Japan Nuclear Coverage

[Gawd]

Damn Americans Designed The Failing Nuclear Plants

Christopher D. Wilson, a reactor operator and later a manager at Exelon’s Oyster Creek plant, near Toms River, N.J., said, “normally you would just re-establish electricity supply, from the on-site diesel generator or a portable one.” Portable generators have been brought into Fukushima, he said.

Fukushima was designed by General Electric, as Oyster Creek was around the same time, and the two plants are similar. The problem, he said, was that the hookup is done through electric switching equipment that is in a basement room flooded by the tsunami, he said. “Even though you have generators on site, you have to get the water out of the basement,” he said.

Another damn good reason not to buy anything American.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world ... anted=2&hp

[FBM]

Damn Americans Designed The Failing Nuclear Plants

Christopher D. Wilson, a reactor operator and later a manager at Exelon’s Oyster Creek plant, near Toms River, N.J., said, “normally you would just re-establish electricity supply, from the on-site diesel generator or a portable one.” Portable generators have been brought into Fukushima, he said.

Fukushima was designed by General Electric, as Oyster Creek was around the same time, and the two plants are similar. The problem, he said, was that the hookup is done through electric switching equipment that is in a basement room flooded by the tsunami, he said. “Even though you have generators on site, you have to get the water out of the basement,” he said.

Another damn good reason not to buy anything American.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world ... anted=2&hp

Good point, but I still want a Bacon Double Cheese Whopper.

[Seth]

Damn Americans Designed The Failing Nuclear Plants

Christopher D. Wilson, a reactor operator and later a manager at Exelon’s Oyster Creek plant, near Toms River, N.J., said, “normally you would just re-establish electricity supply, from the on-site diesel generator or a portable one.” Portable generators have been brought into Fukushima, he said.

Fukushima was designed by General Electric, as Oyster Creek was around the same time, and the two plants are similar. The problem, he said, was that the hookup is done through electric switching equipment that is in a basement room flooded by the tsunami, he said. “Even though you have generators on site, you have to get the water out of the basement,” he said.

Another damn good reason not to buy anything American.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world ... anted=2&hp

Good point, but I still want a Bacon Double Cheese Whopper.

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but the Japanese had plenty of opportunity to notice that the switching gear was in the basement. They are the experts in tsunamis after all. Seems like everybody poked the pooch on this one. Sounds like a good reason to immediately modify every other plant to rectify the problem right away.

[Gawd]

Damn Americans Designed The Failing Nuclear Plants

Christopher D. Wilson, a reactor operator and later a manager at Exelon’s Oyster Creek plant, near Toms River, N.J., said, “normally you would just re-establish electricity supply, from the on-site diesel generator or a portable one.” Portable generators have been brought into Fukushima, he said.

Fukushima was designed by General Electric, as Oyster Creek was around the same time, and the two plants are similar. The problem, he said, was that the hookup is done through electric switching equipment that is in a basement room flooded by the tsunami, he said. “Even though you have generators on site, you have to get the water out of the basement,” he said.

Another damn good reason not to buy anything American.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world ... anted=2&hp

Good point, but I still want a Bacon Double Cheese Whopper.

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but the Japanese had plenty of opportunity to notice that the switching gear was in the basement. They are the experts in tsunamis after all. Seems like everybody poked the pooch on this one. Sounds like a good reason to immediately modify every other plant to rectify the problem right away.

It is a major American design flaw, thus Americans are to blame. Don't try to lay the blame of shoddy American engineering on someone else.

[Seth]

Damn Americans Designed The Failing Nuclear Plants

Christopher D. Wilson, a reactor operator and later a manager at Exelon’s Oyster Creek plant, near Toms River, N.J., said, “normally you would just re-establish electricity supply, from the on-site diesel generator or a portable one.” Portable generators have been brought into Fukushima, he said.

Fukushima was designed by General Electric, as Oyster Creek was around the same time, and the two plants are similar. The problem, he said, was that the hookup is done through electric switching equipment that is in a basement room flooded by the tsunami, he said. “Even though you have generators on site, you have to get the water out of the basement,” he said.

Another damn good reason not to buy anything American.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world ... anted=2&hp

Good point, but I still want a Bacon Double Cheese Whopper.

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but the Japanese had plenty of opportunity to notice that the switching gear was in the basement. They are the experts in tsunamis after all. Seems like everybody poked the pooch on this one. Sounds like a good reason to immediately modify every other plant to rectify the problem right away.

It is a major American design flaw, thus Americans are to blame. Don't try to lay the blame of shoddy American engineering on someone else.

You won't find me defending General Electric, which is run by a terrorist-sympathizer and ought to be out of business. However, the Japanese nuclear engineers had to approve the plans before they were built, so they have an equal share of the blame for the oversight that left the plant vulnerable. Even more so because they knew the risks of high water and should have demanded modifications to the plans before allowing the plant to be built. There's plenty of blame to go around, but your argument that nobody should buy "anything American" is just moronic America bashing with no foundation in any rational thought or truth. You might want to check the nuclear reactor plans produce by GE carefully, but that's hardly an indictment of the entire United States.

Besides, what have the rag-head, grasshopper-eating camel fuckers living in mud houses in the Middle East done for civilization except lay claim to the oil resources that they needed American and British technological infrastructure and knowledge to extract, or for that matter find? It was the British and the Americans who discovered the oil, and when they did the Sheiks were living in tents in the desert fucking camels and shooting each other. Lawrence called them a "little, barbarous people" and he was, and remains, exactly right. The only reason that they aren't still eating grasshoppers and chopping each other's heads off is America's demand for oil. Without the oil, and without America, the Middle East would be a region filled with ignorant savages, as it has been for a long time.

[Gawd]

Why the hell are you bringing Arabs into this discussion when it has zero to do with them (not to mention your racial stereotyping of them)? Should I follow suit and blame some Jews for this, then?

And these faulty nuke plants were designed by American engineers, you don't have Japanese engineers putting their stamp on another engineer's work yah know?

[Seth]

Why the hell are you bringing Arabs into this discussion when it has zero to do with them (not to mention your racial stereotyping of them)? Should I follow suit and blame some Jews for this, then?

Because it annoys you. I enjoy annoying you. You need to be annoyed. Hopefully you will become so annoyed that you will fuck off somewhere else in annoyance. As long as you carry on bashing Jews, I'll carry on bashing Arabs, just for balance.

[Mysturji]

All together now...
"Nuclear power is perfectly safe!"

PS. Just heard on the radio that the second reactor building that just blew up had a whole shitload of nuclear waste stored on the roof.

I mean for fuck sakes.

[Mysturji]

Why the hell are you bringing Arabs into this discussion when it has zero to do with them (not to mention your racial stereotyping of them)? Should I follow suit and blame some Jews for this, then?

Because it annoys you. I enjoy annoying you. You need to be annoyed. Hopefully you will become so annoyed that you will fuck off somewhere else in annoyance. As long as you carry on bashing Jews, I'll carry on bashing Arabs, just for balance.

What annoys you, Seth?

[JimC]

Seth and Gawd, can we please leave this sort of nonsense to other threads?

In other posts, you have both made very useful contributions to this thread, which should focus on the nuclear issues.

The design should certainly have taken into account the possibility of a basement switching room being flooded, so lets call it a draw in responsibility between the American designers, and the Japanese clients, and move on...

[Gawd]

Seth and Gawd, can we please leave this sort of nonsense to other threads?

In other posts, you have both made very useful contributions to this thread, which should focus on the nuclear issues.

The design should certainly have taken into account the possibility of a basement switching room being flooded, so lets call it a draw in responsibility between the American designers, and the Japanese clients, and move on...

Seth started it....

[JimC]

All together now...
"Nuclear power is perfectly safe!"

PS. Just heard on the radio that the second reactor building that just blew up had a whole shitload of nuclear waste stored on the roof.

I mean for fuck sakes.

I have heard nothing about nuclear waste stored on the roof - sounds a bit like an urban legend to me...

[JimC]

Seth and Gawd, can we please leave this sort of nonsense to other threads?

In other posts, you have both made very useful contributions to this thread, which should focus on the nuclear issues.

The design should certainly have taken into account the possibility of a basement switching room being flooded, so lets call it a draw in responsibility between the American designers, and the Japanese clients, and move on...

Seth started it....

Shit, it's like dealing with a class of 13 year old boys...

You'll both be on detention soon!

[Mysturji]

All together now...
"Nuclear power is perfectly safe!"

PS. Just heard on the radio that the second reactor building that just blew up had a whole shitload of nuclear waste stored on the roof.

I mean for fuck sakes.

I have heard nothing about nuclear waste stored on the roof - sounds a bit like an urban legend to me...

Tell that to Moira Stewart. It was on BBC radio 2 news. Couldn't find it on BBC website... gotta go to work.

[Seth]

All together now...
"Nuclear power is perfectly safe!"

PS. Just heard on the radio that the second reactor building that just blew up had a whole shitload of nuclear waste stored on the roof.

I mean for fuck sakes.

Nobody said that nuclear power is perfectly safe. The question is whether it's safe enough to use when all of the other risks and necessities of power generation using other methods are taken into consideration. If you ask the EPA, coal-fired power plants have killed hundreds of thousands more people than all the nuclear power plants on earth, through indirect means like lung disease and cancer caused by the emission of toxic byproducts, heavy metals and yes, radioactive materials, from stacks.

There risk in everything, so it becomes a matter of assessing risk and controlling it, not trying to eliminate it. You're far more likely to get hit by a bus or shot by a mugger than you are to die of a nuke plant failure, even a catastrophic one. Nobody lives forever anyway, so get over it.

Unless you're interested in going back to pre-electrical times, where you'll die much more quickly from black lung like people did in London during the "killer fogs" back when coal was used for virtually everything including heat, you've got to pick your poison. I'll take nuclear, thanks all the same, because it's the most efficient, most effective and overall the safest form of electrical generation we have. It could obviously be better, and I'd like to kick the engineers who were stupid enough to put the switch gear for the electrical system in the basement squarely in the balls, several times in a row, but live and learn, and now we know that's a problem and had better not make that mistake again. So far as I'm concerned, everybody harmed by this failure should sue both General Electric and the Japanese engineering firms who approved the plans for damages. Big, giant, huge, enormous damages that put them out of business. The point being that designing and building nuke plants should be a zero-defect completely fail-safe proposition with as many redundancies and safety devices and protocols as needed to ensure safe shutdown under ANY circumstances short of the sun going supernova, in which case it won't matter at all.