangerous energy production is hydro as more deaths per kilowatt produced.

If I say to you, its safe to drive from London to Brighton, thats not an untrue statement is it? even though you could be killed in a horrible accident.

Timbo614 said...

If this proceeds to the worst case - meltdown - and the design holds in that no serious radiation leak occurs then it would have to be hats off to the engineers and designers.

Even then, can they get the less damaged pair back on line? What to do afterwards? You have a melted reactor core (or two) sitting on your island in the middle of your most essential power station. How long and how much money will it take to solve that problem? Rolling power cuts are already scheduled when they most need power for hospitals and emergency centres.

Tsunami aside, the reactors are going to be a very long term problem for the Japanese to solve. They have built a monster in their midst.

My heart goes out to the people of Japan devastated by this earthquake and tsunami, but I worry mostly for the medium to long term.

rwendland said...

Sean, if having the steel roof of your reactor blow off is so good, why did they drop this idea in Mark III of the BWR containment design, which switched to the usual modern concrete dome design?

With this steel roof design, the head of the primary containment (called the "drywell head") may have blown off with the roof, exposing to the air the top of the pressure vessel (which hopefully has not also blown off). This might explain why there is a 20km airplane exclusion zone around the plant.

The more modern concrete roof design would have retained all this mess under the concrete.

Sean said...

well i did not say it was good, i said it was better than an explosion damaging the containment vessel and then the core. And if you can protect those two things you are are probably going to avoid a Chernobyl type accident.

From the photos ive seen the steel substructure and the top of the containment looks intact.

I doubt the gases caused by cooling, are going to be too hazardous, and dealing with them under a concreate roof would be problematic. My point is it might have made the situation easier to deal with...maybe we have the design wrong?

I dont have good internet at the moment, but I assume the reactor switched off and the core is cooling, and the problem is the rate of cooling.