Via the GWPF – After Tsunami Disaster, Expect Nuclear Delays & Global Run On Cheap Fossil Fuels
Forget wind. Forget solar. Forget green energy. Japan’s nuclear disaster will only intensify the global race for cheap fossil fuels while most future energy R&D will go into nuclear safety. –Benny Peiser, 14 March 2011
Any potential switch away from nuclear power is likely to favour gas-fired generation, the most practical low carbon-emission alternative. –David Musiker, – Reuters, 14 March 2011
Nuclear power should have a part to play in cutting carbon emissions. But safety fears could kill its revival – at least in the west. Although support for new nuclear construction has been creeping up in the US and Europe, it remains brittle. Even one serious accident could shatter it. –Financial Times, 14 March 2011
Germany’s federal government intends to check the operating time of each of the 17 German nuclear power plants. The question of coal energy is newly emerging. –Die Welt, 14 March 2011
Cost remains the biggest obstacle for any revival of nuclear energy. Momentum for a nuclear comeback also has been slowed because other energy sources remain less expensive. Natural gas is cheap, especially with the expansion of supplies from shale rock, and there’s been no legislative action to tax carbon emissions. — Jia Lynn Yang, The Washington Post, 13 March 2011
Former President Bill Clinton said Friday that delays in offshore oil and gas drilling permits are “ridiculous” at a time when the economy is still rebuilding, according to attendees at the IHS CERAWeek conference. –Darren Goode, Politico, 11 March 2011
Other headlines:
Japan’s crisis may have already derailed ‘nuclear renaissance’
The world has seen a surge of nuclear reactor projects recently, and President Obama has made a push for nuclear power. But the crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 (Daiichi) nuclear plant may abruptly halt those efforts.
The nuclear crisis in Japan, even if authorities are able to bring damaged reactors under control, has cast doubts on the future of nuclear power as a clean-energy solution in the United States and around the globe, – Los Angeles Times, 14 March 2011
Japan Earthquake Holds Lessons and Warnings – Science Insider, 11 March 2011
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Maren says:
March 15, 2011 at 8:57 am
It is interesting to find out about the cooling regime/timescale. But of course that would beg the question of poor coolant system redundancy design? Surely, if one knows that it will take many days and many thousands of gallons of coolant required to finish the cooling after shutdown – this would be designed into the system more effectively than that apparently used in Fukushima? Maybe a simple gravity fed system?
You also kind of confirm the point I was trying to make in that the government and power company have been stalling in respect of openly disclosing the real situation. The declaration of an emergency – but with the clear statements that it was purely ‘precautionary’ – were clearly incorrect. I would strongly suspect that the engineers on site knew full well they would be unlikely to restore adequate cooling after the batteries were gone if their other systems were non-functional (and unlikely to be so)?
As for your last comment – you missed my meaning, which I thought was fairly clear – in that it was the ‘bunch of idiots’ running the power company – who, no doubt like most corporations, have considered profit above design or maintainence expense? I made no reference to the folk on site – who, as you say, are doing their utmost at great personal risk – again, who will likely get little thanks from the bosses in Tokyo!
Radioactivity: sieverts and other units
Luboš Motl – the reference frame
http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/03/radioactivity-sieverts-and-other-units.html
It is unclear whom the Sky report is quoting saying that all 4 reactors are safe and stable.
The Japanese news reports make no such claim. They do note that the reactor 4 control room is so contaminated that workers can only stay for 10 minutes. As this was one of the reactors that was shut down for maintenance, this indicated that the damage and radioactivity have spread. Worse, the fuel from reactor 4 is held in a pool on the 5th floor of the reactor building, along with spent fuel from earlier use. This pool is inaccessible and may have boiled dry. That leaves the fuel to melt, oxidize and vaporize, possibly contaminating much of the downwind area.
The suggestion by the utility that water be dumped into the pool from helicopters indicates their desperation. The pool is 40×40 and 45 feet deep. It would take 2-3 thousand tons of water to refill it. Even assuming the roof over the pool were removed and the pool accessible, it would require a massive fleet of equipment that does not exist and that could not be supported in this damaged area to do this job.
The workers on this site are heroes, true Japanese. They are working in a destroyed facility, surrounded by devastation and radioactive debris, unsure of the fates of their own homes and families, yet they remain on the job trying to prevent a greater disaster while recognizing that they are the most at risk.
What usually happens in this sort of situation, is that the emergency responders get tunnel vision regarding one issue (the reactor core heating) and lost focus and touch with the issue of the spent fuel rod cooling pool also needing water level management.
My guess is that as a result it got over looked until bad things happened. Exhausted crews working long hours under high stress make those sort of mistakes unless their response system provides crew rotations or an outside reviewer that during shift turn over takes a fresh look at what has been done and what still needs to be done.
This is why the incident command system was developed, so there is a systematic process to make sure secondary issues don’t get lost in the shuffle and come back and bite you later as major issues. Large complex disasters are too big for any central control system to manage, they must be managed near the site, with a constant review and planning cycle to catch missed issues and anticipate the next crisis before it happens.
I am sure the Japanese will discover all sorts of interesting systemic issues in managing a disaster this complex.
This is in no way a criticism of their response, just an unfortunate learning process that every emergency management community goes through periodically as they lose focus on what is important.
As always it is the poor grunt in the field that puts it all on the line and eventually through extraordinary effort, courage and willingness to push through to completion that gets the final job done. All the folks with boots on the ground at the reactor site should be commended for their efforts, but as always there are (or should be) lessons learned that will make the next emergency of this magnitude resolve more efficiently.
America should pay very close attention to these lessons or we will at our peril re-learn them when we have “our” major earthquake and tsunami in the north west and California. It is not a question of if but when we will face exactly the same sort of challenge.
Larry
“dallas says:
March 15, 2011 at 7:02 am
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/15/fukushima-15-march-summary/”
Dallas that is a very welcomed site. Especially their new post. Thanks. If you ever read the comments on the next post here about Japan’s nuclear problem, you should see that I needed the help. For a moment there, I thought I was all alone in my POV, it sure didn’t sit well with many.
Kev-in-Uk:
I agree with your comments re an inadequately designed the cooling system. An emergency generator on battery power backed up with a diesel engine sounds like far too little redundancy, given the savage consequences of failure. As you say, cooling must be possible, independent of a power supply in an emergency, and so the new generations of reactors (III and IV) have been designed with passive safety systems, such as cooling tanks placed on top of the reactor building and the use of convection. This together with the potential of using Thorium eventually changed my opposition to nuclear power. I must say as well, that the fact that the plant in question has withstood an 9.0 earthquake and a ten metre tsunami has not changed my new position, on the contrary, I believe it’s quite impressive. These reactors have been let down solely by their power dependent pumps (that is as far as we know, of course).
But if the management of the power company was led purely by the bottom line in deciding what to do, neither you nor I can say with any surety right now. Given that the usage of seawater has rendered these reactors irreversibly unusable, one must assume that company orders will have revolved around attempting other measures first. Whether they tried for too long and worsenend the problems, whether it was irrelevant what they tried or whether they swiftly abandoned measures designed to save the reactors and sacrificed them in order to deal with the emergency, it’s simply to early for any judgement on that.
Fair enough, though Kev, I misunderstood your criticism being pointed at the management not the staff battling the emergency. It’s certainly not unthinkable that greed and/or incompetence might eventually be found to be the crux of the worsening situation. Still disagree on the information policy by the government. I think they did exactly what was needed. I’d expect my government to evacuate in a timely manner, and to me it doesn’t matter whether they call it a precaution or whether they say “run for your lives”, I’d go in any case, but to the local government it could change an orderly evac to panic induced, unmanageable chaos, especially given that the area in question is already a disaster zone.
It is possible that relatively simple pre-positioned equipment and pre-installed hardware could have largely prevented the entire issue.
For example on the spent fuel rod cooling pools. If they had pre-plumbed stand pipes reaching to the ground, that would feed water directly to the cooling pool fitted with standard fire engine hose connectors, they could have simply hooked up a fire engine and pumped any source of water to top off the pool.
The other option for alternate power which has been used in the past is to bring a Navy ship in to shore and lay power cables from the ship. Many Navy ships can provide high kilowatt class power to shore with a little cabling.
Larry
Maren
I would concur with the apparent competence of the installation being able to withstand the earthquake and the Tsunami (the latter to a lesser degree because of the cooling system failure) as being commendable. However, as an engineer, I would be looking for all possible ‘failures’ in either design or operation to provide pointers for design and implemenation at other existing and future sites.
It happens in aeronautical engineering – flights crash, lessons are learned – service schedules altered, parts changed, etc, etc – all to try and make future flights safer. Obviously, people tend to forget how ‘safe’ nuclear power is in real terms, but that nothing is perfect, and with so ‘few’ major incidents it can be somewhat overhyped in the public eye.
I’m still not convinced on the press release line though. I feel they probably knew they had issues from the start and were trying to ‘break it gently’ – it’s just how it seemed – especially with all the initial ‘it’s nothing serious’ stance. I am sure most folk whenever they hear their prime minister say ‘it’s not serious’ – the first thing they think is ‘yeah right!’ – I mean, if it was just some minor official saying it, you might believe them – but when the top guys come out to speak it’s usually a sign of intent!
I guess I am just too damn cynical, but I do agree that only time will tell.
Here’s a lengthy article just posted:
Here’s a quote from the thread whose link I just gave:
The following massively cynical financial-news site has had the most up-to-date reports (mostly alarmist) on the situation, as well as a few informed comments. If you can discount the bias and the numerous strange commenters, it’s worth following.
http://www.zerohedge.com/
Roger Knights says:
March 16, 2011 at 11:53 am
“The following massively cynical financial-news site has had the most up-to-date reports (mostly alarmist) on the situation, as well as a few informed comments. If you can discount the bias and the numerous strange commenters, it’s worth following.
http://www.zerohedge.com/ ”
Sometimes a “massively cynical” approach is appropriate.
What’s wrong with being “massively cynical”?
The situation at the nuclear plant is clearly out of control at this point, no?
Aborted helicopter missions, the latest satellite imagery showing the roof blown off, reports (from BBC) that they might use a water cannon on it. Sea water. Is it just me?
hotrod (Larry L) said
“If they had pre-plumbed stand pipes reaching to the ground, that would feed water directly to the cooling pool fitted with standard fire engine hose connectors, they could have simply hooked up a fire engine and pumped any source of water to top off the pool.”
That seems a rather low tech solution. Buckets next?
Andy
AndyW says:
March 16, 2011 at 1:39 pm
I agree – it would appear to be rather low-tech! But on the other hand, where has all the high tech got them?
In my humble opinion (though I know little of nuclear reactors) – if I was asked to design a multilevel failsafe system, I would think the most simplest low tech solution would always be at least one of the levels (and in this kind of tech, probably the last level?).
Considering this a bit further, I wonder how grateful the tech guys at Fukushima would be to have a decent store of water at or near the site and able to be gravity fed to the reactors/containment vessels last week? – perhaps through a simple fire sprinkler type system, or even a basic gate valve which could be opened to flood the reactor chamber? I know I am being mind-numbingly simplistic – but I really do wonder if such a basic system could/should have been installed?
For example, there are many larger sized industrial units in the UK where they have to have a fixed on-site water store available for fire fighting as water supply may not be available. On the basis that the water cooling of these type reactors is an absolutely primary requirement (as I understand it?) – you would think that at the very least, a decent fixed and protected water supply would be available (and also able to be replenished from a distance)?
I am not decrying the valiant efforts in Japan – merely posing a question.
Don’t under estimate low tech.
Most heavy rescue of the trapped in collapsed buildings are rescued with ropes, pulleys, sledge hammers, simple hammer drills, sledge hammers feather and wedge splitters — technology that were in use during Roman times.
The guiding principle of emergency response is KISS — Keep It Simple Stupid!
Larry