On 16/03/2011 15:47, Andy Cap wrote:
Nightjar "cpb"@ insertmysurnamehere wrote:
On 16/03/2011 14:28, Andy Cap wrote:
wrote:
On Mar 16, 1:24 pm, "
wrote:
On Mar 16, 3:34 am, "Ala" wrote:





"Bram" wrote in
...
But looking at the footage, when the No.3 building exploded, the
fallout
didn't appear to be going out to sea. Also, if it was a hydrogen
explosion, why was the flame orange?
Also, notice that there has been no video footage of the No.2
reactor
building exploding? Or of the No.4 reactor on fire?
The explosions appear to be quite sequential, and therefore quite
possibly
planned, as opposed to an accidental explosion, so it's more than
likely
that they know what they are doing and making do with a worst case
scenario. But, the situation only escalated after all three working
reactors (out of the six) have now suffered explosions.
I don't doubt the the Japanese for their technical ability, but I
also
don't feel that they are giving people the facts.
as of tonight they'd evacuated workers- Hide quoted text -
IMHO, a better way to fix it, now it seems to have got completely out
of hand, thanks to the usual 'incompetence of engineers' who designed
emergency systems that don't work in an emergency, would be:

1. Get everybody out of the plant, tell all local residents to stay
inside and close the windows, 'Protect and Survive' stylee (much
better than the daft policy of evacuating the surrounding area, which
is going to cause major problems with housing evacuees)

2. Induce intentional meltdowns in all reactors, by precision-bombing
them from the air, so that the cooling systems are completely smashed
and all coolant escapes. This would cause the fuel to melt down into
the layer of graphite provided beneath the reactors for just this
scenario, you then monitor the situation from the air with thermal
cameras etc.

3. Once the graphite has absorbed all the fuel, you really let the
site have it with large bombs, so that the graphite layer is buried
under rubble and displaced soil etc.

4. Finally you finish the job by sending men and machines in, with
appropriate NBC precautions, to entomb the whole thing in concrete.-
Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

BTW, does the 'exploding reactor' footage remind anybody of this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qW6OrdLkCLU

( 1 min 28 sec in)

Somebody who knows how to do this sort of thing should mash the two
up...


What surprised me, was the apparent vulnerability of the standby power,
unless there was more to the loss of coolant circulation than I've
understood!

The emergency systems withstood an earthquake five times as powerful
as they were designed for and worked perfectly afterwards. The
reactors shut down exactly as planned. However, the core remains hot
for some days afterwards and, on this design, that needs pumped
coolant. To provide that, there were generators, backup generators and
backup battery power. The generators worked as planned, until the
tsunami hit. They were designed to withstand a wave the height of a
house, but the one that hit was too high. It knocked out the
generators and the backup generators, but the batteries continued to
run the systems for eight hours, as planned. The problem came in
getting the fourth level of backup - mobile generators - into
operation within the eight hours the batteries gave them. Given the
circumstances, it is more surprising everything worked as well as it did.

Colin BIgnell

Thanks for that explanation. I couldn't believe there was only one level
of backup. Looks like a higher location is in order then. Can't see us
abandoning the nuclear option whatever the present concerns.

The reason the plant was near the sea was so that any tsunami that hit
would only be water, not water plus bits of building, cars and other
assorted debris. More modern designs have, in any case, done away with
the need for pumped coolant and, hence, for the generators that were
knocked out.

Colin Bignell