Japan Earthquake/Tsunami

Gogo feed and bleed. Works like a charm when nothing else is running lol. The time limit is kinda silly though. It should say something more like if it isn't cooled melt down most likely did occurred since your decay heat is down to almost nothing after a day after shutdown.

I wouldn't be suprised. There hasn't exactly been alot of advances in battery techology over the years.

Most likely. There was alot wrong with SL-1 and things went really really bad. And we learned alot from it.

Like using more than 3 control rods. Making sure you can't go super critical with just one rod no matter how far you pull it out. And ya know don't manually pull it out when there are no mechanical stops so if they guy accidentally pulls too hard and does 20in instead of 1/4 in it doesn't cause the reactor to go from shutdown to 600,000% power instantly causing a steam explosion which causing part of the reactor to impale a guy onto the ceiling...

From the sounds of NHK and other Japanese media, this sounds very TMI-esque, but not nearly as bad.

Basically, they've got pumps running, the scram succeeded, they're pretty sure they have the reactor covered and decay heat is dropping, but there still may be a steam bubble in there and some of the rods may have melted.

While not in immenent danger of "wtfkablooe kill everyone," or even "zomgradiationleak killeveryonemoreslowly," we're probably well into "trillion-yen paperweight" territory.

As far as what's really going on in there and what they really know... well this wouldn't be the first time japan has released false or misleading info about problems with one of their reactors...

Could just be bad translations, people saying the wrong stuff, or trying to keep the hype down. Who knows at this point lol

/cheer

...Does that imply they don't have a seawater pump hooked up? That it's reserves? The wording there is awkward and unclear.

I rounded down... still really rediculous. Said was like 3MW went to 20 GW in 4miliseconds...

Seawater is a very last result. That ***is highly corrosive and full of stuff that would become irradiated lol

So the world is full of *** literally. o.o

OK, so let's talk scenarios, here. Like Jaerik said, we're probably into trillion-yen paperweight territory now, and regardless of what happens from here, there will no doubt be a long, expensive clean-up and weeks/months of media debate over the safety of nuclear energy filled with pundits spouting absolute nonsense in support of every position conceivable -- but:

What sort of environmental effects can we really expect here? If for some reason the cooling should fail and we get a run-away meltdown that breaks containment sometime before tomorrow, how bad could it be? Or, assuming what is probably more likely: the cooling works, but the core is spent, and they have to completely refab the plant and dump the fuel somewhere; what then?

Does sound good. But TMI was a bit different. In that it was 500% preventable. Basically some design flaws and a good dozen errors made over the course of a week or 2 by the people operating it. From actual operations to maintenance practices to ignoring locked in alarms...Then a small problem which auto-matic safeties took care off... but no one recognized they didn't stop which made things very bad. then a general lack of knowledge leading to not knowing a steam bubble had formed.

Decay heat production always drops. The only way your heat production wouldn't go down is if the reactor or part of it restarted... ie melted back together and managed to become critical again like chernobyl.

They should know if there is a steam bubble/core covered. Steam tables ftw.

As far as danger goes... core are designed to not go into omfg everyone here is going to die now mode now and designed strong enough to do so even under circumstances like this. Radiation doesn't leak in the way you are thinking but outside of the natural distastors themselves wrecking the buildings plants are designed to contain all containments no matter how badly things fail. Outside of purposefully letting some out.

I'd be perfectly fine living a few miles away... the media fallout from this though could be very very bad.

My understanding was that this particular boiling water reactor core configuration was a legacy design from the 70's or so, and was recently approved by regulators for another 10 years.

I don't pretend to know all the intricacies, other than to regurgitate what I've read, but the primary boiling water turbine cooling system had failed and they had to use an ad hoc backup battery-run makeshift pump system to cool it. That and damaged monitoring systems and the high level of radiation in the control room area might have lead to lack of a clear understanding of what was going on in the core.

So, basically, it's now standard practice to design these buildings to seal off a freaking nuclear apocalypse beneath an impenetrable dome.

Sometimes, I really love engineers.

Yah, supposedly Chernobyl was a very weak/open reactor design, which allowed a lot of overpressure to develop from the heat of the melted core. My understanding, is that allowed it to create a pressure-bomb like effect that then expanded upon containment failure into the atmosphere, spreading the radioactive material.

You underestimate idiots. There are still people to this day that "monitor" radiation coming from 3 mile island and that happened 30 years ago. And exposure barely increased during that time and I believe no contaminments were released. The media fallout was bad enough that our nuclear power which had been increasing pretty much since we started took a sharp decline for a good 20 years.

Worse case scenario fuel melts thru the core down thru the floor etc we work on shoring up containment more permanently (as if it wasn't designed to last decades anwyays) and possibly go in and see if we can remove/contain just the fuel itself.

Assuming there is only minor fuel dmg they will probably remove it. Clean up all the contaniments released and provided things aren't too contiminated/irradiated to continue operations go on like nothing happened. If it has take it apart peice by peice store it somewhere and post a sign that a nuclear plant used to be in the now empty field lol. Actually they might do that anyways just because people might freak now and ask for it.

It's the russians what do you expect? Plus was along time ago everyone has learned and designed things alot better. But yeah the plume from that took out people flying over in helicopter iirc

Ruh-oh.

Dat bad. Most likely steam. At this point I think I'd call them idiots

Dat really bad.

It could just be sensationalist hooey though. An "Explosion" sound could be caused by a lot of things, and they might just be venting more steam to ease pressure.

I think I'll wait for an official source.

:O

There really is no excuse for that if you have any means of controlling over pressure at all and they were already venting... which would provide a white plume.

To be fair most are old (especially in america since until recently we had barely built any new ones). ***is designed to last very long time. And are used as such.

You know, it's entirely possible that we really just don't know how bad the situation is in there. I mean, maybe we're overlooking a really important fact, here: there was a *** 8.9 earthquake.

Might not have been the Power Plant itself. Hoping it wasn't.