Posted on 05/26/2011 5:17:46 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Earthquake, not tsunami, may have damaged cooling system at No. 3 reactor
2011/05/26
Data from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant indicates that the March 11 earthquake--not the tsunami--damaged piping for the emergency core cooling system at the No. 3 reactor, leading to a meltdown, experts said.
Tokyo Electric Power Co., the plant's operator, has insisted that a tsunami far exceeding expectations led to the accident at the plant, and that shaking from the magnitude-9.0 earthquake did not cause serious damage to crucial equipment.
Junichi Matsumoto, a TEPCO official, told a news conference on May 24 that the piping at the reactor may not have even been damaged.
"We suspect a malfunctioning of a pressure instrument," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at asahi.com ...
P!
Does it make a difference? Like here in Florida, a hurrican can destroy your home because of of water or wind...the only question is the insurance?
There has been a line of argument that the quake did not destroyed the reactors but the tsunami did. So if it were placed some distance away from the shore, the reactors would have been fine. This new finding shows that may not be the case.
But you need the adjacent water to cool the reactor..that’s why they build them on the shore..you can’t build a mile or more pipeline...it would be breached in a quake..
Guess he never heard of the old saying, "Hope for the best but plan for the worst." Yes, that was a huge quake and a huge wave but if you're at a nuke plant and the experts think a X foot tall wall is sufficient, then build a wall double that. Here's another old saying he should be familiar with, "Better safe than sorry."
I’ve always thought it was the quake that started the whole domino effect. The base was fractured by the quake and then the tsunami just multiplied the damage.
I pointed this out in an earlier post on one of your threads. The emergency cooling heat exchanger could not be put on line right after the quake and had to be taken off line after ten minutes, long before the arrival of the tsunami. Almost certainly this was caused by mechanical damage inside the primary containment.
It is necessary to build reactors to survive a magnitude 11 quake without damage. Better would be to design for a magnitude 12 event.
No reactors in the world are built to such specifications.
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