Lesson #1: People died from forced evacuations, not from radiation
Dr. Kelvin Kemm
A decade has passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake, and the name Fukushima is etched into history. But few people know the truth of what happened. The phrase, “the lessons learned from Fukushima,” is well-known. But how do people implement them, if they don’t know what happened, or what lessons they should actually learn?
It was after lunch on 11 March 2011 that a giant earthquake occurred 72 kilometers (45 miles) off the Oshika Peninsula in Japan. It registered 9.0 on the Richter Scale, making it the largest ’quake ever recorded in Japan. The undersea ground movement, over 30 km (18 miles) beneath the ocean’s surface, lifted up a huge volume of water, like an immense moving hill. Meanwhile, the ground shockwave travelled toward the land at high speed. It struck Japan and shook the ground for six terrifying minutes.
The shock wave travelled under 11 nuclear reactors, including two separate Fukushima complexes: Fukushima-Diani and Fukushima-Daiichi. (Diani means ‘Complex 1’ and Daiichi ‘Complex 2’.) All 11 reactors shut down, as they were designed to do, and no doubt all the reactor operators breathed a great sigh of relief. It was premature.
The mound of sea water was still traveling. As the water “hill” entered shallow water, nearer the land, it was lifted up into a towering wave as high as 40 meters (130 feet!) in places. Then, some 50 minutes after the earthquake, the tsunami struck the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power station. Some kilometres away, when water struck the Fukushima-Diani nuclear power station, it was “only” 9 m (30 ft) high, which was not as devastating as at Daiichi. Diani did not make it into the news.
The water jumped the protective sea walls at Fukushima-Daiichi. The sighs of relief from a half hour before turned into concern and dread. Over at the Fukushima Diani power station, 12 km (7 mi) to the south, water also caused damage to machinery, but the reactors were not harmed. There was no risk of radiation release, so the Diani power station was of no interest to the international media. Diani was safely shut down to “cold shutdown” after two days.
As a result, over the past decade, any reference to “Fukushima” has meant only the Daiichi power station and not the other one.
The devastating tsunami swept up to 10 km (6 mi) inland in places, washing away buildings, roads, and telecommunication and power lines. Over 15,000 people were killed, mainly by drowning.
Although all the nuclear reactors had shut down to a state known as “hot shutdown,” the reactors were still very hot and needed residual cooling for many hours after the urgent fast shutdown. People instinctively know not to put their hands on the engine block of a car right after it has been switched off. Nuclear reactors are the same and need to cool down until they reach the safe state known as “cold shutdown.”
A nuclear reactor has pumps that send water through the reactor until it cools. But the Fukushima electrical pumps failed, because the tsunami had washed away the incoming electricity power lines. So the reactor system automatically switched to diesel-driven generators to keep the cooling pumps going; but the water had washed away the diesel fuel supply, meaning the diesels worked for only a short while. Then it switched to emergency batteries; but the batteries were never designed to last for days, and could supply emergency power for only about eight hours.
The result was that hot fuel could not be adequately cooled, and over the next three or four days the fuel in three reactors melted, much like a candle melts.
The world media watched, and broadcast the blow-by-blow action. Japanese authorities started to panic under the international spotlight. The un-circulating cooling water was boiling off inside the reactors resulting in a chemical reaction between hot fuel exposed to hot steam. This led to the production of hydrogen gas. As the steam pressure rose, the engineers decided to open valves to release the pressure. That worked as planned, but it released the hydrogen as well.
Hydrogen, being light, rose up to the roof, where the ventilation system was not working, because there was no electricity. After a while some stray spark ignited the hydrogen which exploded, blowing the lightweight roof off the building right in front of the world’s TV cameras. The Fukushima news just became much more dramatic. Authorities were desperate to show the world some positive action.
They progressively ordered the evacuation of 160,000 people living around the Fukushima neighbourhood. That was a mistake. As days and weeks passed, it materialized that not one single person was killed by nuclear radiation. Not one single person was even injured by nuclear radiation, either. Even today, a decade later, there is still no sign of any longer-term radiation harm to any person or animal. Sadly, however, people did die during the forced evacuation.
So one of the lessons learned from Fukushima is that a huge amount of nuclear power can be struck by the largest earthquake and tsunami ever recorded, and nobody gets harmed by nuclear radiation.
Another lesson learned is that an evacuation order issued too hastily did harm and kill people.
World Nuclear Association Director-General Dr. Sama Bilbao y León said: “The rapidly implemented and protracted evacuation has resulted in well-documented significant negative social and health impacts. In total, the evacuation is thought to have been responsible for more than 2,000 premature deaths among the 160,000 who were evacuated. The rapid evacuation of the frail elderly, as well at those requiring hospital care, had a near-immediate toll.” [emphasis added]
She added: “When facing future scenarios concerning public health and safety, whatever the event, it is important that authorities take an all-hazards approach. There are risks involved in all human activities, not just nuclear power generation. Actions taken to mitigate a situation should not result in worse impacts than the original events. This is particularly important when managing the response to incidents at nuclear facilities – where fear of radiation may lead to an overly conservative assessment and a lack of perspective for relative risks.”
Thus, a decade later, we can contemplate the cumulative lessons learned. Above all, they are that nuclear power is far safer than anyone had thought. Even when dreaded core meltdowns occurred, and although reactors were wrecked, resulting in a financial disaster for the owners, no people were harmed by radiation.
We also learned that, for local residents, it would have been far safer to stay indoors in a house than to join the forced evacuation. We also learned that governments and authorities must listen to the nuclear professionals, and not overreact, even though the television news cameras look awfully close.
Fukushima certainly produced some valuable lessons. Governments, news media and the public need to learn the correct lessons from them.
Dr Kelvin Kemm is a nuclear physicist and is CEO of Stratek Business Strategy Consultants, a project management company based in Pretoria. He conducts business strategy development and project planning in a wide variety of fields for diverse clients.
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Just a textual error, daiichi is number 1, daini is number 2.
It would be helpful to add to this article the detail about why nuclear reactors stay hot and need cooling following shutdowns. The fission product daughters of Uranium or Plutonium are unstable. When these daughters decay, they emit radiation which continues to heat the reactor. This continued process goes one for quite a while and is dependent on how long and at what power levels the reactor was operating prior to shutdown.
It’s not just that the reactors are big chunks of heated metal, but that they continue to heat themselves that drives the need for continued cooling.
The latest generation of reactors don’t need power to cool themselves. The problem has already been solved! The Fukushima plants should have been replace long before the tsunami , but were not due to anti nuclear forces.
Dr. Kelvin Kemm, thank you for this well written article.
The truth is that most people seem to focus on the Fukushima core melt event (which demonstrably resulted in no deaths), and shrug off the 15,000 people who died as the result of the Tsunami itself. The resulting actions taken by Japan (shutting down most of their nukes) will do nothing to lower the death toll of the next inevitable Tsunami. That this result seems to result in almost no introspection is sad.
I have been involved with commercial nuclear power for much of my working life (over 20 years). The over all “public” perception of the risk of commercial nuclear power is grossly at odds with the reality. Commercial nuclear power has been operating for nearly 80 years. There is no lack of concrete data that it is one of the least risky endeavors that humans engage in, yet this seems to have little impact on global nuclear policy. I have been asking myself why this is for decades. I don’t really like the most obvious answer, but, to paraphrase Willis Eschenbach, too bad!
While many of us malign politicians and policy makers for what we consider misguided and or irrational actions, the simple truth is that if you want to make changes to complex technology policy, you have to figure out how to make it as interesting as the latest lip gloss color. The “good” ones, in my opinion, are the ones that can do that with a straight face. Unfortunately, the “bad” ones are also extremely good at this tactic as well.
Regards,
Ethan Brand
Lesson #1: Don’t hire outside firms to manage security at nuclear sites:
https://humansarefree.com/2014/02/fukushima-was-an-inside-job-the-sabotage-exposed.html
Several years prior to the 2011 earthquake event, TEPCO had been warned by an independent safety review team that the Fukushima seawall could be breached by a high wave tsunami, and that an earthquake which could produce a high wave tsunami was a high probability event.
TEPCO’s management did absolutely nothing to prepare for a high wave tsunami. Not even something as simple as maintaining sixty hours of battery backup for the reactor cooling system control valves, and making preparations for bringing in emergency power from offsite if the backup generators were damaged by seawater intrusion.
Implementing these relatively quick and inexpensive measures would have allowed plenty of time for a long-term facility enhancement project for moving the backup generators to high ground, for running armored cables from the generators down to the reactor cooling pumps, and for hardening the electrical distribution and control systems inside the reactor buildings against seawater intrusion.
It’s another example of what happens when the top people in charge choose to ignore clear warning signs that serious trouble is on the horizon and foolishly decide to do nothing to deal with it.
All they had to do was locate the emergency diesel generators to higher ground behind the plant
That is it
There would have been no Fukushima disaster at all
Not quite. Relocating the emergency generators to high ground, but also doing the other upgrades to the power distribution and control systems needed to ensure reliable cooling pump operation in a flooded reactor building, might have required the reactors to be offline for two or three months while the new systems inside the buildings were being installed and tested. Not exactly cheap, but relatively easily done.
How about just replacing the old reactors with a new reactor design that does not need power to cool the reactors after shutdown! Of course all of us know in this political environment that not possible.
I have only read the first few pages of comments, but most of them are based upon inadequate or poorly understood information. Most of them include an element of truth, then wander off into the unknown. We do know the tsunami greatly exceeded the plant design specifications which led to safety system failures, meltdown and hydrogen explosions. Obviously, the Maximum Credible Accident was greatly underestimated. The Fukushima lesson is the same as that learned from every other nuclear plant accident: the public overreaction caused by excessive fear of radiation leads to more deaths and destruction than the nuclear accident itself.
IMHO, the value of this article is that it articulates in the clearest, most concise, and cogent way that “the public overreaction caused by excessive fear of radiation leads to more deaths and destruction than the nuclear accident itself.” Without explaination that the average person understand, statements of fact alone are inadequate. This article provides that explaination.
Recently on a calgary call in radio show they had someone on correctly pointing out nuclear is the only answer if CO2 is an actual problem.
A caller suggested the guest should show his dedication by going and eating seafood caught near the Fukushima plant.
I suggested I would gladly take that bet, in return they would need to eat something captured near a Chinese rare earth processing plant, assuming you can find anything alive in the area.
Sound of crickets ensued.
I was working with some Hitachi engineers in an Alberta coal generating plant that summer, they were from the Fukushima area and they weren’t concerned about radiation
I worked as a Mechanical / Systems Engineer at one of the Fukushima sister plants in the US. The potential diesel fuel supply tank risk was identified in the early 90’s and was rectified in the US, Japanese operators evaluated correctly that their installation could handle a 10 m ocean surge. They couldn’t justify, at the time, preparation for a risk that had never happened (>10 m ocean surge). The plants did survive a 9.0 shaker, having done a lot of seismic work on this design, that is a real credit to the designers, fabricators, and operating maintenance crews. Maybe the real lesson for those in the business is that risk analysis and evaluation process needs to be re-examined.
This post allows me to pose a question that has bothered me for years. We are told that earthquakes are the result of the accumulation of stress in rock formations deep within the earth (30 km deep near Fukushima) that build up over decades to the point that solid rock can fracture and displace by up to several meters, releasing enormous energy in a very short time. Shift for a moment to the Kola Borehole project which attempted to go as deep as possible in solid rock. From 1970 to 1992 they managed to bore 12,000+ meters deep, encountering very high pressures and unexpectedly high temperatures. They could go no deeper; as Wiki puts it “The unexpected decrease in density, the greater porosity, and the unexpectedly high temperatures caused the rock to behave somewhat like a plastic, making drilling nearly impossible.” As was described, by the time they withdrew and replaced the bit, the lower part of the hole had squeezed shut.
Now my question: How is it possible that rock formations that exhibit plasticity at 12km can accumulate stress over decades without deforming slowly to release the stress at depths of 30, 50, or 100 km, with correspondingly greater temperatures and pressures?
I don’t think that crustal geology is homogeneous: what is true around the ring of fire is not generally true elsewhere, for example.
kola borehole is very much not a plate boundary nor a subduction zone. I am not sure that we should extrapolate from it to those.
Very good point. However, I find it difficult to imagine that the “ring of fire” or subduction zones represent temperature and pressure conditions more conducive to rigidity than the plasticity of the “solid rock” Borehole.
Just as in the U.S., a major facility like this in Japan has to involve a study of natural hazards. Of course one has to set a limited time period over which we look at historical hazards. It was known that a tsunami had inundated the site (in the 700s CE as I recall), but the study period was organized to begin just after this historical tsunami.
I had a retired GE nuclear engineer as an office mate from 2010 to 2013 who taught our nuclear engineering courses. His contention was that the biggest problem with Fukushima, and Chernobyl as well, was groupthink.
There are hazards, and then there are hazards. The Three Mile Island meltdown was the result of an accumulation of a number of smaller problems and issues which coalesced under the right set of conditions into a larger triggering cause for a meltdown.
On the other hand, both the Fukushima and the Chernobyl meltdowns were a consequence of easily predictable root causes, ones which could have been easily avoided through appropriate actions taken by the corporate or government managers in charge of those reactors.
Corporate managers have a tendency to see their huge stack of safety analyses — for which they’ve paid millions of dollars — as being an impenetrable wall between themselves and disaster. What this amounts to is nuclear scale hubris.
“The Three Mile Island meltdown was the result of an accumulation
of a number of smaller problems and issues which coalesced under the right set
of conditions into a larger triggering cause for a meltdown.” Sorry, that
may be wrong, it was due to inadequate operator training.
The operator had been a nuclear power plant had been an operator on a naval vessel nuclear power plant but in shutdown of a Naval reactor heat is not a big problem, the reactor is much smaller. The operator shutoff the cooling pump because he was worried about the vessel that keep track of the water level in the reactor would fill up, he was taught in the Navy that that was bad.
As bad as it is, in a commercial power plant the overriding consideration should have been keep the reactor cool, what happen in the monitoring vessel should have been a secondary concern and keep the pump on and the reactor cool no mater how much flooding you have was the proper course, instead he shut the pump off as he was trained to do in the Navy. Yes, flooding in a naval vessel is a problem but not a reactor on land, last, I check you cannot sink on solid land.
The failure was not the plant or its engineering or maintenance (I thought for a long time the report back them, it was due to a value being left open which may have been true but that was not an insurmountable problem) it was human, on many levels, most of it was a lack of training or understanding how the Naval training may conflict with the necessary training a commercial plant operator should have.
Now granted I got this from a TV documentation presentation and how accurate it is anyone guess but to me it made sense.
>>
Now granted I got this from a TV documentation presentation and how accurate it is anyone guess but to me it made sense.
<<
Here are just three bullets from a commentary by Dr. Lawrence Weinstein:
It sounds like your TV documentation was a hit piece on Navy operators. I bet his mother wore Army boots too.
Jim
In reply to Jim.
The blaming the operator is BS… And it hides the real problem. The reason why fuel rod, water cooled reactors are not being installed today in all of the CAGW crazy countries.
Pressure water reactors are dangerous as hell, if there is a wiring error, if backup pumps are not available, if electrical power is lost, and so on.
Pressure water reactor are inherently dangerous, because they operate at 130 atmospheres. Water boils at 100C and the reactor is operated at 315C.
Pressure water reactors have had problems that were close to loss of pressure vessel integrity because of human ‘maintenance’ errors.
An example, is a refuel in which the wrong grade of studs was used to replace the reactor lid studs when it was taken off. The studs expanded sometime after start-up and a large amount of water was lost…. however the human operators were able to shut the reactor down before loss of cooling water.
The fuel rod fission reactors key safety problem, is that …
The fuel rods melt, if the cooling water stops, in 12 minutes. Heat is continued to be produced in the reactor (7% of thermal output before emergency shutdown for 48 hours) after fission is stopped, by the very short lived highly radioactive fission byproducts.
The water cooled, fuel rod reactor blows up if a pipe breaks or a pump breaks if the emergency bypass systems fail.
There is a ‘new’ fission reactor design that solved all of the water cooled, fuel rod safety problems.
A fission reactor does not need a 1000 dials and gauges, 600 alarm panels, and hundreds of switches. dangerous. Water cooled, fuel rod reactors are very, very, complicate and inherently dangerous.
There is a fission toaster design …. A fission reactor that is 13 feet in diameter and 27 feet long…. (See next below comment for details).
Truck to site. Cheap as a coal plant to build. Can compete with coal because it cheaper to build because it does not have the safety problems that fuel rod, water cooled reactors have.
The optimum fission reactor, produces 440 MW, at 600C.
It does not have level control or pressure control. It does not melt down if cooling is lost. It is walk away safe if all operators were to just walk away and all power was lost and all of the control equipment stopped working.
The optimum fission reactor operates at atmospheric pressure. It is partially filled (small air gap on top) with a salt that melts at 400C and boils at 1400C
Think of the ‘control’ panel for a molten salt reactor.
What is there to control?
The molten salt reactor, has six, internal heat exchangers in the reactor take heat away. There are six 35 horsepower screw pumps on top of the reactor which help the natural convection circulation in the reactor.
The level in the molten salt reactor does not change with load. The pressure in the molten salt reactor does not change with load.
The molten salt reactor naturally follows power load. That is not true for fuel rod water cooled reactor. They can absolutely become a bomb in minutes because of an overpressure problem caused by an abrupt change in load or a crack in piping or if the backup cooling system is required and it does not work.
The molten salt reactor does not have any of the catastrophic safety issues, which are specific to fuel rod, water cooled reactors.
Molten salt reactors, naturally follow power load.
The molten salt expands if temperature rises in the reactor which slows down the fission reaction in the core of the reactor. The molten salt contracts, if load the reactor feeds, increases and temperature drops in the reactor, increasing the rate of fission and the temperature falls in the reactor.
The molten salt reactor of course has control rods.
The molten salt control rods control one variable, reactor temperature.
In a fission reactor the radiation (both gamma and particle) breaks the water bonds and produces hydrogen and oxygen.
The hydrogen must be continually removed or there will be an explosion. And in addition the zircon cladding on the 50,000 fuel rods, reacts with water vapour to produce hydrogen and loses it integrity, if the fuel rods are exposed to air.
You keep pushing the vaporware. Again, I have to ask (and again, I’ll get crickets in return) show me *ONE* (just one, surely that is not too much to ask for) of these miracle molten salt reactors in commercial operation so we can compare the reality to your hype.
A fine article, thank you, KK & WUWT.
A book I highly recommend by Robert Zubrin, nuclear PhD engineer: Merchants Of Despair.
Exposes the “environmental” movement as the Nazi, depopulationist, Malthusian & Darwinian eugenicist abomination it is.
Compares coal,oil, nuclear +++ .
A realist’ view.
JD.
“lessons from Fukushima?’
Why are we talking about an obsolete fission reactor design? There is a ‘new’ fission reactor design that solves all of the problems of the water cooled, fuel rod reactors.
The US built built and tested the optimum fission reactor design 50 years ago. Which is the molten salt, burner design.
A Canadian company, Terrestrial Energy, has copied and optimized the US molten salt reactor. Their 440 MW burner reactor is small, truckable to site. It has six internal heat exchangers and six 35 horse power screw pumps and a carved graphite core which is the moderator.
The ‘new’ fission reactor design does not require a containment building, to contain explosions. This is a technical explanation of that design by their senior technical designer.
Terrestrial IMSR Good Summary 11 minutes
The optimum fission reactor was no catastrophic failure modes. It is walk away safe. All of the human operators could die and there is no possibility of a catastrophic failure.
And the optimum fission reactor is sealed. So it possible to have absolutely zero radiation leaks to the environment from this reactor design. That is not true for a pressure water reactor. The water which cools the pressure water reactor can and does pick up radioactive noble gases and water soluble radioactive fission by-products, if there are crack in the fuel rods.
The optimum fission reactor design, does not and cannot produce hydrogen gas. There no internal chemical reactions that could cause an explosion. The optimum fission reactor uses a salt that melts at 400C, the reactor produces heat at 600C, and the salt boils at 1400C. The maximum temperature for a water cooled reactor is 315C.
It cannot fail like the three reactors did in Fukushima or the reactor at Three Mile Island or the Russian reactor. The optimum reactor cannot have an overpressure event, it operates at atmosphere pressure rather, than 130 atmospheres.
It is six times more fuel efficient than a pressure water/boiling water fuel rod reactor and produces nine times less high level radiation. Because is so efficient in burning all of the fissionable uranium and produced plutonium.
Fuel rod reactors are inefficient because the fuel rods must be replaced before they crack and the because there is uneven burning of the fuel because the fuel does not circulate through the core of the reactor where there are the most neutrons.
The molten salt reactor, because it does not use zircon clad fuel rods and because it does not require internal steel supports both of which absorb neutrons, requires three times less fuel than a pressure water reactor, to produce the same output power.
Fission reactors when fission is stopped…. Continue to produce heat (7% of the maximum thermal output just before emergency shutdown) from the very short lived fission products, particular for the first 48 hours.
The Terrestrial reactor uses unmelted salt which lines a cavity that the reactor sits in to provide a fail safe, passive method to dissipate heat in event that the back-up cooling system which is cooling of the unmelted salt failed.
The burner reactor has a life of 7 years. (It can produce power continually as there are no fuel rods to replace. When it reaches the end of its life, it is drained. The drained reactor is not high level waste and can be disposed of without issue. The old reactor is replaced with a new reactor, every seven years.
It is six times more fuel efficient than a pressure water/boiling water fuel rod reactor and produces nine times less high level radiation. Because is so efficient in burning all of the fissionable uranium and produced plutonium.
The covering on the fuel rods (zircon) and the steel required to hold the 50,000 fuel rods…. In a typical water cooled reactor, absorb neutrons.
The molten salt reactor does not have fuel rods to absorb neutrons and as it operates at atmosphere pressure so it does not need the enteral supports that are required for a pressure water reactor that operates at 130 atmospheres.
A pressure water reactor ‘s fuel rods will start to melt in 12 minutes if cooling water flow is stopped.
The optimum fission reactor design, does not use water to cool…. the reactor. The optimum fission reactor has no catastrophic failure modes. It is walk away safe even if there as an earthquake or tsunami.
“The world media watched, and broadcast the blow-by-blow action. Japanese authorities started to panic under the international spotlight.
The un-circulating cooling water was boiling off inside the reactors resulting in a chemical reaction between hot fuel exposed to hot steam. This led to the production of hydrogen gas.
As the steam pressure rose, the engineers decided to open valves to release the pressure. That worked as planned, but it released the hydrogen as well.”
Sounds great, where can we see one of these portable nuclear molten salt reactors in commercial operations? what’s that? there are none in operation, they’re still being “developed”? color me not surprised.
“it is important that authorities take an all-hazards approach.”, said Dr. Bilbao y Leon. This would have been a good way to approach the Chicom virus. I hope our government learns to do this for future crises. I am afraid, though, that this is wishful thinking.
I think we solved this problem in 2015:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/05/26/claim-new-chinese-nuclear-plants-are-unsafe/#comment-1527845
Fearless Fukushiming Leader:
We’ll put the emergency cooling water systems down near the beach – what could go wrong?
Newby on Team:
What about tsunami’s?
Fearless F’ing Leader:
Screw it! It’s time for lunch. Are you a team player or not?
Team:
Hai ! ( OK! )
….
Later…
Team:
Oh Fukushima!
Here’s a leading Chinese scientist commenting on Chinese nuclear safety
China warned over ‘insane’ plans for new nuclear power plants | China | The Guardian
Griff: Your article is from 2015 – “President Obama says…”
It is true though that Chinese environmental, safety and operating standards leave something to be desired, for example:
A little-known story concerns “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan biological weapons lab (being done under contract to a US government agency, because this work was outsourced to China after it was made illegal in the USA). Seems the lab-manufactured virus “jumped or was pushed” out of the lab, and caused all sorts of havoc all over the world. The virus was only fatal to the very elderly and infirm, but it was deliberately overblown into a very-scary “killer” virus. Then, tried-and-true emergency plans were shelved and a bunch of quacks were put in charge, who implemented ineffective and extremely costly-and-harmful year-long lock-down policies for the low-risk workforce and student populations. The cost to society of these lock-downs in terms of lives-harmed-and/or-lost is estimated at ten to 100 times the harm caused by the illness.
Actually, the story must be a fiction – no rational person or group could be this stupid for this long.
Of course , none of the “samauri” volunteers at Fukupshima had the slightest ill-effect and none of the Russian soldiers fighting to confine Chernobyl leakage even got so much as a runny nose.
Radio-activity is less dangerous than CO2, in fact its really good for you.
Right, well I think we can see the level of understanding our nuclear physics expert is going to provide here.
Thanks. Good night.
When there was some concern about the Chalk River Nuclear plant (Ottawa Valley, Ontario) being built on a known fault line, residents were told not to worry because any earthquake strong enough to damage the reactor would break the dam before that happened. Yes. Don’t worry about radiation because you’ll be under water.
I think you have these switched.
ichi = one
ni = two
And, the first one should be Daini, not Diani.
“Dr Kelvin Kemm is a nuclear physicist and is CEO ”
So pretty much clueless when it comes design, and operations of commercial power plants. Also emergency planning.
Fuel damage is an economic loss covered by insurance in the US. Not a safety issue.
We design nuclear power plants for natural occurrences that we can reasonably expect to happen during the life of the plant.
We have emergency plans to deal with things that we do not expect.
Comparing a decision for evacuation to prevent radiation exposure in the face multiple expected deaths to hindsight is BS. Justifying your hindsight with ‘premature death statistics’ is BS^2.
Don’t run stuff well past its best before date?
LFTR is better?
My sailboat is 40+ yo. It has seen better days. Just bought a new head sail and a couple quarts of non-skid paint.
My 2-seat convertible sports car is 26 yo. Seen better days. Has new tires and brakes.
The diesel pusher Class A I live in is 23 yo. It has seen better days.
It has something in common with older LWR. Large components were installed and the building around it. My ammonia refrigerant fridge stopped working. It was too big to fit through the door.
My last start up before retiring was a PWR in China. It had a really big equipment hatch. The reactor vessel could be installed after the containment building was built.
Many of the BWR (including designs used in Japan) and PWR I have worked on produce more power and last longer than the orginal design.
That is better.
Of course part of new design is improvements based on experience.
I priced a new German 2-seat convertible sports car on line. I can pay cash. That is because I can keep things running long after the ‘best before date’.
Bottom line is safety criteria must be satisfied. Best is not a criteria.
And of course there is always the fear of the unexpected. Every so call advanced reactor will still have an emergency plan. The fear mongers will always call for an evacuation.
From the photos I’ve seen of the Fukushima site, the reactor was located in a depression along the beach between two hills, which probably helped channel the tsunami water into the reactor. Maybe one lesson to be learned is to build nuclear reactors on higher ground in an area prone to earthquakes and tsunamis.