2 Cooling Systems Need Repair Before Restart, U.S. Expert Says

[highplainsdem]

Source: NY Times

2 Cooling Systems Need Repair Before Restart, U.S. Expert Says
By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: March 21, 2011


ROCKVILLE, Md. — Two of the reactors at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant are too damaged to allow cooling systems to restart immediately even when electricity is available, a top official with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Monday.

But the official, William Borchardt, the executive director for operations, also called the success of Tokyo Electric Power Company in connecting a high-voltage transmission line to the plant “perhaps the first optimistic sign that things could be turning around,” and said that the situation at the plant appeared to be “on the verge of stabilizing.”

The 90-minute briefing for the five commissioners on the panel was largely focused on whether changes in American nuclear precautions were necessary. But it also revealed other new details about the nuclear crisis in northern Japan.

A staff geologist, Annie Kammerer, addressed the strength of the plant’s design. She said it been designed to withstand ground motion equal to 37 percent of the force of gravity, and had recently been analyzed for 62 percent — the level the plant sustained from the recent 9.0 earthquake. But she noted that the presumed source of the shock in the analysis would have been smaller and closer to the site. Because this earthquake was larger and further away, the motions probably continued longer than in the hypothetical situation, she said.

-snip-

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/world/asia/22atomic.html

[Raschel]

1. Can you believe this ongoing disaster has been all but wiped off the front pages by the media?

It's disgusting.

[aquart]

2. Worry instead that it's going to be back.

[Myrina]

3. I pulled on my tinfoil and thought maybe that's the reason we're involved in Libya ...

... out of sight, out of mind ... nothing to see in Japan -- move along ...

:tinfoilhat:

[flamingdem]

6. Now winds are going directly to Tokyo

prepare for new readings about radiation in the water and air.

I wonder if their instrument measure isotope type, if they do I bet they won't share the news if it includes plutonium.

[nadinbrzezinski]

12. Shimy, squirrel

that said, DU has mostly gone to the next shiny too. So perhaps the media knows something not nice about the US Public. Our attention span can be measured in minutes.

[TheMadMonk]

14. Because the chance of it becoming an actual disaster is now about zip.

No bleed. No lead.

As for interest in the actual ongoing disaster in the earthquake and tsunami affected areas. America has never given a shit past the last "miracle" survival story.

I agree it's disgusting. But why the hell are you surprised? It has not been any different for so long that few remember it ever being different.

[marions ghost]

18. Depends what ya call disaster...

:eyes:

[TheMadMonk]

22. DIsaster is dead bodies. Prefereably ones which glow in the dark.

Right now it really is a case where pretty much all of the (already minuscule) public facing danger will be washed away in the first decent rain.

With proper testing I don't consider crop contamination to be a danger, just a major ecconomic pain in the arse. Mainly because public sentiment is going to see to the destruction of perfectly good food, when people are starving.

BTW AFAIK, so far the amount of contamination on or in food crops is too small to be of any appreciable concern, even if a person ate nothing but contaminated spinach washed down with local milk for a month.

[marions ghost]

23. LOL

radiation "too small to be of any appreciable concern, even if a person ate nothing but contaminated spinach washed down with local milk for a month."

Let's see you do it!:7 c'mon :applause:

[TheMadMonk]

24. Not bloody likely. I hate spinach. :P

However, at 3 x background I would not be at all concerned with the effect on my food supply unless it went on for decades on end.

Mix me up a mess of what my tastebuds will tollerate and no problems whatsoever mate. No problems at all.

Not that I would reccomend it of course: But even a week at 1000 times normal would barely suffice to increase a person's cancer risks by a statistically measurable amount.

Many perfectly ordinary jobs offer up higher life time cancer risks than any possbile civilian exposure to this incident. The asbestos that remains in the world around us is a greater daily risk to each and every one of us, than Fukushima is to the people right next door to it.


In a place which is reputed to be one of (if not the) worst nuclear waste facility in the world, the symptomology of the surrounding people appears to be more consistent with heavy metal poisoning than radiation poisoning. I'm not saying it's not there, it almost certainly is, but even at the exposure levels such a place must have, the damage caused by what ammounts to extreme levels of ordinary industrial pollution overwhealms that caused by radiation.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

15. that's cuz Sarah's visitin India and Israel and all other

states that start with Y. That's news. Tokyo is just too far away to matter.

[Raschel]

4. It never left, just the coverage.

[leveymg]

5. "Will need repair before restart"? That's like saying this plane will need "repair" before it flies

[flamingdem]

7. A while ago they said the control panels didn't work

but how can they fix that except with robots? It's too radioactive to do anything for long near those plants.

[leveymg]

10. Exactly. The reactors are covered in tons of melted piles of radioactive debris. No restart for

#2, #3, and #4. They'll have to dig out the reactor cores and rods, or entomb them in place.

Good luck figuring out how to do that without killing more people anytime soon.

[AtheistCrusader]

16. They aren't trying to restart the reactors.

Just the cooling loops in the storage ponds, and possibly to the cores.

Obviously, that's going to be a problem with reactor 2, since the suppression pool appears damaged.

[leveymg]

19. I know. They're trying to restart the cooling systems. But, that's like trying to restart the AC

system in the plane that's crashed and burned. Might work in the cooling pond behind Bldg #3, and reactor #1, but forget it where there's been significant fire damage and collapse. The coolant feed pipes are likely a mess, as are the controls.

[AtheistCrusader]

20. Obviously there is damage.

Much of it can be bypassed for a forced, always on system. The pipes are in some cases, 6 inch thick stainless steel. The pipes are probably still there, ok, but as you say, the controls are likely wrecked.

That's ok though, if the pump can be turned on, and you don't care about certain features of the electronics and just want MAX water pressure jammed down the core's throat, it could be rigged up fairly easily.

[leveymg]

21. I hope and pray you are right. Unfortunately, it will take more than that to solve this, if

indeed there is a "solution." As for jamming maximum water pressure on an overheated reactor core that may have integrity issues, I think that might have a considerable risk of adverse consequences of its own.

[marions ghost]

8. I don't understand why

they would have done their risk analysis based on earthquakes closer to the site and not anywhere along the fault?

I just don't get why the critical systems at the plant were installed in the tsunami zone either. The worst failures in this whole disaster rest with the initial design of the units and the site. :thumbsdown: Not very reassuring.

[Raschel]

11. This isn't reassuring either:

The commission’s inspectors at each nuclear site have been told to double-check that emergency precautions mandated years ago were still in place...

....know where the equipment and materials are, said the official “to make sure they haven’t fallen into disuse because they haven’t been used.”

[marions ghost]

17. sure indicates that

nothing is really kept up to date, that inspections are generally inadequate. America probably does better with inspecting elevators than nukes. :thumbsdown: Consumer protection is nonexistent in this country, but people think it's "over-regulated" --what a lie.

[Art_from_Ark]

26. I think one of the problems is, this complex was built 40 years ago

There was a lot less reliable information about all of the undersea faults in the area. Also, they had to find a relatively unpopulated area that was still close but not too close to Tokyo (which up to that time had laid claim to the Mother of All Modern Japanese Earthquakes). No doubt Fukushima was a somewhat impoverished and rural prefecture back then, and I can just see the prefectural fathers welcoming this complex with open arms.

This web page is very interesting-- It says that there was a 99% chance that a major earthquake would occur off the coast of Miyagi "within the next 30 years". I wish I knew when this piece was written.

http://www.engineer.or.jp/cmty/bousai/BousaiQandA_Ver1_02_20090909A/chap_3/3.4.pdf

[Raschel]

9. Mr. Borchardt and other staff members said REPEATEDLY

that they did not yet have a full picture of events in Fukushima.

Does anyone know what's really going on? Does our government?

PS, please excuse the caps, tried to use bold but it didn't work for me.

[nadinbrzezinski]

13. Yes the fifty people on the ground

and TEPCO has been very good at hiding things... they have a history.

[Locrian]

25. probably not...

>>Does anyone know what's really going on? Does our government?
Probably not - but this is the best site I've found for information. http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/