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> Building tornado-hardened designs in tsunami zones does not pay off The big issues are keeping our construction, engineering, and regulatory agencies active
by bonesss 9y ago
> Building tornado-hardened designs in tsunami zones does not pay off
The big issues are keeping our construction, engineering, and regulatory agencies active with the subject material and with industry, and allowing saner reactor technologies into commercial use.
Fukishima was not far off from surviving that catastrophe as was. More robust training for emergency response would have avoided them pumping the water the wrong way, and something as simple as raising their backup generator a few meters off the ground would have done the trick.
More vitally, pushing techs into commercial production like thorium-salt reactors (among many others!), would provide failure modes that are INSANELY better than what we get from light water reactors. It's just about the most insane thing to do with radioactive power sources... surround them with something under pressure that violently expands and tries to go right to the atmosphere...
I think the tsunami zones should be fine for reactors, we just need to start with reactor designs that will thrive in failure. Your molten salts turning into rock and keeping themselves contained during a breach or flood, for example, is something that's highly amenable to disaster planning.
- Recurecur 9y agoAll that needed to be done was house the emergency generators in a tsunami-proof building. Even then, there was time to bring in backup generators, and they were brought - but idiotically the connectors were wrong and they couldn't be connected in time.