Crane fails at Fukushima Reactor #3

[formercia]

Failure begins at about 1:33. Reactor #3 is on the Left, in the background.

[grahamhgreen]

1. No new nukes in Georgia!!!

[jimlup]

2. Any explanation?

There doesn't appear to be a cause. Nothing seems to be happening and the crane that falls isn't even being used. Was it somehow weakened? This is bad. It means TEPCO is really just plugging holes in an ever more complex dike.

[AtheistCrusader]

3. Well, one can assume the cranes might not be getting their

regular inspection and maintenance, but this could have been as simple as operator error. It just dropped the adjustable boom, the whole thing didn't come down.

Accidents happen on industrial sites. More likely to happen on industrial sites that are the scene of a national industrial disaster.

[formercia]

4. Inspection of the Crane revealed it had cracks prior to the failure.

We're lucky the Crane wasn't trying to move Fuel Rods at the Time. #3 Reactor has MOX Fuel Rods in the Cooling Pool. Dropping the Rods could cause serious Plutonium contamination.

[FBaggins]

6. That isn't a crane that would be used for fuel removal

#3 Reactor has MOX Fuel Rods in the Cooling Pool.

That's a common misunderstanding. All spent fuel pools have plutonium in them. MOX doesn't change that much. And in the case of Fukushima, there was almost no MOX in the spent fuel pool at all... it had just received its first fuel loading with MOX during the last refeul cycle... so virtually all of the MOX would be inside the reactor core, it wouldn't be "spent" for years.

[Jesus Malverde]

5. If you look to the lower right, you can see silhouettes of people

Those workers and the crane operators are real heroes.