The problem is that TEPCO bet that they could save the reactors

[CreekDog]

but we lost the bet.

[Paradoxical]

1. I have no idea what you are talking about. They poured salt water on them.

Which effectively destroyed any possibility of future operation.

[CreekDog]

2. they did that after the explosions

:hi:

[Paradoxical]

3. And the explosions were caused by the inadvertent release of hydrogen into the air

When they were attempting to keep the reactor vessel from bursting under pressure.

Hardly the kind of conspiracy theory you seem to believe.

[CreekDog]

4. the explosions were caused by the heat buildup in the reactors...

which vented into the containment structure which didn't vent.

had they kept them cool in the first place, any way possible, the explosion could've been avoided.

it's well documented that the initial hesitation of using the sea water was, in part, because it would ruin the reactors.

[Javaman]

9. do you know what happens when the rods are exposed to air?

after all the water boils off the rods react to the air. It splits the h20 in to it's components. Hydrogen build up is what caused the explosion, not a "heat build up".

[CreekDog]

10. yes, the hydrogen gas built up in the reactor and then vented into the unvented containment

had they used seawater to keep the rods cool earlier, they might have avoided that.

[sendero]

5. I don't think they were trying to save the reactors..

... however, using the incremental half-measures they've been employing all along has lead us to this sorry state. Why the slow day-late dollar-short actions?

It's hard to say but a reasonable speculation is they "didn't want to alarm people" or "didn't want to overstate the problem". This is typical corporate spin-by-action or inaction and now there are no options whatsoever, its pretty much out of their control.

Bravo.

[geckosfeet]

6. They were lost as soon as they lost all power. They knew it. Not sure what they are trying to do.

Probably a lot of legal and political CYA going on. I am sure that they got a lot of 'direction' from political leaders as well.

[quaker bill]

8. I expect they are trying to put out a fire as best they can

There never was a magic bullet to deploy that would have stopped this in its tracks. It wants to cook, melt, and explode on its own. Massive containers of cadmium sulfide (ala the manhattan project) perched above the reactor to be operated by the SCRAM (super critical reactor axe man) might have been helpful, but I don't think this was included in the design. (Literally in the manhattan project there were containers of CdS propped and kept from dumping into the core by a rope, and a guy with an axe ready to cut the rope on signal).

Of course it probably would not be useful, as the individual fuel elements removed from the reactor will cook off on their own, sitting isolated on the kitchen counter... dumping CdS all over them would apparently not make a difference.

[geckosfeet]

11. Plus the sheer volume of spent and active fuel must be hundreds if not

thousands of time the amount they had at the Manhattan project or Los Alamos or Fermi. Those projects all worked with Plutonium didn't they? I think the reactors all run on Uranium. And end up with Plutonium.

[quaker bill]

12. I am not sure as I have not read it in a while

but I am thinking the early reactors were U235 enriched by gas diffusion at Oak Ridge. I would guess they did not use much more than a critical mass of the isotope, as it was tough to get your hands on much of it, and there was likely great fear about whether it could be controlled at all. I think plutonium was largely obtained by breeding up U238 in the early graphite moderated reactors in places like Savanah River.

I have met with ecologists working in Savanah River to restore heat impacted wetlands. During the weapons building boom, the reactors were run hot and kept cool by dumping 190 degree water into the river, pretty well boiling things for quite some distance downstream....

[quaker bill]

7. I don't think so

The bottom line is that nobody plans for multiple concurrent system failures. It is unlikely that the equipment was designed with the capacity to be adapted to this situation, so they have had to make it up as they go along under really bad conditions. They seem ineffective because they have been, but then all the normal infrastructure for miles around was destroyed at once.

I think it is fairly amazing that the results are not vastly worse than what has happened, which is no doubt, really bad.