On Apr 5, 6:06*pm, "Nightjar \"cpb\"@" "insertmysurnamehere wrote:
On 05/04/2011 13:40, Bolted wrote:

On Mar 28, 12:45 pm, "Nightjar\"cpb\"@""insertmysurnamehere
wrote:
Of course the plant is wrecked, but the point is there was no nuclear accident.

Out of interest is that still your view? *No nuclear accident at all,
not even a little one?

As I would define a nuclear accident as necessarily involving a critical
failure of the reactor, that is still my view.

Aah. It's definitional. The IAEA (not known for being anti-nuke, and
rightly so) call it one, I don't think they require criticality.
Which makes sense, after all, if (hypothetically) some reprocessing
plant suffered some non-nuclear explosion and belched loads of used
fuel dust into the atmosphere it would be fair to call that a nuclear
accident.

After all it is well established on this NG that a wind turbine being
dropped on someones head while being off-loaded at a harbour is a wind-
energy death rather than a dock-working death. Can't fairly take
liberty on both sides of the equation.

The reactors shut down properly immediately the primary shockwaves from the earthquake was
detected.

Properly? Doesn't seem to be working that properly now, unless you
really shut your eyes and ears and mind at tsunami +x hours (where x
varies by reactor).

There were failures is the containment of radioactive materials, but, as
I pointed out, the amounts of radiation released are not particularly
significant.

Past tense? It's feed and bleed. With water that is 5.4 billion Bq/
kg at the outlet.

They exceed the safety levels, but then we can't build
nuclear reactors in Cornwall because the natural radiation there is
already higher than the safe levels for operating a nuclear reactor.

How do they compare? Very cursory search says 7mSv/year for
Cornwall. The released levels are levels way beyond 7mSv per hour in
places outside the evac zone.

I don't think it's clear how many people will be affected and in what
way or for how long. But pretending there isn't a nuclear accident in
progress just seems bizarre to me. I'm quite pro-nuke and I don't
think it helps the cause. I think it would be better to be honest and
upfront, and deal with it. It's a very old plant, built to superceded
standards many decades ago, with no real containment over the SFPs
unlike even the later BWRs. And near to a very active fault line
where (perhaps with the benefit of hindsight) they underestimated both
the quake and tsunami risks. That's something which can be dealt with
for future plants by being less complacent rather than more
complacent. It's pretty clear that slack regulation allowed them not
to harden the vent stacks despite that being a required update in the
US. It's clear they were very slack about inventory in the SFPs.

There will be all sorts of lessons learned from this accident which
will progress the cause and the safety of nuclear power. Pretending
it isn't even an accident is an industry trope which will only
increase rather than decrease trust.