Japan Nuclear Coverage

[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.

What annoys you, Seth?

A) Nothing
B) If something did, do you really think I'd be stupid enough to tell you what it is?

And with that I'm going to accede to the request to back off.

[FBM]

Shit. Boom goes a third one.

[Tero]

All our happiness is pumped out of the ground, mined as coal and uranium. Without them, it's back to horses and hay.

[Svartalf]

LOL, do you imagine trying to readapt moden cities to the sheer room needed to accomodate horse drawn vehicles and all those animals?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Just ordered a copy of "On the Beach". Movie night, my house!

[Gawdzilla Sama]

BBC says 35m wave hit town.

That's what you need to shield a coastal reactor against. Good luck with that.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Preliminary test results from the Fukushima area are disturbing.

Fukushima Testing.png (774.15 KiB) Viewed 996 times

[JOZeldenrust]

TMNT

[Gawdzilla Sama]

TMNT

[egbert]

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.

The tsunami wave that hit the plant measured at least 7 metres in height, compared to the maximum 6.5 metre case the plant was designed to cope with.

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Ve ... 03111.html

[Warren Dew]

Damn Americans Designed The Failing Nuclear Plants

It could have been worse - they could have gotten the Chernobyl design from the Russians!

[Warren Dew]

Power is not required to operate the valves, they fail open. And you have a 72 hour water capacity in those tanks. You can refill them with anything that pumps like a fire truck.

Fire trucks are not a passive measure. You are also mistaken about the valves, which require control power to activate the explosives.

[Warren Dew]

There is simply no excuse whatsoever for creating a nuclear reactor that will melt down as the result of a power failure, ever.

Interestingly, there was an initiative in the U.S. nuclear industry in the early 1990s called "alternate AC" that resulted in many plants adding backup diesel generators or batteries.

Fukushima appears to have addressed similar concerns using a "sharpening their pencils" method, called "probabilistic risk analysis". Now, a correctly done probabilistic risk analysis is actually fine; the problem is that such an analysis is very difficult to do correctly. For example, if you assume that earthquakes and tsunamis are independent risks, then you never account for situations like what happened at Fukushima.

I'm guessing they made that or a similar mistake.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Nuclear Experts Explain Worst-Case Scenario at Fukushima Power Plant
The type of accident occurring now in Japan derives from a loss of off-site AC power and then a subsequent failure of emergency power on-site. Engineers there are racing to restore AC power to prevent a core meltdown
> In-Depth Report: The Japan Earthquake and Tsunami

From SciAm.

[FBM]

Yet another boom.