Pick a number, and that reactor is described as being near a meltdown. The news coverage coming out of Japan is even more confused when American media deciphers it. Hopefully hard facts come in soon…
Meltdown occurred according to Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency
URGENT: March 12 00:00 PST: Explosion at Nuclear Facility
VIDEO of explosion at nuke plant.
Reuters Live Earthquake News Feed
Several people appear to be injured at Fukushima nuclear plant – NHK
Walls and roof of a building at site destroyed by blast – NHK via Sky News
UPDATE: 22:50 PST: BREAKING NEWS: Pressure successfully released from Fukushima No. 1 reactor: agency
UPDATE: 21:47 PST: Meltdown underway at Reactor #1? http://twitter.com/#!/dicklp
Fukushima fuel cores are melting at 2000C and dropping onto steel floor. Steel melts at 1500C. Could still be brought under control, but Four other Fukushima nuke reactors are struggling with similar problem. If multiple meltdown begins, it will be uncontrollable.
Nuclear reactor coolant systems are running on batteries, and the coolant has reached the boiling point. Extremely critical situation currently at several earthquake affected nuclear reactors. Officials are concerned that a Three Mile Island 1979 meltdown could happen here. Reuters Link
From the LA Times:
Conditions appear to be worsening at a nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture in northeastern Japan, according to local media.
The Kyodo news agency reported that the cooling system has failed at three reactors of Fukushima No. 2 nuclear power plant. The coolant water’s temperature had reached boiling temperature, the agency reported, citing the power plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power.
The cooling system failure at the No. 2 power plant came after officials were already troubled by the failure of the emergency cooling system at the Fukushima No. 1 plant, which officials feared could cause a meltdown.
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This seems like a good time to check sources of information.
The engineers and control operators are not wasting their time giving progress reports (I hope), the situation is being handled by people that know the system.
The best, and brightest are on the job.
Japan has previously had an excellent nuclear record, barring the accident at the enrichment facilities at Toka-Murai. What a shame this is. Japan uses essentially 1960s nuclear technology, i.e. US Westinghouse reactor designs. I don’t understand completely what happened here but wonder if the automatic shut-down feature might be a poorly designed system.
The one possible bright note, once Japan pulls itself back together, is that these reactor accidents are always opportunities to better understand the causes of failure and to make corrections and improvements. It’s hard to imagine a greater test of the technology than the circumstances of these earthquakes. If the containment buildings remain intact this should be no worse than Three Mile Island. It will represent a massive economic loss and a major problem in terms of real energy shortages for Japan – but hopefully no harm will come to the people who work in and live around these plants.
My thoughts and prayers are with the people of Japan.
This is serious. Loss of coolant is the Achilles heel of all nuclear power plants. Even after a shutdown, if the residual heat cannot be rejected for several days, the danger of fuel bundle meltdown (a partial meltdown occurred at Three Mile Island), loss of pressure containment and a thermal explosion is very real. The worst case result would be a giant “dirty bomb” that could render a wide swath (depending on prevailing wind at the time) uninhabitable for many decades.
Seeing to it that such failure cannot happen under any imaginable circumstance is at the heart of all nuclear power plant safety design. Design typically includes the assumption that external electric power to the plant is lost and provides for a minimum of two redundant backup cooling systems for such an emergency. Those backup safety systems are “seismically qualified” to withstand the worse calculated earthquake possible for the geologic zone in question and protected against the worst postulated flooding.
If those backup systems failed at three of the Japanese reactors, there was by definition a defect in the design of those systems.
I read that they had done a SCRAM on the Fukushima No. 1 plant and the standby generators that power the cooling system had failed. If true, they could have a partial core meltdown like 3-mile Island. Very bad PR and very expensive, but no danger.
The important thing is to keep the cores covered, even if they have to vent some steam to the outside, which is really harmless if they can keep the cores covered. If not, their reactor is toast and they will spend a couple of billion on cleanup. But regardless, the activists will set up a howl like we haven’t heard since TMI, only worse since this is Japan, the one-time nuclear target. The question is, why did those auxiliary diesel generators fail? And what does this mean for the future, assuming there is one?
Hmmm. Scary for Japan which has suffered enough. Scary for all of us. I think a lot of us old conservationists/environmentalists who had opposed nuclear were “warming up” to it as the best and cheapest alternative to fossil fuels should they run out or global warming actually proved to be CAGW, which I doubt. Now, I suppose, for better or worse, we are stuck with fossil fuels, very inefficient wind, and very expensive solar. BTW, there are millions of us conservationists/environmentalists who feel the global warming zealots and green extremists have hijacked our beloved movement. Lets take it back!
Scary. This is why I’ve never been a big fan of nuclear…
Does anyone know if these are breader reactors or slow thermal reactors ?
From what I understand – slow reactors like these can NOT ever, under any circumstances “melt down”. They can not explode. Infact, nothing more than coolant release can happen (and that coolant is mildly radioactive, but not long lasting ??). If the coolant releases, the reactor gets a little hot, and shuts down. End of story.
“melt downs” and “dirty bomb exposions” are a myth with these sort of reactors. It`s only breader reactors (fast breaders) that have this risk, and I think it`s only the crazy Russians and Chinese who built these. If these are breader type reactors, then the Japanese are frikkin crazy people for building them in an earthquake zone. Surely the Japanse are not that crazy ??
These are Gen II reactors much like the current reactors operating in the USA for decades. To provide for extra coolant in the event of a Loss of Coolant accident, to cool the reactor after shutdown. Just like your home oven after you have baked a cake and turned the oven off, it remains hot until it cools off. This is neccessary until the reactor cools off, they have spare diesel generators to provide the electricity to drive the water pumps which pump in extra coolant, in the case that standard electricity sources are unavailable.
The 30-odd new Gen III+ designs being prepared for construction in the USA, the NRC and the reactor builders have anticipated that it is possible that regular electricty may be down, and the spare diesel generators might be unable to come online, however remote.
So the new reactor designs place the extra coolant in tanks higher than the reactor so the extra coolant can flow into the reactor with simple gravity without needing any pumps, at all. In addition the new reactors have much larger reactors vessels, that are large enough that the reactor will not need any extra coolant. Further they have been re-designed so that the coolant already there, circulates by natural thermal convection, wihtout needing any internal pumps during a shutdown.
Proving once again that the new GEN III+ reactors in the process of building in the US, are even safer than the ones that have been running safely for decades, today.
This seems to be the best source for info on status:
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Battle_to_stabilise_earthquake_reactors_1203111.html
I agree, waiting for more non-MSM information is probably prudent. I’m having a hard time imagining the, properly paranoid, Japanese doing a slipshod version of Peachtree.
Peachtree in my mind was much worse than TMI. It showed that some of our nuclear “engineeers” didn’t have a clue about failsafe design. When a lighted candle in a plenum can take out 5 failsafe systems, the system isn’t exactly failsafe. One of the Swiss professors in my graduate studies group was a expert witness in the examination of the accident. The stories he told… As an American I was embarrassed to hear how poorly our “Leading Engineering Firms” had designed that plant.
According to some Nuclear specialist sites I visited, the reactor and core is self regulating and cooling however this is regulated by a series of valves and switches which are nominally powered by D.C. The D.C. is provided by a series of back up generators and batteries.
The generators have allegedly failed (W.T.?). They were operating and have shut down?
Could be the inverters have failed and not be charging the batteries?
If ever there was an ad for thorium salt reactors, this, unfortunately is it. They can’t “melt down” because the fuel is already molten. When the power fails, the fuel cools and the reaction stops.
I just hope they can cool these suckers down enough to remove the rods.
It seems that while they were designed to withstand earthquakes, apparently they were not designed to operate after a serious tsunami.
I don’t understand why the systems don’t automatically withdraw the fuel rods and stop the energy producing chain reaction.
The situation is basically this
The reactor would have been shutdown No more chaim reaction.
However about 10% of heat released by a reactor comes from the decay of radiocative
byproducts after original fission event. This is the energy that is the cause of the
problem. The energy release decreases rapidly. From member, after 24 hours
the energy release from these byproducts decreases by at least a factor of 10.
There should be an ECCS (Emergency Core Cooling System). This is a big
tank of water located at an elevation higher than the reactor that can be
dumped into the reactor to help keep the core from being exposed in the
case of pump failure. There has been no mention of this in any news story.
In TMI (Three Mile Island) the core was exposed. This irrevocably
damaged the reactor, but otherwise caused no harm. It was a commercial
as opposed to human disaster. One of the problems at TMI was that
the operators did not know what was going on, but I suspect that the
engineers in Japan will know what is going inside the reactor core.
The TMI accident showed that a reactor vessel and containment
vessel could withstand a loss of coolant accident that exposed the core.
If the operators vent steam from the reactor to release energy and
pressure, there may be a lot of adverse publicity, but this does
not constitute a disaster. The steam which will be radiactive and hot
will rise and disperse through the atomsphere. Compared to the
devastation caused by the Tsunami, this is a fleabite.
If the operators have access to an ECCS with water in it, then I do not
believe the worst case scenario will occur. As far as the news stories go
the frustrating thing is no mention of the ECCS which should be available
when the pumps fail.
Moderator, I think my last comment is in the spam filter.
[Posted. ~dbs]
I read that the backup generators at the affected plants were flooded by the tsunami.
It seems strange to me that the Japanese didn’t protect their nuke plant backup generators against the worst possible tsunamis.
From: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Battle_to_stabilise_earthquake_reactors_1203111.html
To the extent that there is evaporation inside the containment vessel, some steam may need to be vented, but it is reportedly filtered before it is released, so any radiation release into the environment would be limited. After watching TV and reading other news accounts, the reporting on this story appears to be more than terrible. Let’s hope that Tepco will be able to properly manage this situation. It would appear that they are well prepared for it.
Radiation levels 1000 times normal to me is indicative that the problem at at least one plant is past the point of just being a core cooling problem. The plant is shutdown and radiation levels should be lower than normal and dropping — normal being operating at power. With rad levels that high, at least some reactor core damage may have already occurred.
From: http://nuclearstreet.com/nuclear_power_industry_news/b/nuclear_power_news/archive/2011/03/11/japanese-reactors-fine-after-7.2-magnitude-earthquake031101.aspx
While I promised not to comment with TOO MUCH sensitive ‘Truth’ for you ‘scientist guys’ ~ Perhaps you’d like to indulge me by going to this site and deciphering the data for me.
It regards ‘Global Weather Modification’. The results certainly ‘seem’ to be compelling – for an amateur, such as myself. I’d love to read what your insightful thoughts are.
http://www.youtube.com/user/NufffRespect#p/a/f/1/Xbp6umQT58A
The title of the youtube video is called ‘HAARP CHART FOR NEW ZEALAND’ – with any ‘luck’ – maybe in a day or two they’ll post one for Japan.
In Truth,
Cynthia Lauren Thorpe
The International Atomic Energy Agency (where I worked for a year) has some info on the situation:
http://www.iaea.org/press/
The reactor is a boiling water reactor and has numerous backup systems. The situation is not a dire as the news media indicate. See also a report from the Nuclear Energy Institute:
http://www.nei.org/newsandevents/information-on-the-japanese-earthquake-and-reactors-in-that-region
The operators of the plant seem to be making some progress. The core is still covered, and the operators plan to relieve some of the pressure inside containment by venting the containment through filters which reduce the amount of radiation released. Backup power supplies are on site.
From: http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2011/03/11/media-updates-on-nuclear-power-stations-in-japan/
and
“This is serious. Loss of coolant is the Achilles heel of all nuclear power plants”
I’m not sure that is true. Loss of coolant is the Achilles heel of some nuclear designs. For example, the light water civilian reactors developed from nuclear submarine technology were not really optimized to cope with loss of coolant, but rather to fit in a confined space. There are designs that are better able to handle loss of coolant.
However, the news will not make that distinction. The blame will fall on nuclear energy, not on the design faults, making it all the more difficult to built nuclear plants. A really significant failure could end to nuclear power for years to come.
SOYLENT GREEN says:
March 11, 2011 at 7:58 pm
I hope they get it under control and pull the rods out too.
One has to wonder what was going through minds to put this plant on a 10 year extension just last month.
The design is straight out of the 1960’s.