An explosion at a nuclear power plant in northern Japan on Saturday blew the roof off one building, brought down walls and caused a radiation leak of unspecified proportions, Japanese officials said, after Friday’s huge earthquake caused critical failures in the plant’s cooling system.
The evacuation zone is now twelve miles around the power plant. The Japanese government is saying that while the containment building blew up, the reactor vessel is intact.
4 comments:
Japan's nuclear power industry has had one scandal after another for the past 20 years, with dozens of people dying due to accidents in their facilities. The executives in charge of the electrical utility are drunk and incompetent and Japanese society, with its emphasis upon consensus, has no way of dealing with that problem. Firing someone in Japan is viewed as shameful and scandalous, because it means you made a mistake in hiring him in the first place.
This particular explosion isn't particularly unexpected. During prior coverage you heard engineers say there was an alternate way to keep the reactor from melting down but they didn't want to use it unless they had to. Well, clearly they had to. And you see why they didn't want to use it, because that alternate way is to flood the containment building with seawater (that was built in as a last-ditch cooling effort -- that's why all of Japan's reactors are built by the sea), and when seawater flashes to steam, kaBOOM. One thing to note is that they're cooling the *outside* of the containment vessel this way, meaning that the scary looking steam cloud doesn't carry a lot of radioactivity, unlike the steam cloud that spewed from Chernobyl (which had no containment vessel thus when they poured water onto it to cool it down, the resulting steam was highly radioactive). The downside is that the containment vessel is reinforced concrete and *may* crack given this treatment, though hopefully it won't be a big crack...
So anyhow: Not Good. But not Chernobyl either -- yet.
- Badtux the Glow-in-the-dark Penguin
They're dumping in seawater and boron to try and tamp it down. My suspicion is that dumping in seawater means that the reactor will be unserviceable forever.
MSNBC is saying that the core has partially melted.
Dumping cold seawater into a very hot reactor will probably do funky things to the rods.
The Japanese reactors are more like the
TMI (US) than Chernobyl with a tightly enclosed core vessel and outer containment building. At first I'd suspected they had a hydrogen gas buildup that lit off and fractured the outer containment. That was a real risk for TMI that they controlled.
The sea water drench has several problems one being corrosion over time
and its all junk afterwards.
It's a bad scene and not enough data
to evaluate the actual risk. But with everything else they have going on I feel for them as the whole quake recover and things like reactor damage will take a long time to clear up.
Eck!
Yeppers, EBF, that reactor is toast. Even if there's no physical damage to the reactor core itself, there's no way that the containment vessel could ever be certified as safe again, because cold seawater hitting hot containment vessel is one heckuva thermal shock. My guess is that once they get it cooled down enough, they're going to just seal it in like Chernobyl and let it sit there for 100+ years or more until it's cooled down enough to do something with it.
Eck, yep, more like TMI. The design of this particular reactor is almost identical to TMI. And, unfortunately, so is the negligence of its operator :(. This reactor is trashed, period. Just like TMI Unit 2.
-Badtux the Glow-in-the-dark Penguin
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