Interesting info. Do you remember if there were any doors or gates to the outside from the reactor hall or fueling hall? Because I’m wondering just how much of this grief could have been avoided if someone had ventilated those upper halls to prevent hydrogen build-up, either before venting operations or after the reactor #1 building blew.
Of course, ventilating from inside might not have been possible after reactor steam had been vented into those halls - they could have been too radioactive - but I do wonder.
The handing out of iodine pills, and taking a Carrier out of dock where it was undergoing servicing and repairs, that is a very disturbing move. They are almost 200 miles from the plant.
a week of battery power is enough to move a generator into place. The problem is that once it got out of hand they couldn’t do the most basic of tasks without overexposure. You can’t work on something if you’re not there. A week of cooling would have helped immensely.
You assume your ordinary disaster scenario, like where just part of the country is damaged in the extreme. And you can still fly in from other areas. You add extreme volcanic activity to the disaster, so you can’t fly, and some biological problem, some disease or pathogen type disaster, where help won’t be coming in a week, and you have 20 or 30 damaged reactors, (say, a really big series of multiple quakes), you get to a point where you are on your own.
A bunch of nuclear reactors in such a worst case disaster, turns the disaster into a worldwide disaster, with no way to end it at that point.
We still are not at the point if we can end this one disaster.
One explosion right now, or containment breach, and the whole thing can go up in flames.
Nothing about that yet on NHK, which I have on a lot of the time. CNN online is talking about Libya at the moment. Are you sure you’re not referring to the smoke seen yesterday evening, where there was no corresponding radiation spike?
It’s a design flaw. Do you think every car on the road is equal? The GE design is better that Chernobyl but worse than others. I’d rather have a coal plant next to me but nuclear is fine. One of the first nuclear plants was 20 miles from my home. It’s been put to bed as have a half dozen of other small coal plants. We’re going to need something to replace our aging power plants.
I’d probably be using electricity from a nuclear power plant now but they buggered up the construction job so bad they just built a coal plant instead. I certainly don’t want another mess like that.
Just catching it on NHK now. Happened yesterday evening, buildings #2 and #3 still smoking but the radiation level is not increasing. Work has recommenced. There was a brief radiation spike associated with a “grey smoke” release from reactor 3 that led to an evacuation from that area, but not the whole site.
Well, what’s going to happen now is older plants are going to get too much flack, so we’ll be phasing them out. Middle aged plants are going to have to wage a PR war to stay alive. We’re already hearing them brag about their plants.
We’re still probably going to have to build some new plants. Especially in the densely populated eastern half of the US. I live in the western half, and the US’s prevailing winds are mostly towards the east, so no worries here.
The Yellowstone supervolcano will take out the west.
