Earthquake off Japan

[Skgoa]

It is the greens and the main opposition party. What do you expect?

That said, unless TEPCO manages to get the thing under control, nuclear energy might be dead for the next decade. Because if one cannot trust the companies not to screw with such important things and nuclear regulators missed it, then that is a huge trust loss.

Nuclear power might become dead in countries like Germany.

Nuclear anything has been more or less dead in Germany for a while now. The current "debate" is about how long the existing plants are allowed to operate.

[His Divine Shadow]

Long enough to get neighboring countries to build enough nuclear power to sell to germany I would figure.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

For people who don't think the plant was built well enough; The place was built to withstand a magnitude 7.8 earthquake, because they felt 7.2 or 7.3 was the most powerful that you could have in the region. You can't fault the builders for not anticipating something there was no historical precedent to expect.

Even then, the plant weathered the earthquake just fine. If it was just the earthquake, there'd have been no problems of this magnitude. It was the great big flood that came afterward and effectively killed the cooling systems that was the kicker.

[Broomstick]

It's not all hysteria here, either. The local news has been rather calmly reassuring people - the Chicago area has more nuclear plants than just about anywhere else in the US. Ours were built with the New Madrid quake of 1812 in mind, a series of quakes, actually, with the strongest around 8.1, plus a safety margin. No way is Chicago going to be hit by a tsunami, short of giant meteor hitting Lake Michigan. They've been very firm it's more like TMI than Chernobyl. I'd say the newpaper op/ed pieces have been running about 50/50 for and against.

Of course, you always have some people running around in a panic.

[bz249]

For people who don't think the plant was built well enough; The place was built to withstand a magnitude 7.8 earthquake, because they felt 7.2 or 7.3 was the most powerful that you could have in the region. You can't fault the builders for not anticipating something there was no historical precedent to expect.

Even then, the plant weathered the earthquake just fine. If it was just the earthquake, there'd have been no problems of this magnitude. It was the great big flood that came afterward and effectively killed the cooling systems that was the kicker.

Most probably even the tsunami would only result in a serious, but otherwise managable situation (somewhere around INES 3-4) if the company would have concentrated to solve the situation instead of denying it. After all, it took one day after the tsunami after the first hidrogen explosion, which followed by an exact same one another day later and another one next day... etc. And the fire in block 4 happened at the fourth day. Sure it can be bloody tiring and chaotic there, but still, it is the fourth day and no contingency plan in action, no large scale resource mobilization. Even in earthquake hit Japan, something could have been done in four days.

[Tribun]

Well, after looking at how incompetent they handled the whole thing, especially trying to deny everything at first instead of getting help to stop it in the early stages, we can probaly thank the corrupt POS that is TEPCO for this serious nuclear accident.

[CaptHawkeye]

The ideal lesson to take from this would be that yet again the Private Sector has royally screwed the pooch. Count on everyone to forget that though and just go back to blaming governments for it. I mean it's been a year since Deepwater Horizon and people already think that was the President's fault.

[Broomstick]

My impression is just about every major disaster has heaps o' cover your ass and denial. As I said, we have to design systems with human limitations in mind. Humans, you know, greedy, bald, poo-flinging monkeys that would sometimes rather die than admit being wrong.

That, of course, is one reason nuclear power generation is so heavily regulated.

And it's not just nuclear power - same shit happens with every major accident or disaster, regardless of cause.

[Thanas]

My impression is just about every major disaster has heaps o' cover your ass and denial. As I said, we have to design systems with human limitations in mind. Humans, you know, greedy, bald, poo-flinging monkeys that would sometimes rather die than admit being wrong.

That, of course, is one reason nuclear power generation is so heavily regulated.

Regulation which seemed to have failed spectacularly.

[Skgoa]

Thats the reason why I am strictly against a "Laufzeitverlängerung" (lifetime extension) for the german nuclear powerplants, but this is going of topic.

Long enough to get neighboring countries to build enough nuclear power to sell to germany I would figure.

Most electricity we get from France is (effectively) sold to the Netherlands. Current long term plans call for long distance power lines (I forgot the exact term) transporting power from north and/or east and offshore "wind parks".

[Simon_Jester]

To be fair, having state-run nuclear power plants isn't necessarily the answer by itself. In the case of Fukushima, the reactors themselves held up quite well, but the spent fuel rod pool has been a disaster... but there's nothing preventing a state-run plant from having a pool like that, and there's no guarantee state employees won't engage in ass-covering and minimize the extent of a problem while forgetting to look after one thing that then spirals out of control. That happens in both public and private sectors.

Here, TEPCO didn't commit the obvious sins of for-profit companies like skimping on construction costs or running the facility at unsafe levels. They just dropped one of the several balls they'd been juggling in the days after the earthquake and tsunami.

There are arguments against giving too much responsibility for key infrastructure to private companies, but this isn't one of them.

[Broomstick]

My impression is just about every major disaster has heaps o' cover your ass and denial. As I said, we have to design systems with human limitations in mind. Humans, you know, greedy, bald, poo-flinging monkeys that would sometimes rather die than admit being wrong.

That, of course, is one reason nuclear power generation is so heavily regulated.

Regulation which seemed to have failed spectacularly.

Until the accident is fully analyzed we don't if regulation was a failure or if it was insufficient. Perhaps the agencies diligently observed what they were required to observe, but no one thought to look at other things that, in hindsight, were critical links in the chain of events. I suspect part of this was so much focus was on the reactors that the fuel pool was simply overlooked until it became a problem. That's not OK, of course not, but it's not necessarily incompetence at work, either.

Although, yes, I suspect there were failures to follow procedures as well. There always are. Most of the time there is so much redundancy in these systems that such failures are either self-correcting, not critical, or easily reversed. That's why it takes multiple failures or insults to the system to generate disaster.

Most of these high tech systems that wind up in catastrophic failure do not, in fact, have one discreet cause of failure. The catastrophe is the end result of smaller events, any one of which would be minor but together are epic disaster. Well, OK, in this case we had the 9.0 quake and the 10 meter tsunami, both of which exceeded worse case event predictions, neither of those were minor, but subsequent events and actions were not so major.

So far we have learned:

1) We need to recognize that the past "worst quake" data on a region is not sufficient, even in known seismically active areas that have been studied a long time. Japan needs to entire not just nuclear plants but all critical facilities for 9.0 quakes, or even larger ones. Everywhere else probably needs to rachet up their expected "worst quake" figure.

2) Don't assume natural disasters come one at a time.

3) Don't put back up power generators in a low spot. Actually, we've know this for quite some time, but so many older buildings and facilities have theirs in the basement and reconfiguring them is somewhere between pain in the ass and impossible. However, going forward all new critical facilities should have the emergency generators at a high point in the structure, not a low one.

4) We should seriously consider reconfiguring or upgrading older facilities. There are design features at the Fukushima complex that are now considered obsolete and not safe enough. There are newer back up cooling systems that require less power (for roof top cooling reservoirs, that require no power but gravity which, I'm sure we all agree, is very reliable) that should be standard, and it might even be possible to retrofit some of these. Where possible back up generators should be moved to better locations And so on.

5) No matter how many safety systems and how redundant they are, we should start planing for "what if they ALL fail?" because clearly the universe can always throw more at us than we expected.

6) Perhaps we should be quicker to perform permanent shut-downs that ruin reactors rather than spending quite as long trying to salvage a working reactor out of the mess. Because, let's be honest here, if they had done the sea-water dump two days ago on all the reactors we probably wouldn't be seeing this mess.

We need to look at the human element, yes, but also everything else. This needs to be thoroughly and dispassionately examined so we can extract the maximum learning from this experience, both what went right and what went wrong, to make nuclear power safer. Because even if we decided to give up nuclear power today it would take decades to safely dismantle and dispose of what's already out there, so the safety issues are not going away. However, it's clear many nations won't even consider giving up nuclear power. These issues will never go away, the genie is out of the bottle and its not going back.

Yes, yes - there is corruption, greed, incompetence.... and there's something reassuring to the notion of it being JUST "bad people" at fault, because then all we need to do is replace them with "good people" and it will be alright. That's a lazy short cut - we have to have systems that hold up to the moral limitation of the average human being. We have to account for non-human factors. It's all so much harder, but that's the only way to make things safer going forward.

[Broomstick]

Thats the reason why I am strictly against a "Laufzeitverlängerung" (lifetime extension) for the german nuclear powerplants, but this is going of topic.

I'm not up on the current situation in Germany regarding their nuclear power plants, but if their facilities are older than about 30 years and/or reaching their planned lifespan then extending their use can definitely represent a risk. At a minimum their safety systems would need upgrading, and that's assuming it is even possible to do so.

I think there's merit in discussing whether to shut down obsolete power plants and try different types of energy sources or build new, modern, safer facilities rather than to continually extend old power plants just on general principles. The details would just lend more weight to one side of the argument or the other, it wouldn't really change the base debate much.

[Thanas]

Until the accident is fully analyzed we don't if regulation was a failure or if it was insufficient. Perhaps the agencies diligently observed what they were required to observe, but no one thought to look at other things that, in hindsight, were critical links in the chain of events. I suspect part of this was so much focus was on the reactors that the fuel pool was simply overlooked until it became a problem. That's not OK, of course not, but it's not necessarily incompetence at work, either.
*snip rest*

This is a company which has in the past struggled with glaring incompetence and which was allowed to still operate despite having falsified maintenance protocols, reactor data etc. More than once, over several years.

[bz249]

I'm not up on the current situation in Germany regarding their nuclear power plants, but if their facilities are older than about 30 years and/or reaching their planned lifespan then extending their use can definitely represent a risk. At a minimum their safety systems would need upgrading, and that's assuming it is even possible to do so.

I think there's merit in discussing whether to shut down obsolete power plants and try different types of energy sources or build new, modern, safer facilities rather than to continually extend old power plants just on general principles. The details would just lend more weight to one side of the argument or the other, it wouldn't really change the base debate much.

The life-time extension is a simple cost-saving procedure, since in the nuclear industry more than half of the entire costs coming from the construction and the dismantle of the plant. Thus the longer the plant runs, the less are the capital cost/kWh produced... which either leads to cheaper energy price or higher profit. That´s why extending the lifetime is always the preferred option to the companies.

[Simon_Jester]

This is a company which has in the past struggled with glaring incompetence and which was allowed to still operate despite having falsified maintenance protocols, reactor data etc. More than once, over several years.

Very well; if they should be punished for those things, fine.

But while they're at fault with the Fukushima crisis, there is no evidence that they made the key mistakes because they're a private company. State-owned nuclear reactors dating to the same period have quite a few of the same features and procedures that created a problem at Fukushima.

[D.Turtle]

I'm really confused at the current situation. It seemed that while the situation was pretty bad, it was pretty much under control, with no major leakage of radioactive material, and really no reason to believe it would lead to such a situation.

With the last few explosions, fires, etc. is it now in a situation where some larger amounts of radioactive material has been released? Is there now a significantly higher danger of large amounts being released and the situation spiraling out of control?

Just what is the worst-case scenario that is possible?

Its really, really difficult to get any non-biased information about this.

[Crossroads Inc.]

The last I heard from NPR was that reactor 1 and reactor 3 have "partially" melted from overheating and "might" meltdown. However, from what NPR said (and I really trust them) the WCS would be the cores melt to the point where they simply melt through the containment barrier. Evidently there is no possibilty of a Chernobly style explosion and subsequent radiation ploom.

So far all of the large explosions have been the build up of Hydrogen from the cooling water that has exploded. None of the explosions have (from what we are 'told') damaged the cores or containment barriers in anyway.

Now how true that is up in the air, but like I said I trust NPR, so unless they are being fed BS I am in favor of taking this at face value.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I'm really confused at the current situation. It seemed that while the situation was pretty bad, it was pretty much under control, with no major leakage of radioactive material, and really no reason to believe it would lead to such a situation.

With the last few explosions, fires, etc. is it now in a situation where some larger amounts of radioactive material has been released? Is there now a significantly higher danger of large amounts being released and the situation spiraling out of control?

There has been NO LOSS OF CONTAINMENT at any of the plant's reactors. Things are getting under control as more personnel and equipment is coming to the site. Barring an additional massive earthquake, the worst is past.

[bz249]

I'm really confused at the current situation. It seemed that while the situation was pretty bad, it was pretty much under control, with no major leakage of radioactive material, and really no reason to believe it would lead to such a situation.

With the last few explosions, fires, etc. is it now in a situation where some larger amounts of radioactive material has been released? Is there now a significantly higher danger of large amounts being released and the situation spiraling out of control?

There has been NO LOSS OF CONTAINMENT at any of the plant's reactors. Things are getting under control as more personnel and equipment is coming to the site. Barring an additional massive earthquake, the worst is past.

There was a release which said that there is a partial loss of containment at reactor 2. Or is it revised?

[Broomstick]

I'm really confused at the current situation. It seemed that while the situation was pretty bad, it was pretty much under control, with no major leakage of radioactive material, and really no reason to believe it would lead to such a situation.

Largely correct. Of course, it was known that if they couldn't keep water pouring on the reactors it could get much worse - hence the use of sea water when they couldn't use the pure water systems. It was known that hydrogen accumulation and explosions were a risk, but even with that a meltdown could be avoided as long as the reactor cores were cooled.

With the last few explosions, fires, etc. is it now in a situation where some larger amounts of radioactive material has been released?

Correct.

Although some of those fires may have been a result of or concurrent with the event that spiked the radiation, not a direct cause of it. Or maybe they were. That still needs to be determined as an explosion might have cracked the plumbing, allowing water to run out and leave the core exposed, or some of the fires may have resulted from the core being exposed and becoming hot enough to melt.

In either case - the release of certain istopes is indicative of fuel rod damage.

Is there now a significantly higher danger of large amounts being released and the situation spiraling out of control?

Define your terms.

There is absolutely NO chance that this can turn into a Chernobyl-style explosion of core reactor material. It just can't happen. The worst that can happen to the core(s) is that they melt. That would be "out of control" in one sense, as having a puddle of liquefied reactor core is a hellacious mess and certainly not orderly, but it won't be leaving the reactor building. It can't. There's no mechanism to cause that. It would be a puddle of liquid metal that's heavier than lead.

Now, worst case from that is it melts/burns through the bottom fo the reactor chamber, but there is supposedly a thick "bowl" of sorts beneath of high-temperature tolerant concrete to catch any such puddle. And there it would sit, not going anywhere, and we can just pour more water on top of it to keep cooling it. Such a puddle would be a very impure mix of metals and won't spontaneously fission. We know this, because the solidified puddle from TMI (which hasn't gone anywhere) isn't doing anything. Even the solidified mess from Chernobyl, although radioactive still, is so from decaying isotopes, not from fission, and has nicely solidified and stayed that way.

That's the worst that can happen to the core - become a puddle in a concrete bowl in the basement of the building.

The fuel rods sitting in the pool might be more of an issue. If they lose the water, which is serving to soak up stray neutrons, they can spontaneous "go critical". It should be emphasized this is NOT an explosion, but a spike in radiation. If you're standing too close it is lethal. Fortunately, distance rapidly reduces the danger. This is a danger for people at the power plant. It's NOT a danger to nearby residences or Tokyo or anyone else. This could kill workers at the plant dealing with the emergency.

Now, if the fuel rods are exposed and a fire breaks out (because without water they might become hot enough to cause nearby combustible things to combust, or they might cause water to disassociate into hydrogen and oxygen and generate another explosion) then, potentially, you have some of the material launched into the air. However, such particles are going to be heavy and they won't stay up long. That sort of thing is the reason to evacuate within 30 km, because if that does happen it's essentially fallout and you'll need to wait a bit before going back there. It's not going to travel to another continent or the Phillipines.

Just what is the worst-case scenario that is possible?

At this point? Fuel rods go critical, massive radiation spike, plant grounds uninhabitable, the fuel rods and cores melt into puddles, some "fallout" nearby. Maybe more hydrogen explosions. An unholy mess, but not Chernobyl, you won't have a large "exclusion zone". There will be some work required to entomb the mess in place for a few decades until it becomes safe to handle, or deal with it some other way, then folks can move back to their old homes just like Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt after having atomic bombs dropped on them. It may not be a good idea to grow your own vegetables within a couple kilometers of the plant for awhile as there is some cesium lose, but most of the time local shops are trucking food in from elsewhere anyhow.

Could people die from this? Yes, they certainly could - but if that happens it will be the workers at the power plants, not the civilians (who are supposed to be all evacuated) and certainly not anyone further away than 30 or so km.

At least that's my best guess, subject to change upon receipt of new information, etc. etc. usual disclaimers apply.

Its really, really difficult to get any non-biased information about this.

You have to sift through a lot, yes.

It should, however be emphasized that right now things are coming under control again. There is water going over the reactor cores. Radiation levels are dropping. We're probably seeing the end the emergency.

[Broomstick]

This is a company which has in the past struggled with glaring incompetence and which was allowed to still operate despite having falsified maintenance protocols, reactor data etc. More than once, over several years.

Yes. However, we should not simply assume that past errors and faults are the cause of THIS situation. By all means, it needs to be investigated and if prior incompetence has impacted the situation it should be punished. If current incompetence, etc. are found they should be punished. But – and I know this can be hard to grasp – past failures may have had NOTHING to do with this emergency.

The quake and tsunami combined were sufficient to exceed design standards. In other words, the plants withstood in excess of 100% of what they were designed to withstand. There may be no flaw or oversight beyond “this was more than we expected to happen”. It could be that even if everything was done perfectly after the two natural disasters it would not have been enough to prevent problems, even serious ones.

That's why it must be studied, to determine ALL the factors involved, including something as simple as “this was never built to stand up to such punishment”. Naturally, maintenance failures would only intensify such a situation. We must learn the facts here. We need to know if we need to build more robust power plants, or if we need to work on human factors or (more likely) both. Dismissing it as “oh, the company is incompetent and corrupt” is, as I said, the lazy man's approach to accident investigations.

The life-time extension is a simple cost-saving procedure, since in the nuclear industry more than half of the entire costs coming from the construction and the dismantle of the plant. Thus the longer the plant runs, the less are the capital cost/kWh produced... which either leads to cheaper energy price or higher profit. That´s why extending the lifetime is always the preferred option to the companies.

Which is exactly why companies should not have the last word here – their bottom line is money. The public's bottom line is safety.

[Broomstick]

There was a release which said that there is a partial loss of containment at reactor 2. Or is it revised?

There was a loss of coolant – that's what allowed the core to be exposed to air and partially melt. They have now added more water. Everything is still inside the containment building.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

At this point the situation has been largely contained again. Radiation levels have dropped to much lower levels, 135 times what they were during the peak while the fire was taking place at No.4 and before pressure venting resumed on No.2. There is no fire and all venting is back under control and there is no source for further release of radiation except TEPCO incompetence and/or the damage to the torus on reactor No.2, which may be leaking into the ground or may not. There is not any good way to tell, and it is not threatening to human life. The fuel pool on No.4 is presently subject to many conflicting reports.

[bz249]

There was a release which said that there is a partial loss of containment at reactor 2. Or is it revised?

There was a loss of coolant – that's what allowed the core to be exposed to air and partially melt. They have now added more water. Everything is still inside the containment building.

So this one was a false alarm?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12745186