On 3/30/2011 7:49 AM, HeyBub wrote:
Higgs Boson wrote:
On Mar 29, 9:46 am, bob wrote:
Once GE gewts hit with all the lawsuits over the japanese reactor
there will be no profits to pay taxes on, GE will end up in
bankruptcy.

Their cheaper reactor the buyers got what they paid for

I gotta say that, according to what's coming out now, the Japanese
engineers/geologists/other specialists were using very, very, very old
data when planning and siting these reactors. Nobody had properly
studied the history of earthquakes going back over 1,000 years.

It was known. There was data that tsunamis had swept as far as 2 miles
inland near that location. That data was discarded as being too old to
be "reliable".

This was revisited not too long ago and the Tsunami risk wasn't even
looked into.


This
is just plain inexcusable. Not that GE isn't at fault too for their
criminal greed, but the Japanese had a duty to study the geology and
earthquake history of these areas before committing to the cheap-o GE
product.

What greed? What cheap-o product? The reactors performed exactly - or almost
exactly - as they were designed. They shut themselves down properly and so
forth.

Actually they didn't shut down properly. Unit One ran into trouble early
on and it was designed with a passive cooling loop to the condensor. It
should have been fine for some time with no power. The rest of them also
had troubles shutting down. The only thing that did function properly
was the control rods.


The genesis of the current problem, the root cause, the whole enchilada,
lies at the foot on one horrendous mistake: The location of the reactors.


Most reactors are located either near the sea or near a river.

Blaming GE for the site's vulnerability to a tsunami is like blaming Sunbeam
for a toaster failure when the toaster gets submerged.

These are all Mark 1 designs, unit 1 being a BWR3 reactor and the rest
BWR4. A design that was marketed as being cost effective. Top level
engineers at GE had quit over the design.

Unit 6 was either a Mark II or Mark III. If it had been online it
wouldn't have had the same problems as the obvious flaws in the design
had been corrected. No spent fuel pool sitting exposed on the top floor
for one. And a much larger wet reservoir.

It's going on 3 weeks out and they still haven't been able to drain the
cooling pumps, a necessary step to keep them from blowing out the lines,
before they can restart the cooling loops.

Since this is first generation, I can't fault the design so much as the
fact they have extended the service life. Apparently in the case of
Fukushima without any of the mods to make them safer. They have a long
history of problems. This is criminal.

Jeff