The report is in my last post. Extremely well-worth reading. Some things I noticed:
Half the units were in outage. World-wide, the nuke industry has gotten extremely good at minimizing down time. I’ve not kept up with the NRC side for a while, but I’ll guess that the average shut down time is about three months out of every eighteen month fueling cycle. Meaning normally you’d expect one or two more reactors to be running.
So much for the good news.
They got an hour’s worth out of their backup diesel generators before the tsunami hit. Says it took out “multiple” sets, so they did have backups for their backups (and possibly for their backups). All of which were taken out by a wave of Poseidon’s hand.
At that moment they had 8 hours battery power. And that point right there was the tipping point for the meltdowns.
For every multi-agency drill and exercise I took part in, there was always the “hotwash” afterward. It’s the “lessons learned” pow-wow. After my first two I went ahead and started writing down the biggest concern before the coming exercise, just to save time. First Lesson Learned? Improve communication!
Invariably.
Now, with single homogenous groups, like us HPs in solo “traversing the plume” training, sometimes the biggest problem isn’t communication. For an ad hoc improvisational top-down hierarchial structure of (wildly) varying agencies and jobs? Communication. Always.
Fukushima still had their diesels an hour after the earthquake. The Prime Minister was already pretty busy with that. The diesels were swept away along with the rest of Japan’s east coast. People dying by the thousands.
In a world free from static and garbling and misunderstood messages, Fukushima gets immediate access to the Prime Minister. Or the Japanese SDF or Robert Gates , for that matter. And the simple message is immediately understood and believed. “In eight hours we lose cooling to our reactors.”
In that world, the reactors don’t melt down.
But that world isn’t inhabited by human beings.
On the subject of triple and quadruple redundant on-site back-up power, I cannot help but think that the big lesson learned from this is going to be to bury every layer of redundant emergency power and make sure your air intakes are 50′ tall and capable of eating a 747 — or tsunami! — to the face.
Or there’ll be a trend to build all future seaside nuclear complexes below sea level, so that in the event that something like this arises in the future, so that all we have to do is blow the sea walls and let the hand of Poseidon do the legwork in providing coolant for the damaged reactors.
The second one falls under an old adage, “Dilution’s the solution to the problem of pollution!”
We don’t get to use that one much anymore.
Rush Limbaugh just referenced this website from the nuclear energy institute things maybe better than we are expect http://nei.cachefly.net/newsandevents/information-on-the-japanese-earthquake-and-reactors-in-that-region/
Good catch, thanks for the link.
I’ll probably post it shortly.
Just looking for the people who stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
Heh.
The commercial from Holiday Inn Express
That’s the best HIE commercial I’ve seen. Though it would feel a little raw to a lot of people right now.
And yet, we here in the U.S. were informed of the 8 hour battery life, probably before those batteries even went flat. Granted, authorities in Japan had their hands WAY full. But even the non-technical types in the media understood that the reactors were a potential Big Problem.
What I don’t get is why anybody thought 8 hours was sufficient.
My background is telecom. I can tell you that virtually 100% of telecom facilities have a minimum of 5 hours reserve battery available. Those batteries are mainly there for DC filtering, but they keep the systems alive during the 4 seconds or so it takes for a generator to kick in, and they will supposedly last long enough to call a fuel truck if the generator runs out of fuel.
Strings of batteries (big ones) aren’t cheap, and power outages that outlast the fuel tanks are few and far between, but the telcos buy them anyway because people expect their phones to work no matter what, and people truly *need* them to work no matter what, so that people can call 911 in an emergency.
A nuke plant is probably 1000 times as expensive as a telephone central office. The consequences of losing cooling capability is arguably much more than 1000 times worse than losing phones service in an area that might cover 1 or 2 zip codes. So why the hell wouldn’t they spring for a few more batteries?
The problem is that they need a huge amount of batteries. I wager that they cut power consumption down to bare minimum (perhaps even cutting off power to the fuel rod ponds too) and still drained a building-sized pile of batteries in eight hours.
Keep in mind that if some of the sets of generators had survived, the batteries could have lasted a lot longer or not have been used at all. They probably figured that eight hours was plenty of time to send in generators or rig something from the grid.
Everything comes back to one lack of conservatism: tsunami-proofing. Someday we’ll learn what was the worst the safety experts expected to ever see.
I have heard about some “communication problems” between the government and TEPCO.
I think one of the other problems was that (almost) everybody expected that plate to grumble further south, likely hitting Tokyo directly. Nobody really expected it up there.
And keep in mind, the reactors withstood the 8.9, which is amazing by itself. If not for the tsunami, none of this would have happened.
I know it’s macabre to be thankful for where the earthquake occurred, but if one had to compile a list of worst places for a 8.9 earthquake to occur, up in the area around Sendai would be rather far down on the list.
As if the worst-case scenario had occurred and that quake’s epicenter had been in the middle of Tokyo Bay, the amount of death and destruction would have been staggering in a way that one quickly runs out of adjectives to describe.
Mr. WORM, I’m curious if automatic scram of all reactors after a quake is the standard response plan everywhere. To me it sounds like a good idea in theory only (like “zero tolerance” policies at schools that mean they expel kids for bringing a butter knife in their lunch).
It seems that if the reactors were intact after the quake they could have left one running to provide power for a controlled shutdown of the others. My guess is a reactor with intact containment is a heck of lot more tsunami resistant than diesel gens (and their fuel). Particularly when any disaster big enough to damage all the onsite backup power will also disable offsite power.
Maybe we should consider having older plants vulnerable to loss of power emergencies install a smaller modular reactor with passive cooling to run the bigger reactors. They could bury it or mount on shocks. That would be a better option than scrapping older plants that work fine as long as they have power.
I just put some of your stuff here in a full post to respond. Thanks!
Maybe I missed it….why couldn’t the nuke plant which produces power use what it produces to power the pump. I guess something damaged the turbines??? Very Ironic.
Actually, Billy, I think some designs have that elegant emergency mechanism. Your core’s overheating because there’s no power, so you’re getting steam you don’t want? Vent it over the turbine and use the unwanted steam to provide power for coolant.
>Maybe we should consider having older plants vulnerable to loss of power emergencies install a smaller modular reactor with passive cooling to run the bigger reactors.
>
Excellent idea. Use the direct thermal to electric design that they use for space missions. Don’t recall how much they produce; several small ones would be redundant & easier to service/dispose of.
How many KwHr do the batteries contain? How many Kw do you need to run the low pressure pumps? Might be doable.
Could be, and I didn’t even think of that. I was just thinking that next-gen reactors could tie in to the electrical infrastructures already there, saving lots of resources.
“oldHP”, eh? Welcome! When I first started out in 1984, I worked with a tech who went so far back he’d supported “nuclear acclimation” projects. He’d slap an ion chamber to the soldiers’ necks as they came back from the trials. Would get several rem/hr. off their thyroids.