Reactor Meltdown in Japan!

By Friday May 13, 2011

Unfortunately nobody is covering this except this guy:

Found by D. Lacey



34 Comments
  1. Publius says:
    5/13/2011 at 6:07 pm

    TV news has lost its value. just move on.

    Reply
  2. The_Tick says:
    5/13/2011 at 7:13 pm

    Funny how something like this gets all the nancie’s going. The reactors were past due to be decomisioned so they did indeed standup to their scheduled life expectancy. A couple cowardly simps shouldn’t deter us from moving forward with nuclear energy. Cover it in crete and deal with godzilla when he rises in a few years.

    Reply
  3. Confuzled says:
    5/14/2011 at 12:54 am

    Did I hear him apologizing for Mururoa Atoll?

    Reply
  4. Mr. Fusion says:
    5/14/2011 at 7:38 am

    Much fuss about something expected.

    We want our electric lives, AC, TV, iPods, computers, etc. No matter how we get that electricity there is some trade off.

    You want hydro? Well, some water is going to be dammed and some fish will have a tough swim.

    You want coal fired generators? Look for excessive CO2, SO2, and HNO3. Also figure out what you are going to do with all that ash.

    You want wind? Look for dead birds, whirring noise, and a lot of trees cut down. And brown outs when the wind is calm.

    You want solar. Look for shutting down your life every night.

    You want nuclear? Look for a place to dispose the waste and the occasional accident. AND a lot of wusses all excited when Godzilla steps on their favorite geisha hall.

    Everything is a trade off. We try our best to keep the negative elements to a minimum but sometimes things get bigger than we thought. You can design your reactor to survive a 747 crashing into it, a 8.5 earthquake, and a 25′ tsunami. BUT when a A380, a 9.0 earthquake, or a 30′ tsunami happens, well, … shit happens.

    Reply
  5. msbpodcast says:
    5/14/2011 at 9:52 am

    Try this.

    Guys in aluminium foil suits are standing around the reactor.

    I wouldn’t get too worried … yet.

    Reply
  6. msbpodcast says:
    5/14/2011 at 10:04 am

    In #24, Mr. Fusion said: You want solar. Look for shutting down your life every night.

    Solar focused on salts heat the stuff until it becomes molten and the latent heat remains for a long time to boil low viscosity oil to drive steam turbines which generate electricity.

    A few kilotons of salts would tide you over a sunless period of several days, which just doesn’t happen in some arid south western states.

    Of course if the mega volcano under Yosemite blows up, (and someday it will happen,) so much shit will hit so many fans that not having electricity from the desert will be the least of your problems.

    Reply
  7. msbpodcast says:
    5/14/2011 at 10:27 am

    Risk assessment is done from the wrong perspective.

    Its a systemantic principle that Fail-safe systems fail by failing to fail-safely.

    Just taking to heart that change in perspective causes the design of systems to change from if to when.

    Instead of “How likely is <something> to happen in X years?” they should be asking the question entirely differently.

    They should be asking: :How will we get along when <something> happens and deprives us of power?

    For one thing, it would lead to systems designed so that single points of failure stop the entire from working entirely instead of the current the nuclear reaction goes on on its own.

    If they had implemented even a single zip feature which would have taken brought the fuel down to sub-critical units fissionable units the moment that a tremblor is detected, (out of the many plant improvements possible,) we would not be having these posts.

    Reply
  8. msbpodcast says:
    5/14/2011 at 10:39 am

    No I’m not a nuclear engineer, I’m a systems designer.

    I design systems that fail elegantly instead of work mysteriously.

    Elegant comes from the Latin e (meaning out) and legare (meaning choose*).

    An elegant system is one where Occam’s razor has been applied and everything that is unnecessary has been out-chosen.

    Implementing a reactor core so that it only produces electricity (and fissionables) when everything is perfect and stops working (and producing fissionables) when things are not perfect is easy, but it has to be done from the start.

    You can’t retrofit safety.

    *) the word legage is also at the root of legal which is who we choose to get along.

    Reply
  9. LibertyLover says:
    5/14/2011 at 6:42 pm

    #24, Holy Cow. Is that really you?

    Reply
  10. McCullough says:
    5/14/2011 at 7:07 pm

    “You want solar. Look for shutting down your life every night.”

    Many areas cannot efficiently do solar, but most areas in the West can. Batteries store the energy collected during the day. I’ve heard of super capacitors in the near future. And, yes, battery disposal is an issue.

    I think it will take different strategies in diff areas. Could create some jobs? Obama, where the fuck are you?

    Reply
  11. Mr. Fusion says:
    5/15/2011 at 3:23 am

    #26 & 30,

    My point is that everything has some trade off. Yes, I could have covered every point. Perhaps I’ll make that the major theme of my next book. (cue laugh track)

    The Japanese nuclear generator survived a serious earthquake without any significant damage. It survived the external power failure by using its own diesel generation. Where it failed is the tsunami knocked the diesel generators out by contaminating the fuel supply. The batteries worked as intended until they too died. Also, the batteries didn’t have the power to keep the water out of the diesel generators so they were flooded before fresh fuel could be sourced.

    The expected catastrophic failure safeguards worked except for the tsunami being larger than expected. Yes, the fuel could have been kept higher than it was to avoid the water. That raises the question; how high should they have anticipated the water? Eight meters? Fifteen meters? 35 meters? At what point would have been high enough?

    It is because of all the redundancies and fail-safes that nuclear is so expensive to build. That is the tradeoff. Every other power source also has some tradeoff. None of them are free. While we can consider and plan for the problems of solar and wind, we can also build safeguards into nuclear to gain a steady supply or coal to be a clean(er) source.

    So while I won’t volunteer to stand naked in front of a melting core, I won’t say nuclear power is all bad. Just expensive to build and maintain. And I’ll sleep tonight knowing there are several nuclear power stations within 100 miles of here.

    Reply
  12. bobbo, PUKES aren't the only ones lying all the time says:
    5/15/2011 at 10:34 am

    Say Fusion==yes, trade offs to everything. What do you think of some like me who think some trade offs just aren’t worth the risk? And suppose the MAJORITY of voters agree with me.

    Can you stand democracy?

    Reply
  13. spookie says:
    5/15/2011 at 2:25 pm

    Because it’s a NON-STORY! Nuclear scientists don’t use the word meltdown for a reason–it has no meaning! I live the width of the Mississippi from a reactor of the exact GE design of those in Japan. It worries me not, because if a crisis occurred that caused a dangerous situation, I’d have other things to worry about. Nuclear is safe and clean and produces far less radiation than coal plants.

    Reply
  14. Glenn E. says:
    5/17/2011 at 10:34 pm

    As bad as this is. And it is pretty bad, I won’t deny it. It’s nowhere near as bad as the 15 megaton nuclear blast that the US military set off by accident (it was suppose to be only 5MT) in the Pacific Ocean, back in the 1950s. And the 66 other nuclear tests conducted out there, at the Bikini Atoll, to impress the Russians that the US could out obliterate the world, more than they could. Only when the Russians demonstrated that they could whip up a 50MT warhead (and a 100MT one was possible too), and cooked half of the Arctic circle. Did the US choose to ban nuke testing above ground, and out in the world’s oceans. Of course this didn’t stop others from doing it, like the French military.

    But now it’s all this worry about a relatively tiny radiation leak into the ocean, near Japan. Wow. Aren’t we all ecologically concerned, all of a sudden. And yet, nobody in the media is talking about NOT building more nuclear reactors. At least not this shoddy design, Japan adopted. There are better designs. But you know they’re not the ones that will get chosen, come the next reactor building boom. Corners will always be cut. Safety will always be compromised. Inspectors will always be paid off.

    Just how much are you willing to risk be irradiated by accident, in order to be able to power your Playstation 3?

    Reply

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