"Steve Walker" wrote in message
news
On 14/12/2017 20:11, Rod Speed wrote:
Brian Gaff wrote

On an allied front, does anyone know about all this legal wrangling in
Japan about whether they will restart their nuclear reactors or not?

Just the usual mindless **** fight. Quite a few want them all shut down
forever and the current PM wants to tell them to go and **** themselves.

I heard it on a foreign station yesterday. It seems there is
disagreement about the safety of them after the problems encountered
when they got the tsunami, even though steps have been taken to protect
the control systems now.

The problem wasn’t the control systems, it was the standby generators
ending up under water etc. Trivially easy to fix so it doesn’t happen
again.

It is actually a fundamental design flaw. If a new station was being
designed from scratch, they would not be relying upon protecting the
generators - they had done that anyway, but not anticipated such a high
tsunami and so the protections were insufficient. Modern practice would be
to design the reactor so that it would fail-safe without power to the
control systems. The target now is passive safety rather than active as
nothing can fail to operate, lose power or sieze from misuse if nothing
has to move or be controlled.

Sure, but that’s all academic to the question of whether
they should leave them all turned off forever now.