Okay. They lost all power and the diesel generators were damaged by the tsunami.
No hydrogen vents for the buildings that exploded?
How about underground generators?
(Warning, incoming dumb question) Any way to manually create power? Yup. 100 people on treadmills or bikes or whatever.
How about tidal generators, since they were near the ocean?
From my time as a Problem coordinator for Excel Energy, I can state that one of the ironically weird issues you can have at power plants is getting electricity for your systems in an emergency. Everybody at the plant is busy trying to get the whole shebang running again and nobody has time to get the emergency generator running if there’s a problem with it. So, they’re trying to do everything with battery power and hand-held flashlights.
Flooding is bad for those, especially flooding you might get during a hurricane or tsunami.
We had a problem with that in Houston. Some of the backup power for some of the Medical Center hospitals had been moved from the 2nd floor to basements before Tropical Storm Allison hit. That was a bad move. It all failed when the entire area got inundated.
Keeping water out of basements is hard.
There’s no good way to do this. Treadmills/bikes with a lot of people might keep some of the light bulbs lit. That’s about it. Certainly not enough to do much about the entire plant. That’s rather the point of all that equipment in the first place.
Some gyms have that kind of gear - stuff that will generate power from your exercise. None of them generate all that much energy. Not even enough to run the equipment. At best, it’s enough to mitigate a fraction (maybe up to 1/3) of the power to run the treadmills and bikes in the first place.
I can’t find the thread now, but tidal power pretty much already exists where it can work. It’s not much good elsewhere. You need regular tides of considerable height to make it work. And sea water is fairly corrosive to boot, so hard on the equipment.
The existing scheme they had at Fukushima wasn’t horrible in principle. But they needed higher seawalls.
The problem was that they had a number of back-up systems, but all of the back ups assumed that they would fail independently. They had first discounted, then ignorned the possibility of a tsunami of that magnitude.
The generators failed because they were inundated with sea water. The backup batteries couldn’t last forever and the emergency backup power line from another grid was knocked down by the earthquake.
The problem was complex. They didn’t have detailed enough emergency planning and then the fog of war. The earthquake had knocked out critical roads. By the time it was obvious that they couldn’t restart the plants or the generators, the they were leaking a considerable amount of radiation.
Often overlooked, there were another set of reactors, Fukushima II, with the similar design and approximate age. They also suffered from catastrophic failure which also contributed to the estimated trillions of dollars in damage to the Japanese economy.
Oh, except that the problems at Fukushima II were quickly handled.
I saw a post once from somebody who claimed part of his job included testing diesel backup generators. He said these are typically tested by turning them on briefly to see if they run, and then they are turned off again for long periods of time – they are seldom put under any demand or tested for significant runtime. Nobody wants to spend the fuel or put up with the noise and bother.
Hence, when an actual emergency occurs, most diesel backup generators have never been tested under realistic conditions (under a heavy , possibly variable load for a long time), and they fail. A lot. Not just at Fukushima Dai-Ichi and not just during tsunamis – the poster said that in his experience, these generators frequently fail when actually used.
Tidal power and wave power technology exists but requires a steady up down tide. Plus, if you’re being hit by a massive tsunami then most likely all your infrastructure for transferring or using the power will be ruined…bigger issue. If hamster power was effective half of china would be running on tread miles for a buck a day.
Not at reactors. They’re load tested. And the fuel issue doesn’t matter much because it’s determined to have a specific shelf life and needs swapped out periodically if unused anyway.
My company supplies and services backup diesels in nuclear plants (not in Japan though). Backup diesels in nuclear plants have very tough testing, maintenance, and startup requirements – at least in the U.S. For example, testing verifies the fast-start requirement (no more than 10 seconds between startup and full power), both from a standby condition and immediately after engine shutdown. Also, these engines will have systems that are continuously running – lube oil, for example – so they’re not exactly sitting dormant like generator in a non-nuclear (I.e., commercial) application.
Regarding hydrogen, the plant should have had either a venting system, or igniters that would continually burn off the hydrogen before it could reach dangerous levels. Of course, both of these options assume that there was emergency power available, which there wasn’t after the generator sets (and battery banks) were flooded.
Yeah, but my hamster idea was just for the most crucial of systems. Like venting in a reactor containment system. Something akin to the fan deployment system many airliners have where the fan powers the cockpit dials. A last-ditch fallback.
This.
At one plant, the emergency generator had so much stuff plugged into it that when it fired up, it immediately blew all its breakers, and there was nobody free to figure out what didn’t really need to be plugged in and go unplug those things, then reset it.