Earthquake in Japan....9.0...ouch!

Surely now is the time to look at just shutting them down as quickly as they can regardless of the damage it will cause to them.
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They were shut down on Friday.
 
Evilsod said:
Well thats part of the problem. Nobody has any clue what the situation is and the only updates we get are large explosions, which the media will blow completely out of proportion because they don't understand whats going on either. Surely now is the time to look at just shutting them down as quickly as they can regardless of the damage it will cause to them.
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As said above they were automatically shut down as soon as the earthquake hit, but it is not like a car, they still produce heat that needs cooling. As far as I'm aware the reactors were wrecked when they pumped sea water through them.
 
If the rest of the World gets cold feet on nuclear new build it could be good for the UK. At present reactor pressure vessels require massive forging plants to manufacture of which there only 3 in the World atm. This is a major bottleneck in the gen3+ build schedule. The UK has yet to secure foundry time and so may be slotted into the programme many years from now. If new builds are cancelled slots will become available earlier.
 
The state of play tonight:

Status of quake-stricken reactors at Fukushima nuclear power plants

TOKYO, March 16, Kyodo


The following is the known status as of Tuesday evening of each of the six reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant and the four reactors at the Fukushima No. 2 plant, both in Fukushima Prefecture, crippled by Friday's magnitude 9.0 earthquake and ensuing tsunami.

Fukushima No. 1

-- Reactor No. 1 - Cooling failure, partial melting of core, vapor vented, hydrogen explosion, seawater pumped in.

-- Reactor No. 2 - Cooling failure, seawater pumped in, fuel rods fully exposed temporarily, vapor vented, damage to containment system, potential meltdown feared.

-- Reactor No. 3 - Cooling failure, partial melting of core feared, vapor vented, seawater pumped in, hydrogen explosion, high-level radiation measured nearby.

-- Reactor No. 4 - Under maintenance when quake struck, fire caused possibly by hydrogen explosion at pool holding spent fuel rods, pool water level feared receding.

-- Reactor No. 5 - Under maintenance when quake struck, temperature slightly rising at spent fuel pool.

-- Reactor No. 6 - Under maintenance when quake struck, temperature slightly rising at spent fuel pool.

Fukushima No. 2

-- Reactor No. 1 - Cooling failure, then cold shutdown.

-- Reactor No. 2 - Cooling failure, then cold shutdown.

-- Reactor No. 3 - Cold shutdown.

-- Reactor No. 4 - Cooling failure, then cold shutdown.

==Kyodo
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NEWS ADVISORY: Gov't orders injection of water into No. 4 reactor spent fuel pool at Fukushima plant 00:59 16 March
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Stovies said:
Would you still say that if you lived close to one?
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Live next to 2 of them at Heysham.
Doesnt bother me in the slightest & actually hoping Heysham gets the nod for building a 3rd power station as it'll do wonders for the local economy.
 
Shoei said:
Live next to 2 of them at Heysham.
Doesnt bother me in the slightest & actually hoping Heysham gets the nod for building a 3rd power station as it'll do wonders for the local economy.
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So am I as my family work at the power station. I am not in fear of Heysham exploding.
 
Has anyone read how they are getting water into the spent fuel pool in reactor 4? Theres a story on one of the main Japanese channels (a while before that announcement) that they were considering using choppers to dump water on top of the building but were weighing up the potential risk to the chopper and people in it?

For the people that know, just how radioactive is spent fuel vs the rods inside the core, what kinds of things will it be chucking out, and secondly, surely worried about the people in the chopper and being able to just dump water in there means the containment building is open at the top and the rods are essentially exposed to the outside now?
 
You guys should read this article, it is pretty much telling the truth with no scaremongering
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/15/fukushima_update_tuesday/
According to Flat Earth News, By Nick Davies there were only 56 deaths that are officially caused by Chernobyl and not the thousands that everyone thinks.
From the article it debunks another of the scaremongering


The heat in the reactors now is produced by residual isotopes decaying, not a full-blown fission chain reaction. It will by now be less than 1 per cent of the cores' normal output and chances remain good that the Fukushima crews will manage to keep the three hard-hit cores cooled such that they don't actually melt – though it is acknowledged that they are now probably damaged beyond economical repair, the more so as they were nearing the end of their lives anyway.

If they can't be kept cooled and the cores melt, this will drop the molten fuel into coolant remaining beneath, and it will solidify again in a less dangerous state. Cleanup will be more difficult if this happens, but provided the containment vessel remains unbreached there will be no massive release of radioactives. There is basically no chance of any Chernobyl-style incident*.
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drunkenmaster said:
Has anyone read how they are getting water into the spent fuel pool in reactor 4? Theres a story on one of the main Japanese channels (a while before that announcement) that they were considering using choppers to dump water on top of the building but were weighing up the potential risk to the chopper and people in it?

For the people that know, just how radioactive is spent fuel vs the rods inside the core, what kinds of things will it be chucking out, and secondly, surely worried about the people in the chopper and being able to just dump water in there means the containment building is open at the top and the rods are essentially exposed to the outside now?
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I believe that the spent fuel is a mixture of unfissioned fuel, and stuff with a half life of a few hundred days to a few hundred years. It is more dangerous than the unused fuel rods, since the specific activity is much higher in shorter lived isotopes. I suspect they dump the containers of spent fuel in an open pool, rather than put a big container around the pool itself, so the helicopter thing doesn't mean the fuel is directly exposed.

chaosdestro0 said:
You guys should read this article, it is pretty much telling the truth with no scaremongering
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/15/fukushima_update_tuesday/
According to Flat Earth News, By Nick Davies there were only 56 deaths that are officially caused by Chernobyl and not the thousands that everyone thinks.
From the article it debunks another of the scaremongering
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That is quite a good explanation. There may have only been 50ish deaths from radiation poisoning caused by chernobyl, but it has certainly killed many more by inducing cancers however. This is where the thousands of deaths comes from (but of course, the actual number is effectively just a reasonable guess).
 
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drunkenmaster said:
For the people that know, just how radioactive is spent fuel vs the rods inside the core, what kinds of things will it be chucking out, and secondly, surely worried about the people in the chopper and being able to just dump water in there means the containment building is open at the top and the rods are essentially exposed to the outside now?
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Not sure on amounts but to quote from wiki: "Spent fuel discharged from reactors contains appreciable quantities of fissile (U-235 and Pu-239), fertile (U-238), and other radioactive materials" - apparently takes upto 200 years to decay to a significantly low level.




I think people are looking at this somewhat 1 dimensionally... sure if the current reported issues as in the media continue down any of the scientifically likely paths then theres no way it would lead to or potentially lead to a Chernobyl like outcome... however keep in mind that:

There was already concerns about under-investment in safety and maintenance at the plants (being decades old designs and coming upto retirement there was reluctance to spend money on them).
The site(s) were hit with forces considerably more than they were engineered for (enough force to displace 250 odd miles of landmass an appreciable distance) and a tsunami - the damage done to the infrastructure is massive and not immediately fully apparent.
The area is suffering repeat and frequent aftershocks and its not impossible, infact on balance of probability a fairly moderate chance, for another large quake or tsunami to occur.
The events and circumstances at the site(s) have been massively underplayed and are infact quite a lot worse than you see in the media.

I would not personally rule out the chance of a tradegy of Chernobyl like proportions with the absolute that some people have.
 
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1701: Europe's Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger says Japan's nuclear disaster is an "apocalypse", adding that Tokyo had almost lost control of events at the Fukushima power plant, AFP report.
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There are some morons out there, aren't there. Even Chernobyl was far from an "apocalypse".
 
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