Reactor coolant pumps move 100,000 gallons of H2O per MINUTE...

[arendt]

An excerpt from an NRC document (http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/teachers/04.pdf) describing Boiling Water Reactors:

"The major components of a reactor coolant pump (page 4-16) are the motor, the hydraulic section, and the seal package.

The motor is a large, air cooled, electric motor. The horsepower rating of the motor will be from 6,000 to 10,000 horsepower. This large amount of power is needed in order to provide the necessary flow of coolant for heat removal (approximately 100,000 gallons per minute per pump)."

Does anyone know how much water a fire truck can pump per minute? Because, I'm guessing that fire trucks are what they are using to pour sea water into the reactors.

Of course, they can just let the sea water boil. Under normal circumstances, the pumps circulate the coolant to a heat exchanger in a closed cycle.

But, wow, that's a shitload of cooling required. Also, not clear how many coolant pumps per reactor. (The document makes a point of saying "per pump".)

[Statistical]

1. Most reactors have 2 or 4 primary loops.

The size and age of these plants makes me think it is 2 loops. ~500MW of electricity is ~1500MW of heat.

However remember that once fission stops power output is reduced by 95%. by now thermal output of the core is about 1% of peak power output.

So while it is an insane amount of heat (1% of 1500MW is still 15MW of heat) it is nothing like a reactor at full power, which is why first step is to always halt the fission SCRAM.

[arendt]

3. So, they need 1% of 100k gal/min to be in balance?

That would leave the fuel at whatever temp it was at before the SCRAM, right?

So, they need a mere 1000gal/min times 4. I know that the well pump on my house can do about 8 gals per minute, but that's a well.

Again, anyone know what a fire engine pump is rated at?

[Statistical]

6. Well plants are built with some level of redundancy.

Most plants are design to be able to cool reactor at full power with half the pumps. So on a 4 loop reactor it would 2 pupmps. On a 2 loop reactor it would be 1 pump. This is done so that if a pump fails at full power the reactor can still be cooled. It also allows each pump to run at reduced power improving longevity. This plant is almost certainly a two loop plant.

So they likely need somewhere around 1000 gpm to cool the fuel rods maybe 2000 since it is certainly not optimal. The problem with #2 is that it won't pressurize. Water boils at 100 deg at normal pressure (1 ATM). BWR reactors pump the pressure up to 75 ATM this raises the boiling point of water to 250 deg C. Since #2 can't pressurize the water boils off "easier" (only needing the energy to raise it to 100 deg not 250 deg). This is why they can't get the core covered in 2. It is flashing to steam as fast as they can pump water in. It was designed to operate where the cooling fluid would stay a fluid up to 250 degrees.

To answer your larger question a fire truck doesn't have either the flow or pressure to inject the water they need into a reactor. I think a fire truck does maybe 100-200 gallons per minute. Even worse the reactor is under pressure (from all the steam) you likely would blow a fire truck pump if you tried to have it pump into that kind of pressure.

[arendt]

9. Interesting point about the pressure. That's a huge change in BP. nt

[BeFree]

14. Can't pressurize?

"It is flashing to steam as fast as they can pump water in."

That means steam is escaping. Steam with radiation into the air.

Heard one spokesman saying they didn't know where all the water was going.

[Statistical]

15. Yeah steam has been rising from all 3 reactors for 3 days now.

That being said radioactive steam is best of a crappy situation. Even the two plants which can pressurize they have to periodically vent steam to avoid pressure getting to high. The advantage their is that steam is more energetic. Each unit of water carries away more heat.

1) Water is rather resistant to radiation. Only a small % becomes irradiated.
2) It is the hydrogen that becomes irradiated. It becomes tritium.
3) Tritium is relatively weak. It is an alpha emitter, and has a short half life.
4) Tritinated water will flush out of your system in about 10 days limiting damage it does.

So it is trinated water/stream OR the core breaches and you get millions of curies of Strontium, Cesium, Iodine, Plutonium, Uranium, etc.

[BeFree]

18. Breached

The core vessel must be breached if they can't pressurize it.
That means super heated air form the nuclear material is escaping the same place the steam is.

Gotta love that curie term, eh?

Curies = Sick. Orwellian speech, for sure.

[krispos42]

35. Fire engines do a lot more than that

I was watching a show once, and the analogy they used was that a pumper could full up a bathtub in 1.5 seconds.

Assuming a bathtub is 40 gallons, that's about 27 gallons a second, or about 1,600 gallons per minute.

You'd still need over 60 fire engines to replace one of those pumps.

This article seems to confirm that I'm in the ballpark... the pumpers mentions have between 1,500 and 5,000 gallons per minute capacity.

http://www.fireworld.com/ifw_articles/truckreview.php


/shoulda done the Google first, I guess...

[girl gone mad]

25. Where are you getting information about current thermal power output measurements?

Are you in any way qualified to be making these kinds of statements?

I have caught you in basic math errors many times over the years, "statistical"

[Statistical]

26. Physics. The heat output decline of nuclear decay is well understood and very predictable.

Nuclear fission products decay at rates specified by their half lives and thus thermal output at any point in time can be computed. Even if no human was alive on the planet the thermal output of the core would decay according to the same schedule.

As far as fission. If there was active fission well all 3 cores would have melted through the RPV is less than an hour.
Control rods are in place and boron (neutron poison) is being pumped into all 3 reactors. With active fission the thermal output of the reactor more than 100x as much. If active fission was occurring we would have had 3x Chernobyl 4 days ago.

As far as my credentials I have a masters in Computational Physics and Mathematics. If you don't like my posts then place me on ignore, you won't hurt my feelings. If you want third party confirmation try using google. There are many decay product calculators online.

[girl gone mad]

33. Fission has not stopped completely at these reactors.

Engineers flooded the reactors with seawater and boric in order to absorb more neutrons. The control rods weren't absorbing neutrons fast enough to keep the thermal output under control sans coolant. It will take several weeks of keeping the reactors submerged to stop fission altogether.

There is a reason they build these plants on the coast.

[Statistical]

34. Bullshit. Name a single news source anywhere on any site that backs up that claim.

Adding boron is a precaution to prevent criticality in the event the fuel melts. Once melted the fuel would no longer be protected by the control rods (as it would sink to bottom of the RPV).

"It will take several weeks of keeping the reactors submerged to stop fission altogether."
False. Fission halts in the absence of sufficient neutron economy. That is the purpose of a SCRAM. It takes weeks for the decay heat to drop to a level when cooling is not needed.

Maybe some expert answers might convince you:
http://www.livescience.com/13220-nuclear-power-expert-explains-japan-crisis.html

---------------
Nuclear reactor power is derived from the fission chain reaction. Once you turn off (or 'scram') the reactor, the nuclear chain reaction is no longer occurring. This appears to have successfully occurred in the Japanese plant. Once the reactor is scrammed, the reactor power falls off significantly. However, there are fission products that are formed as a byproduct of the fission reaction that remain in the fuel. These fission products continue to undergo radioactive decay, which produces some heat (called decay heat) in the fuel. This is initially about 6-8% of the reactor power, but this reduced heat must be removed nonetheless. These radioactive fission products are normally contained in the intact fuel elements and their heat generation decreases with time. However, if you do not keep cooling the fuel elements to remove the decay heat (by having cooling water), the fuel will heat up and then could melt. When the fuel melts, the fission products can be released from the fuel into the reactor pressure vessel and then into the containment, if the coolant leaks from the reactor vessel.

-----------------

Notice the drop off of heat. Notice also at time 0 (SCRAM) output is at ~7%. Fission makes up about 93% of thermal energy in a reactor when it halts you are left with decay of fission products.


Hell here is a chart by the Union of Concerned Scientists (hardly pro-nuke).



This is the required water flow to manage heat after shutdown of a BWR. Do you honestly think with active fission one could get away with only 60gpm? Really?
http://allthingsnuclear.org/tagged/Japan_nuclear

You have made a completely unsubstantiated claim not backed up by anything but your imagination. Support it. If fission was ongoing the heat output would be 100x to 200x higher. The core would have melted in a matter of minutes not hours or days without proper cooling. That is the entire purpose of a SCRAM in an emergency.

[girl gone mad]

39. Boron is a neutron absorber.

Please stop trying to pass yourself off as an expert.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_rod

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/earthquake-tsunami-nuclear-plant

[Statistical]

40. I explained why it is used.

Of course boron is a neutron poison. It used to prevent a prompt criticality.

control rods only work when they are interspaced between fuel rods where they can absorb neutrons. If fuel rods melt they end up at the bottom of the RPV there will be no control rods to prevent criticality. If a large enough mass of molten fuel ends up in local proximity then it could go prompt critical. Adding boron to water PREVENTS the fission from starting.

If fission was ongoing in the reactor it would have melted down completely in a matter of hours without proper cooling.
As I said find a SINGLE news article anywhere to back up your claim there is active fission in the reactors.
I am not an expert but I am at least informed which is more than I can say for you.

------------------------------
Q: How might the failure of a nuclear power plant's cooling system result in a meltdown?

A: Nuclear reactor power is derived from the fission chain reaction. Once you turn off (or 'scram') the reactor, the nuclear chain reaction is no longer occurring. This appears to have successfully occurred in the Japanese plant. Once the reactor is scrammed, the reactor power falls off significantly. However, there are fission products that are formed as a byproduct of the fission reaction that remain in the fuel. These fission products continue to undergo radioactive decay, which produces some heat (called decay heat) in the fuel. This is initially about 6-8% of the reactor power, but this reduced heat must be removed nonetheless. These radioactive fission products are normally contained in the intact fuel elements and their heat generation decreases with time. However, if you do not keep cooling the fuel elements to remove the decay heat (by having cooling water), the fuel will heat up and then could melt. When the fuel melts, the fission products can be released from the fuel into the reactor pressure vessel and then into the containment, if the coolant leaks from the reactor vessel.

--------------------------------

http://www.livescience.com/13220-nuclear-power-expert-explains-japan-crisis.html

--------------
The top government spokesman said TEPCO has begun new cooling operations to fill the reactor with sea water and pour in boric acid to prevent an occurrence of criticality, noting it may take several hours to inject water into the reactor.
-----------------

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110312p2g00m0dm073000c.html

Though the power producing fission process was stopped by using control rods that absorb the neutrons, the fuel contains radioactive elements including radionuclides like iodine, and caesium. These elements are produced during the uranium fission process. “These radionuclides decay at different timescales, and they continue to produce heat during the decay period,” Dr. Parthasarathy said.

The heat produced by radioactive decay of the fission products is called “decay heat.”

“Just prior to shut down of the reactor the decay heat is 7 per cent. It reduces exponentially, about 2 per cent in the first hour. After one day, the decay heat is 1 per cent. Then it reduces very slowly,” he said.

While the uranium fission process can be stopped and heat generation can be halted, there is no way of stopping the radioactive decay of the fission products.

Hence the original heat as well as the heat produced continuously by the fission products, including iodine, and caesium, has to be removed even after the uranium fission process has been stopped.

--------------------------------------

http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/article1537456.ece?homepage=true

[girl gone mad]

41. Control rods are placed between the fuel rods..

they control the reaction, they don't completely stop all fission. You still have atoms splitting and giving off free neutrons inside of each fuel rod and rate of neutron absorption of boron varies over different energies. The reactor is still producing heat, generally closer to 5% of full thermal output, not the 1% you cited. If absorber fails for any number of reasons, the rate of fission will increase again.

The truth is that we do not know how effective the control rods were, whether they were fully inserted and what the current thermal output is.

[Statistical]

43. Control rods fully in stop all fission. That is called a SCRAM.

You keep making unsubstantiated claims then questioning me.

Please provide a single cite from ANY news agency reporting fission is ongoing in the reactor. I provided three cites one from an ant-nuke organization that explained fission halted when reactor SCRAMMED. They are dealing with decay heat.

As far as the 5%. Heat output drops to about 7% at the point of SCRAM (within seconds). However it has down been 5 days. Heat output continues to decline predictably according to the laws of nuclear decay.



The residual heat can even be approximated using a formula:


"If absorber fails for any number of reasons, the rate of fission will increase again. "
No fission is halted. If the absorbers fail for any reason fission will START again a recriticality accident. This is the reason for pumping in boron to provide a margin of safety to prevent the restart of fission. They have insufficient cooling capacity to deal with decay heat. Active fission would be 100X as much thermal output. The reactor core would melt out of containment within minutes.


All you have are unsubstantiated claims, not backed up by anything but your insulted. Honestly I wish the mods hadn't deleted your posts it indicated that when facing facts you don't understand you lash out. It shows a lot.

[girl gone mad]

45. I don't know what to tell you, except that you are likely confusing the concept of..

halting the critical configuration which produces the 1 to 1 reaction (1 neutron emitted for every neutron absorbed by the uranium atoms) with the ongoing spontaneous fission of the uranium inside of the fuel rods. If the control rods were removed or if they failed, the critical reaction could start again because fission is still occurring - neutrons are still being absorbed and emitted. No other "spark" or "initiation sequence" would be necessary. This is one reason why the situation is so dangerous.

Here are the relevant passages from the article I linked for you:

"According to Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, the earthquake knocked out power to the Daiichi facility. “Control rods” to slow the rate of fissioning dropped automatically in between the fuel rods.

Control rods are usually attached to magnets and hang above the core, and if an earthquake strikes they automatically detach, drop down and help shutter the reaction, says Ron Hart, a retired professor of nuclear engineering from Texas A&M University in College Station. The control rods absorb neutrons to prevent the reaction with uranium that causes fission. But even with the control rods in place, the reactor still produces heat at a small fraction of its full power, because of the decay products of the uranium fission.

As planned, backup diesel generators kicked in after the monster earthquake and continued to pump water in to cool the reactor cores. But when a tsunami swept across the Japanese coast about an hour later, the wave disabled the backup generators. The next backup system then kicked in: battery-powered pumps.

But the battery pumps could not keep up with the residual heat still coming from the cores of several Daiichi reactors. Excess heat caused steam to build up in the system, which operators eventually vented into the environment along with low levels of radioactive elements like cesium and iodine.

Operators at Daiichi have flooded all three reactors with seawater mixed with boric acid. The boron in the boric acid absorbs neutrons and helps keep them from bouncing around and triggering further fission in the fuel rods. Salts in the seawater will, however, permanently corrode the reactor cores and render them unusable in the future.

Hart says it will probably take several weeks of keeping the cores underwater to cool them enough to stop the fission completely. At that point, operators can carefully extract the cores and take them to a containment facility to assess damage, take them apart and dispose of them."

There are many variables to consider right now. The bottom line is that you do not know precisely what is going on in the cores or in the containment pools. You can't use probabilities which don't apply to the conditions presently underway.

[girl gone mad]

46. I hope I did an okay job of explaining this.

Having read through your posts more carefully, it's clear that you were confusing criticality with fission. Sometimes websites and textbooks take shortcuts in outlining operations. When they tell you the fission has stopped, what they actually mean is that the reaction is no longer critical and self-sustaining. This is good enough under normal circumstances that you don't have to worry about regular spontaneous neutron emissions, but when cooling fails and you've got fuel rods melting together into an uncontrolled configuration with defective absorption, the rate of fission can increase back to dangerous levels and thermal output could rise exponentially.

You can't use textbook charts to describe an event which isn't operating under textbook conditions. Sorry if I lashed out at you. I get annoyed when industry apologists use junk science, misinformation and disinformation to promote their agenda while accusing others of being anti-science or uneducated. Sadly, I see it all the time around here.

[JVS]

49. They still SCRAMed properly

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents#Cooling_problems_at_unit_1
Link says SCRAM happened once the quake was detected. 55 minutes later the power to the cooling system was cut out (by the tsunami)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scram

"Reactor response

Most neutrons in a reactor are prompt neutrons; that is, neutrons produced directly by a fission reaction. On average, these neutrons live for about 13 μs, which allows the insertion of neutron absorbers to affect the reactor quickly. As a result, once the reactor has been scrammed, the reactor power will drop significantly almost instantaneously. However, a small fraction (about 0.65%) of neutrons in a typical power reactor comes from the radioactive decay of a fission product. These delayed neutrons will limit the rate at which a nuclear reactor will shut down.<3>
Decay heat
Further information: Decay heat
On a SCRAM for a reactor that held a constant power for a long period of time (greater than 100 hrs), about 7% of the steady-state power will initially remain after shutdown due to the decay of these fission products. For a reactor that has not had a constant power history, the exact percentage will be determined by the concentrations and half-lives of the individual fission products in the core at the time of the SCRAM. The power produced by decay heat decreases as the fission products decay."

[girl gone mad]

50. The critical reaction was halted, but cooling failed.

If Statistical had bothered to read and understand the Wikipedia page from which he pulled his graph and equation, he would have saved himself some time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_heat

The removal of the decay heat is a significant reactor safety concern, especially shortly after normal shutdown or following a loss-of-coolant accident. Failure to remove decay heat may cause the reactor core temperature to rise to dangerous levels and has caused nuclear accidents, including the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Fukushima I. The heat removal is usually achieved through several redundant and diverse systems, and the heat is often dissipated to an 'ultimate heat sink' which has a large capacity and requires no active power, though this method is typically used after decay heat has reduced to a very small value.

You can't apply a model of normal operations to a reactor that is out of control. Obviously the core was not cooling down as designed, it was heating up. Fuel rods don't melt at normal reactor temperatures, let alone at 7% or 1% of average temperatures.

Not really much left to say on this topic. I think the reactors are stable enough at this point that the danger of triggering critical reaction or a chain reaction has passed (knock on wood). The spent fuel is still cause for concern.

[Hannah Bell]

2. pumper trucks, yeah, i think.

[Auntie Bush]

30. No way to get pumper trucks there with all the debris in the way and torn up roads.

[krispos42]

36. Depends on how desperate they are

If you don't care about cost, neatness, or damage, you can do a hell of a lot with a front-end loader or bulldozer in a short period of time.

[Fumesucker]

4. I doubt fire trucks are anywhere near six to ten thousand horsepower..

Perhaps five hundred, maybe a thousand at the outside..

Pumps are pretty much pumps so you can draw your own conclusions about water flow..

[arendt]

8. Statistical points out reactors at 1% power. So need 1k gals/min. Doable. nt

[Statistical]

11. The problem is pressure.

There is a lot of steam pressure in the reactor. Not as high as they would like but still a significant amount of pressure. A fire truck pump isn't designed to pump into a high pressure environment. Likely you would just destroy the pumps.

Fire trucks could be used to cool the spent fuel and fill the cooling pond and then continually refill it to avoid the water level from dropping.

[Name removed]

27. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[girl gone mad]

48. There's no way that number was anywhere close to accurate.

He was basing this on some graph he pulled off of Wikipedia for decay heat loss over time after a reactor is shut down under normal conditions.

Fukushima reactors were not operating like normal this week. Very quickly after the reactors automatically shut down, the cooling systems failed. The cores started to heat up. The fuel rods started to melt down. The water inside of the reactors got very hot and boiled off. The steam probably reacted with the melting zirconium cladding and produced hydrogen. The hydrogen built up inside of the primary containment structures, creating a tremendous amount of pressure. With the increased pressure would come rising temperatures. With the melting rods may have come more fission, more radioactive decay products and even more heat.

There's a lot of induced heat and residual heat Statistical simply wasn't accounting for.

[somone]

5. This is what an 88,000-gallon-per-minute reactor coolant pump looks like

Reactor Coolant Pump for the Westinghouse AP-1000 Reactor

[arendt]

10. Wow. nt

[doc03]

12. Now that's a big pump, part of my job was maintain supply of

cooling water to an electric arc steel furnace we only used 10000 gal. per minute. I had the nightmare scenario happen to me. We received our electricity from two different suppliers and had a diesel backup. During a thunderstorm we lost both electric supplies (our boss said that was impossible). The diesel backup wouldn't start either, the only thing saved us from melting down the furnace was the power came back on after about five minutes.

[krispos42]

37. It's as big as a fire engine! n/t

[arendt]

7. I'm getting numbers between 250 and 2500 gals/min for fire trucks...

the pumps come in a variety of sizes.

So, I guess that a big truck or two could keep up with one scrammed reactor. Just drop the intake in the ocean (not very far away).

Say, what about a fire boat? (Assuming one could sail there.) It might be able to do what a helicopter couldn't do.

[Agony]

13. your typical fire engine has a 1500-2000 gpm pump

at least the company I run with... rural in other words. I think that industrial/airport/city pumps may run up to 3000 gpm with a 580 HP engine for example.

additionally I would only pump at 100-150psi anything more is pretty hard for a firefighter to handle at the nozzle end. 200psi at the outside like with a fixed nozzle on a ladder truck.

not what you really want to have to cool a power plant with...

[KittyWampus]

16. Arendt, where you been? Keeping a low profile?

[arendt]

23. I lurk. Too busy to be active. I write about once/month on DKos. n.t

[NutmegYankee]

17. The Boiling Water Reactor is 03.pdf, not 04.pdf

You linked to a Pressurized Water Reactor.

[StarsInHerHair]

19. I'm having a difficult time trying to understand the universal choice of simple

WATER as a "coolant" for the reactors.........my CAR seems to have a superior cooling fluid in it.

[piedmont]

20. A few reasons...

1) Your car's coolant is around 50% water (which is a dang good coolant), the rest is ethylene glycol or propylene glycol
2) The coolant boiling point is raised by the ethylene glycol only about 9 degrees F
3) The car's cooling system is under pressure, which substantially raises the boiling point even of 100% water (by about 45 F)
4) They need MILLIONS of gallons of coolant, which is why they're using seawater

[flamingdem]

21. Supposedly they are adding Boron, that's a lotta boron! nt

[piedmont]

24. Yeah, there's a lot I'd like to know about what they're doing, out of curiosity

Like: how concentrated is the Boron and how much water are they getting into the reactors?

[Codeine]

22. water is a magnificent coolant.

We add stuff to keep the water from freezing and boiling and to keep it from rusting out your water pump and radiator. The water is the part cooling your engine, the additives enhance its effectiveness. I've run cars on nothing but water and it worked fine to keep the engine cool, but the longterm consequences can be damaging to the cooling system.

[Statistical]

28. Actually not. The antifreeze in your car is a WORSE coolant than pure water.

Very few fluids have a higher heat transfer coefficient than water.

Water has many advantages.
1) The planet has a lot. They have used millions and millions of gallons of coolant so far. Imagine how quickly they would have run out if it was anything else.

2) Water tends to be non-reactive which is an important requirement in something like a reactor.

3) You can raise boiling point of water easily by increasing pressure. BWR runs at 75 atmospheres of pressure which makes the boiling point almost 250 degrees.

4) Cost. We are talking millions of gallons.

For the record racecars (NASCAR, Formula 1) use pure water in their radiators. There are very few substances that work better.

[StarsInHerHair]

29. is there anything in our space programs that might be a dual-use help

in cooling these reactors? I think they should have several pools of refrigerated coolant, 3 pools, to cycle thru the reactor. 1st pool is recently flushed coolant=very hot, 2nd pool is them pumped thru reactor, while 3rd pool is being cooled getting ready to cycle thru the plant. use a fraction of the plant's energy to refrigerate the coolant. what about that fire retardant gel? in hundreds of thousands of gallons?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaXVx8-ruYI&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5I_YDSsS94&feature=related did they line the containment with tiles like those on the space shuttle? why didn't they coat the containers with 24kt gold to prevent rusting? they were using some kind of water to cool it down gold doesn't rust even in saltwater.......WHY did they keep the spent rods onsite?

[Statistical]

42. I don't know I am sure they will be a lot of post-op analysis.

However had the electrical generators remained functional we wouldn't even be discussing this right now.

IMHO your will get a better bang for the buck hardening the generators than by looking at alternative coolants. I know it is hard to believe but water is an amazingly good coolant. In a light water reactor it also has the requirement of moderating (slowing down) neutrons. Not sure how good of a moderator any alternative coolant would be. Also in any disaster it is unlikely you would have millions and millions of gallons of some alternative coolant.

IMHO:
1) Older designs like the MK I need to be scrapped. It is inferior to later designs in so many ways.
2) Generator Buildings need to be hardened and likely raised. The tsunami didn't damage the reactor building but generators are outside the reactor building.
3) Some sort of universal backup connector should be devised. A standardized socket with standardized voltage, amperage, and cycle rating.
4) Plan in place to have tertiary (backup for backups) generators designed to mate with this standardized socket at higher ground with airlift assets available.
5) Crews and training with the ability to bring in earth movers by airlift to secure a landing area for the tertiary generators.

Had the backup generators not failed or if they had been able to secure alternative power to the primary pumps within 12 hours (before first hydrogen explosion) we may have had a much better outcome.

[hulka38]

31. I've never

complained about unreccing threads before. I think some warrant it. Nobody should be doing that to a thread that is providing important facts about a relevant topic as this thread does. It appears that some people are and I think it's ridiculous.

[arendt]

32. I have. That's another reason I mostly lurk here. n/t

[wonderjust25]

38. interesting....nt

[Jersey Devil]

44. So using fire engines or helicopters would be like pissing on a forest fire

That's what I thought and the OP here confirms it.

[Spike89]

47. Not an expert, but there are two different cooling activities in play, right?

From what I've been able to gather, they are using the helicopters to drop water into the cooling ponds for "spent" fuel. The reactor cores are another issue and getting water into them isn't something you can do (because of the pressure) without a heavy duty water pump designed to work with those pressures. Is this correct?