Damn.
I am having a slow day. The roads are flooded and we are more or less snowed in. I went to YouTube and watched the Nova program on the Fukishima disaster. Damn.
It just keeps getting worse. (As Steven King once said on another subject.) The heroism of the operators was amazing.
This is well worth your time.
Yeah, if it gets much worse than this, the death toll might rise all the way to 2.
[Moderating]
Oh, and I can’t really see that this is about a work of art (yeah, there’s a documentary, but the discussion is about the events, not the documentary itself), so I’ll move it to MPSIMS.
I suppose billions of dollars of property were destroyed, or rendered unusable. It will take until about 2050 to clean up the mess. I see now there is nothing really dramatic or interesting about this. Nothing to learn from here. Move along.
In more breaking news, anyone aware of this whole “Chernobyl” thing?
I heard tell about, but this was more interesting from a technical point of view.
Snow in Qatar?
And how much did all the rest of the damage from the tsunami cost? The total cost would have been nearly as high if there had been no power plant there at all, and higher if it had instead been any other sort of power plant of equivalent wattage. A tsunami and earthquake of unprecedented size, in a high-population-density area, is always going to have a high cost.
Yes, but without the nuclear power plant, would the tsunami have caused a magnetic pole reversal?
(At least I assume that the nuclear meltdown caused a magnetic pole reversal, because those are what the OP’s video link is about.)
I would like to get some time to watch it. In the meantime, I will speak out of my ignorance.
I have heard this before and I am a little confused by it. If you are a nuclear reactor operator, your JOB is to handle that reactor. If the st hits the fan, your job is to make it the situation less sty until you are either relieved or you die on the spot. What is not expected is for you to tap out when things go bad.
Same as the captain of a ship. The captain, as the person ultimately responsible for the safety of all crew and passengers, should be the last person off a sinking ship. Anything less, and he/she is a coward.
If you don’t like that responsibility, get another job.
I am very grateful that these people lived up to their duties. And I am sure the people of Japan are even more grateful. But to act as if anything less was expected seems strange to me.
Yeah, magnetic pole stuff for me too.
I am curious, where did you hear that it is the duty of the operating staff to die on the job if necessary? I remember years ago some discussion about the need for a “nuclear priesthood” to install that idea, but I am not aware of anyone actually creating such a cadre. That they stayed in their bunker is good news, but I am not aware of any kind of requirement.
Hi OP, did you post the wrong video?
Japan has historically had a curiously casual attitude towards nuclear power. For those who are interested, you can read Charles Perrow’s “Normal Accidents” which is pretty much an amazing history of nuclear accidents. Toward the end there’s a section on a nuclear reclamation/recyling center Japan allowed to be constructed in a major city. Eventually it went critical. Now it finally went sub-critical on its own, and the death toll was 1, but it could have been worse.
It’s not that these kind of accidents haven’t happened in the US, but the facilities at least weren’t in major cities.
So about $100 billion per person. Not bad!
certainly appears so - but thanks, now I am worried about the planet’s magnetic pole :mad:
Probably so. I am remarkably technically inept. I did however cut-and-paste the YouTube title.
That isn’t what I heard from my Dad. He worked quite a bit with the Japanese on nuclear safety. He was, before he retired, in the top three or four in the world on nuclear reactor safety. He ran a nuclear reactor safety division at a national lab for something like 30 years.
For example, my Dad ran this test:
The question was what would happen if a plane hit a containment dome. The Japanese asked the question and Dad got the job. For the record, the deepest dent in the wall was roughly 4.5 inches. The wall was built to spec out of concrete and rebar and 12 feet thick. The plane was going 480 mph.
Additionally, my Dad was at TMI shortly after the accident began. The V.P. called the house and he flew out on a military jet. Iirc, Dad said the human error in relation to the accident was due to a) inadequate training and b) poorly labeled instrumentation and easily fixable. This contradicts Perrows view as far as I can tell. There may be two or three people on the planet who know as much about the accident as Dad does.
If I talk to him in the next day or so I will confirm my recollections.
Slee