Mar 11 2011
Prayers To The Victims
Click on the image above to go to the New York Times story on the devastation in Japan. What we are seeing today is the truly awesome force of nature – a force we are regularly humbled by. I am truly impressed with the fact that the Tokyo skyscrapers are pretty much undamaged. This has been a huge quake and those towers are still standing.
Our prayers go out to the victims and their families. It appears the massive tsunami will have been the truly deadly force when all is said and done.
But for the BBC buffoon who tried to weave in Global Warming as part of this incident I have only one thing to say – you are a pathetic moron. Underwater earthquakes and their resulting tsunamis have NOTHING to do with CO2 produced by humanity. And to bring it up in the midst of this disaster is as cold and heartless as anyone else who looks at this incident and gets ‘green’ with greed and power.
I was thinking it would have been a tasteless joke to claim that this was due to Global Warming. I can’t believe that some warming cultist already beat everyone to it – and was serious!
Global Warming is a sick, sick religion and has nothing at all to do with science anymore.
Meanwhile, Obama’s on TV right now lying about oil production.
his big push is “reduce demand!!!”
In other words, shut down this economy, freeze in the cold and curse the dark. About what I expected.
[…] Open thread: Obama presser on oil prices – hotair.com 03/11/2011 Erosion. more… Prayers To The Victims – strata-sphere.com 03/11/2011 Click on the image above to go to the New York Times story on […]
Leakage is 1000 x normal at the nuclear plant.
AJ, can you tell us what this means, ie what happens next?
No, “leakage” isn’t 1000 times normal. The radiation level inside the reactor core is 1000 times normal. Now that sounds like a big number but it depends on what “normal” is. Remember the media is going to do everything it can to hype it. Also note that the pressure in the reactor vessel is only 150% of normal so it should be ok.
The problem with this sort of reactor design is that it requires outside power for pumps and valves and control systems. When the lost that outside power, it caused problems.
Newer plants have “passive” emergency cooling methods that do not require these pumps and valves and outside power.
In any case, it needs watching. The reactors have been shut down but there is still a lot of heat in there and apparently the pumping of cooling water had been stopped for some period of time. What they are going to try to avoid is releasing too much pressure and creating a steam bubble. Steam doesn’t cool anything and creates a hot spot in the reactor. That is what happened at Three Mile Island. Pressure was relieved too quickly resulting in a steam bubble forming in the reactor.
So far no radiation has been released and they are talking about a small release of radioactive steam but the amount of radiation would probably be less than what comes out the stack of a coal power plant (coal has natural uranium in it).
What matters isn’t the radioactivity so much as what the isotopes are. Iodine and strontium are the most worrisome as those are readily absorbed and retained by the body.
Ok, so it looks like two different problems at two different locations.
First location has electric pumps that are driven by outside power. The reactor shut down normally but the diesel generators that operate the cooling pumps shut down about an hour later. I dont’ know the current status of that plant.
The second location uses steam turbine pumps, so they are ok for pumping but the valves that allow the water to circulate require battery power. If they can’t get electricity to keep those batteries charged, then they will lose those valves and coolant will stop.
So basically everything relies on keeping backup power to those plants so the emergency systems can operate.
Thanks, Cross. (I meant to post radiation, sorry)
Looks like they have emergency power on site and are in the process of connecting it. Also, the pressure release from inside the containment building will be filtered to trap radioactive isotopes:
http://www.iaea.org/press/?p=1133
A couple of press releases from TEPCO on the two facilities
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031203-e.html
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031209-e.html
This looks like a case of the media trying to hype it to get ad views.
Or make a big political statement…republicans like nuclear power, donncha know!
this was more than just a minor problem:
“Parts of the reactor’s nuclear fuel rods were briefly exposed to the air after cooling water levels dropped through evaporation, and a fire engine was pumping water into the reactor, Jiji Press reported. The water levels are recovering, said operator Tokyo Electric Power, according to Jiji.”
When you’ve got a lonely firetruck trying to stop a nuclear reactor from melting down, you have got a real “oh shit!” moment.
Well, you need to consider a few things.
1. First of all, the reactors has been stopped and had at least one hour of normal decay cooling before the tsunami hit and took out the diesel generators on the site.
2. These are boiling water reactors, not pressurized water reactors. The coolant is not flowing through the turbines because running those turbines under no load (their load has tripped offline due to EQ damage) will cause further damage. There is no cooling tower in this design. As the water boils, they need to release steam. This is primary coolant. That steam is radioactive. There is going to be a release of radiation every time they release that steam.
3. When they lost electricity they lost the ability to monitor water levels inside the reactor.
But people should also understand there is NOTHING routine about this. The reactors shut down as programmed during the earthquake. Problem is that they require external power for running pumps, control circuitry, etc. The external grid was damaged and cut off external power. The diesel generators on the site started and operated as designed for about an hour until the tsunami hit. Now the plant had no external grid power, and no local generator power. This is what is known as being “up sh*t creek without a paddle”. There just wasn’t much they could do at this point. That reactor design absolutely depends on external power to continue operation.
What boggles my mind is why there was not an auxiliary turbine built into the reactors to supply power from decay heat in order to generate just enough power to run the station under this contingency (no grid power and no generator power).
At that point I would make said auxiliary turbine the secondary power and make the generators a tertiary fallback.
Looks like the latest Tepco statement shows better news for Daiichi #3 reactor.
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031305-e.html
Again, keep in mind that these reactors had been shut down before the tsunami and that we are doing only with decay heat which will drop considerably over the next 24-48 hours.
Daiichi#1 is rated at 460Megawatts. The reactor was due to be decommissioned on the 26th of this month so it had probably been running for a very long time with this fuel load.
If had been operating at 460Megawatts, and considering it was operating with normal cooling for the first hour after shutdown, heat prodution would have been about 6.9 megawatts when the generators failed. Power yesterday afternoon would have been down to about 2 megawatts. As long as they are in a position to dissipate 2 megawatts of power, they will be fine but they are going to have to dissipate that heat for a while.
I’ve been trying to figure out how this affects the future – still hard to tell. Obviously a huge blow to Japan’s economy, how much that will affect the rest of the world is unclear.
The nuclear plant problems may, undeservedly of course, end up killing the nuclear industry for at least a generation. Recall that 3 mile island was a relatively inconsequential accident that caused no real injuries, but it still killed the chance for building new plants in this country for 30 years. Plans to build more nuke plants were abandoned not because of any real danger, but because all the bad publicity caused the public to freak out about the idea.
I had hoped that was all in the past – now we have a situation that is at least an order of magnitude worse than 3 mile island. And it happened to some of the best plants of the world. I know, I know, we can talk all day about how good a job they did holding up to this unprecedented catastrophe – doesn’t matter, the optics are horrible, as are the headlines.
I hate to say this, but I think this is goodbye to any chance we had of reviving the nuclear industry in this country. The public wants perfection, even when it isn’t possible.
Lieberman is out tonight calling for a moratorium on all nuke construction in the US. I knew it was coming.