Japanese Nuclear Reactors

[rcpratt]

It's a testament to the fact they happen to have seawater handy to pump into them. Otherwise they would have already gone Chernobyl on us.

You should probably educate yourself on the myriad differences between Chernobyl and this before you make yourself look like more of an idiot.

 

[Londo_Jowo]

How many died from these recent nuke failures compared to how many would have died if a coal plant exploded from some massive earthquake.

Have you ever seen a coal fired boiler? Do you know how one operates? Worse case scenario you will have a steam leak that may last an hour or so and the boiler tubes would melt. The coal feed would breakdown due to misalignment and the coal would burn out. The only deaths (possibly 3 to 5 people) would occur in the boiler room and possibly the control room.

How many people would have died from the exposure to polution living near a coal plant for years.

Based on the obituaries here in the Richmond/Rosenberg I don't see too many people who are dying in large numbers, specially those who live close to the coal fired power plant. Most who are dying are in their 70's and 80's.

 

[DrPizza]

Why would a coal plant explode from an earthquake?

If the coal plant is abandoned and left alone, it will just burn through its fuel supply. That's it. No meltdown. No flooding with seawater. No pouring concrete to encase the burners. No release of nuclear fuel. No radiation. No expensive cleanup.

There's a reason you can buy coal and burn in your pizza oven, but you can't buy uranium. Because coal is inherently much less hazardous than radioactive elements.

Seriously, you need to read a couple of the articles that have been posted repeatedly in these threads. A few posters in the past have noted that sometimes I appear to be "left" and sometimes I appear to be "right" politically. I generally don't give much concern to politics. However, my passion is for accurate knowledge which you seem to greatly lack on this issue. I highly recommend you read those articles, because generally, you don't seem to be an ignorant jackass. However, on this particular issue, you can stop making yourself look like an ignorant jackass like the other ignorant jackasses on the forum, simply by reading those 2 or 3 articles.

 

[wuliheron]

Not entirely sure what you are talking about now. The control rod insertion afaik was done automatically once a seismic event was detected. So unless the earthquake happened right on site, a chernobyl type event wasnt going to happen. Chernobyl had several layers of issues. None that were present in this situation.

They have 55 nuclear power plants in Japan and 108 active volcanoes.

Ancient Chinese saying: Shit Happens.

 

[WackyDan]

It is ironic that those who speak ill of nuclear power primarily come from the left, who take no small pride in reminding everyone that they are the party of intellectuals...

...who apparently know more than engineers and physicists about nuclear power.

They seem to know EVERYTHING. Lecturing us on everything makes them feel superior though, they never seem to get anything done. They make pretty picket signs for their protests though.

Remember, these are the same people who are anti-religion but religious about global warming.

 

[wuliheron]

Yeah, and the engineers said the Titanic was unsinkable and the Twin Towers couldn't be brought down.

You don't need to be a genius to know the engineers are sometimes dead wrong and its stupid to build less then the safest possible reactors on a volcanic island prone to the worst earthquakes and tsunamis in the world.

 

[Linflas]

Yeah, and the engineers said the Titanic was unsinkable and the Twin Towers couldn't be brought down.

You don't need to be a genius to know the engineers are sometimes dead wrong and its stupid to build less then the safest possible reactors on a volcanic island prone to the worst earthquakes and tsunamis in the world.

I can't access snopes at work but I'm pretty sure that despite popular culture spewing out both of those as "fact" the reality is that they are about as true as the idea that most people in 1492 thought the world was flat.

 

[wuliheron]

I checked for you. Snopes has nothing to say about what the engineers thought.

Popular culture promotes the idea that the Titanic was advertised as unsinkable, which it was not. The engineers designed it with some of the latest safety features, but not all of them and the builders removed many of the latest safety features such as the necessary number of lifeboats. Substandard rivets are also suspected as a major cause of its sinking. In other words, there were factors involved that the engineers could not have predicted.

Similarly, the Empire State building survived a B52 bomber crashing into it and engineers routinely designed skyscrapers to survive such assaults. The Twin Towers had even survived a bomb in the subbasement that destroyed eight floors. What none of the engineers had thought of was the damage that a commercial plane fully loaded with fuel could do. It wasn't the impact or explosions that destroyed the Twin Towers, but the fires from the fuel melting the superstructure.

 

[Pens1566]

B-25 crashed into Empire State building.

 

[Brainonska511]

Similarly, the Empire State building survived a B52 bomber crashing into it and engineers routinely designed skyscrapers to survive such assaults.

You mean a B-25. A B-52 is significantly larger than a B-25. A passenger airliner is also much bigger than a B-25.

 

[wuliheron]

Whatever. It wasn't a freaking Cessna.

 

[PingSpike]

Don't worry about it, we haven't built a new nuclear plant in 30 years or so. You guys won, we're going to just burn more coal, natural gas and of course our beloved oil...none of which have ever caused any ecological disasters, economic stability problems or loss of human life during their procurement. We're on the road to safety.

 

[Tom]

Don't worry about it, we haven't built a new nuclear plant in 30 years or so. You guys won, we're going to just burn more coal, natural gas and of course our beloved oil...none of which have ever caused any ecological disasters, economic stability problems or loss of human life during their procurement. We're on the road to safety.

Actually there were calls for better designed nuclear plants 40 years ago. Only reason not to adopt them seems to have been construction cost savings.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16contain.html

Being against bad power plant design isn't being against nuclear power.

 

[wuliheron]

Don't worry about it, we haven't built a new nuclear plant in 30 years or so. You guys won, we're going to just burn more coal, natural gas and of course our beloved oil...none of which have ever caused any ecological disasters, economic stability problems or loss of human life during their procurement. We're on the road to safety.

Safety hell! I want cheap. Cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap.

All that fancy stuff is just too expensive and dangerous. I'm a Walmart kinda guy.

 

[Tom]

You should probably educate yourself on the myriad differences between Chernobyl and this before you make yourself look like more of an idiot.

Yes, like Chernobyl wasn't 150 miles from a city with a population of 40 million people.

 

[Acanthus]

Yes, like Chernobyl wasn't 150 miles from a city with a population of 40 million people.

Chernobyl was also the rupturing of an active core that had zero protection from the environment in the case of an accident.

It burned for weeks with active fuel directly exposed to the air.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Yes, like Chernobyl wasn't 150 miles from a city with a population of 40 million people.

Sigh...

Chernobyl facts :
# very high positive void coefficient.
# No outer containment shell.
# Safety system shutdown on purpose.
# Ignoring of safety protocol with respect to minimum required neutron moderator rods.
# No 8.9 Richter scale earthquake happened.
# No tsunami happened.
# No emergency power failure happened.
# No after shocks happened.
# No large part of infrastructure was destroyed before the accident.

 

[ConstipatedVigilante]

Yes, like Chernobyl wasn't 150 miles from a city with a population of 40 million people.

Chernobyl was also horribly mismanaged. The operators deactivated all of its safety features, so that when things went wrong EVERYTHING went wrong. The operators seem to have done exactly as they should have done at Fukishima.

 

[Throckmorton]

Actually there were calls for better designed nuclear plants 40 years ago. Only reason not to adopt them seems to have been construction cost savings.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16contain.html

Being against bad power plant design isn't being against nuclear power.

So it's not that the reactors are old technology therefore less safe. A choice was made in the 70s to build the less safe reactors, to save money. Apparently that choice is accepted as the norm in the nuclear industry... at least until now.

 

[Tom]

Sigh...

Chernobyl facts :
# very high positive void coefficient.
# No outer containment shell.
# Safety system shutdown on purpose.
# Ignoring of safety protocol with respect to minimum required neutron moderator rods.
# No 8.9 Richter scale earthquake happened.
# No tsunami happened.
# No emergency power failure happened.
# No after shocks happened.
# No large part of infrastructure was destroyed before the accident.

None of which is as relevant as the one difference I posted.

40 million people are counting on fire trucks(?) to pump sea water fast enough to keep the last barrier to direct exposure to the core from going away.

The level of risk that presents never existed at Chernobyl, even when the worst happened.

 

[Genx87]

So it's not that the reactors are old technology therefore less safe. A choice was made in the 70s to build the less safe reactors, to save money. Apparently that choice is accepted as the norm in the nuclear industry... at least until now.

32 reactors around the globe use this design according to the article. How is that the norm?

 

[DisgruntledVirus]

People, like one of my coworkers, who go "nuclear is not safe" and advocate either more coal/NG or moving entirely to renewables are ignorant of facts.

Facts are that nuclear is very safe. Coal is also safe to operate, as is renewables. Nuclear generates hazardous radioactive waste that needs disposed of (although newer breeder reactors and throium based ones are much better in this regard). Coal generates acid rain, releases radioactive isotopes right into the atmosphere, and adds to greenhouse gasses.

The facts regarding this specific situation are that the plant which was 30 years old survived a 9.0 earthquake AND 30 ft tsunami. The only issue they have had was a poor design for the backup generators which should not have all been located where a tsunami could take them out. Even without those, the worst that's happened so far is low level radioactive elements have been released. Most of it so far is less than you would get flying from NYC to Europe. Also, a lot of it will decay within a very quick time frame. One possible issue *could* be loss of water in the storage tanks, which then could catch fire. That will take a few more days to get to that point though (unless there is damage to the cooling pool I don't know about).

Nothing is perfect. These plants were scheduled to be shut down in a few months. They were nearing the end of their lifes. If this is the worst that has happened from 2 massive disasters with a 30 year old design, then bring on nuclear power IMHO.

 

[ericlp]

Kinda strange being so close to the sea level they didn't opt to put the generators in a water proof room with big air and exhaust stacks. You know like you would do in an engine on car where you got a big snorkel stack above the engine.

One could have made a big water proof room with sump pumps in case it did get a little water in them. Would have solved this problem.

The melt down should be the least of your worries about how safe it is. The real question is, what are we doing with all the spent rods. How safe is the storage of the waste of a nuclear reactor.

 

[Muse]

I've never thought nuclear reactors were safe. I was nervous as hell when I had a summer job at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator (long time ago when I was a physics major), would have been much more nervous if there were fissionable material around. Part of my job was to walk around with a portable radiation detection device. I did extra homework to reassure myself that I was safe. I did a bit of research recently and found out that they had a very bad accident not long after I worked there.

In just one nuclear reactor is around 20 tons of uranium (well, the ones I was reading about online last night at Wikipedia were the 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl reactors). The amount of deadly radioactive materials in the world's nuclear reactors is staggering. Chernobyl was badly designed (no containment vessel), but even reactors whose fissionable material are in containment vessels are subject to potential full meltdown in the event of some equipment and/or operator error scenarios and subsequent explosion and massive contamination. Safe? They will never be safe.

 

[Muse]

Yep, still pretty dang safe. You have to remember, this thing was hit by both a tsunami and an earthquake before it failed... that alone should speak to how safe a reactor is in a non-earthquake/tsunami area.

Chernobyl, the site of the world's worst nuclear accident by far, was not hit by a tsunami or earthquake. It was a combination of bad design, poor training, and inexperienced operators' bad judgment that caused the catastrophe.