Posted on 07/17/2007 10:02:21 AM PDT by Milwaukee_Guy
As I understand it, a lot of the waste is ordinary PPE and contaminated tools.
“This is pretty standard when a serious earthquake happens. Takes at least 2-3 days for the real news to get out. I remember being in the San Fernando earthquake (1971) and the news reports said that it was just a minor quake. We were without running water for a week. Go figure.”
Exactly my concern. TESCO and Japanese officials all ran in front of cameras and microphones advising there was no release and no danger to the public. 24 hours later an entirely different picture emerges.
It is obvious that public affairs people will say anything with complete ignorance and concern of what the actual situation is.
This only erodes public confidence and complicates recovery efforts.
Personally I believe we need to greatly expand nuclear energy production here in the US.
I’m no engineer, but aren’t there always additional safety factors built into any large design?
sor of like “It can withstand a 6.0 quake, maybe even a 8.0 quake, but we cannot guarantee the 8.0 number”
Of course the guys with the pocket protectors cannot come out and say that, if the plant did fail in 8.0, then they would get sued.
Yep, that’s a good description for basic mixed waste.
I’d like to know how many curies were released. They never mention stuff like that.
I have not been following the story, is that image the nuclear plant?
I’m not even vaguely educated as to what the degree and halflife of what you describe is, but I would guess that in terms of particulate and curies or roentgens, it must be pretty high......and that it would be a whole lot safer to reduce it to solids as soon as is practicable, esp in such a quake-prone place as Japan. It’s difficult to get a picture with such hedged comments almost concealed within an article like this one, with the comments of very reluctant officials. Since it mentions both “slosh” and barrels that fell over and “lost lids” one must wonder if there aren’t at least 2 releases of liquids. I think there probably were 2....
Trivial details! Hell, when they have a rollover truck, they call it a hazardous material situation when the truck loses 50 gallons of diesel on the road. It’s not like a real hazmat situation with Clean Harbors showing up in class A moonsuit gear.
Reporters are ignorant.
Let’s pose that one to someone more informed than me.
Nuke - ping to #43
must be.....here are the properties behind the jpg, dated today:
http://msnbcmedia3.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/070717/070717_japanquake_vmed_5a.widec.jpg
Glad it was no worse for them. No doubt they'll learn a few things here.
“padre35 wrote:
“Is this another Chernbyl...”
Absolutely NOT, Chernobyl was a grphite cored reactor, they were testing it and inadvertantly drained
all of the coolant fromt he reactor then restarted it, the reactor melted down and burned through the floor.
In Japan, the reactor shut off automatically, there can be no reactor melt down.
this is the sort of thing the Enviroweenies luv to pounce on, rather then congratulating the Japanese
engineers for sucha great design, they will scream about a spill...”
That’s not even close to what happened at Chernobyl.
Really? Do tell “what actually happened” then, they were testing the reactor and there was no coolant in it when they did the tests.
You have different information then please do share it.
I do not know about Japan, but in the US nuke plants are designed to guarantee safe shutdown for the maximum proposed earthquake, AKA Design Basis Earthquake. Safe shutdown does not mean you will not have piping ruptures or broken equipment or even no radioactive liquid/gas releases, it means that enough equipment survives to place the reactor in a safe shutdown state, where the reactor is shut down and enough cooling water flows to keep it cool and the fuel covered with water. The only equipment that must survive intact is the reactor vessel, control rods/drives, one diesel for power, and one train of Safety Injection/residual heat removal.
See teh square buildings? The actual containments is inside those buildings. If they are like the GE mark 3 containments, they will look like upside down light bulbs. The builgings are just shells.
The Westinghouse designs are more efficient and contain the radioactive fluids/gasses better, but the BWR’s are cheaper to build.
Now, see, here we go. I didn’t want to go there - but yeah, I do prefer the Circle-Bar-W units. (Full disclosure - that’s a local company to me and some family have been involved in the business). The construction cost advantage does go to GE.
However, I know of at least one GE plant that had a fuel pin split and lost a couple or three pellets in the stream. That added millions to the costs on their next outage. I realized real fast why there is a bio shield around the turbine floor.
So I suppose those that are homeless will be coming here, right? Hey, we have PLENTY of room for them.
::dread::
Your right, the media is not reporting this.
Some say Tokyo & Yokohama are long over due for a repeat of the Great Kanto quake.
“How soon will US tax dollars be rebuilding the plant?”
No need to. We have already provided them with free nuclear energy back in ‘45.
From what I have seen, a number of these are elderly Japanese. They certainly won't want to leave Japan just because of this event.
For that matter, the Japanese have survived a lot of disasters. It's the most earthquake-prone place on earth; they get their share of bad weather; they have dense populations so that when disaster hits it tends to hit a lot of people simultaneously.
But they persevere pretty daggone well -- look at how eager so many were to return to the very dangerous island of Miyakejima. They spend a lot of money building highly disaster-resistant structures, and do a lot more disaster preparation than anywhere I have seen in the U.S.
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