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I did not realize how bad Fukushima was until I went into a youtube marathon yesterday. Building a reactor at the shoreline of an earthquake zone was bad enoug

I did not realize how bad Fukushima was until I went into a youtube marathon yesterday. Building a reactor at the shoreline of an earthquake zone was bad enough but the safety features of the reactor were poor reliability engineering. "We learned that the reactor design should not rely on external power sources to prevent it from blowing up" was one of the lessons learnt. The reactors are leaking and contaminating ground water. The solution is to store all that water in thousands of tanks and run them through an expensive decontamination process. They are considering freezing the ground under the reactor to control the ground water contamination! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBNFvZ6Vr2U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBNFvZ6Vr2U Understanding the accident of Fukushima Daiichi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtwNyUZJgw8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtwNyUZJgw8 Return to Fukushima - PBS

saagarjha 8y ago
> I went into a youtube marathon yesterday Of course, this can be dangerous in and of itself…
khuey 8y ago
"We learned that the reactor design should not rely on external power sources to prevent it from blowing up" This has been known for decades. Fukushima (like essentially all nuclear power plants) had backup diesel generators. But the electrical switching equipment that connected the generators to several of the reactors were located in areas that was flooded by the tsunami. Oops.
- vilhelm_s 8y ago
  Also, it had an emergency cooling system (the isolation condenser) which could work passively without pumped water. Unfortunately the failsafe logic made the valves to the isolation condenser close when electricity was lost, and then without electric power the reactor operators could neither open the valves, nor monitor whether the valves were opened or closed, so it didn't work and the operators were confused about why. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK253938/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK253938/]
8bitsrule 8y ago
Fuku is puzzling in many ways. Daiichi was built 10m above sea level in a region where several huge tsunamis had struck in the previous century, including one in 1896 which rose to 38m. The 2011 tsunami: 15m. http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-accident.aspx http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-... Also puzzling: the consequences of opening the containments to relieve H pressures, as against the consequences of letting them explode. Also puzzling: the coast of Japan has A LOT of offshore winds. Why is importing fossil fuels a better idea than going with wind? Whatever the source of this mistake, what's certain is that the cleanup cost will be hundreds of wasted billions. The hidden costs will be kept hidden for as long as possible ... a long, long time.
- SamReidHughes 8y ago
  Wind farms kill more people per watt-hour than nuclear power.

saagarjha 8y ago

> I went into a youtube marathon yesterday Of course, this can be dangerous in and of itself…

khuey 8y ago

"We learned that the reactor design should not rely on external power sources to prevent it from blowing up" This has been known for decades. Fukushima (like essentially all nuclear power plants) had backup diesel generators. But the electrical switching equipment that connected the generators to several of the reactors were located in areas that was flooded by the tsunami. Oops.

vilhelm_s 8y ago
Also, it had an emergency cooling system (the isolation condenser) which could work passively without pumped water. Unfortunately the failsafe logic made the valves to the isolation condenser close when electricity was lost, and then without electric power the reactor operators could neither open the valves, nor monitor whether the valves were opened or closed, so it didn't work and the operators were confused about why. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK253938/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK253938/]

8bitsrule 8y ago

Fuku is puzzling in many ways. Daiichi was built 10m above sea level in a region where several huge tsunamis had struck in the previous century, including one in 1896 which rose to 38m. The 2011 tsunami: 15m. http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-accident.aspx http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-... Also puzzling: the consequences of opening the containments to relieve H pressures, as against the consequences of letting them explode. Also puzzling: the coast of Japan has A LOT of offshore winds. Why is importing fossil fuels a better idea than going with wind? Whatever the source of this mistake, what's certain is that the cleanup cost will be hundreds of wasted billions. The hidden costs will be kept hidden for as long as possible ... a long, long time.

SamReidHughes 8y ago
Wind farms kill more people per watt-hour than nuclear power.