Fukushima Is a Triumph for Nuclear Power
If you want to find out how safe something is, find out what it takes to break it. No one designs anything to withstand one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded. And yet this decades-old plant withstood, under conditions five times worse than it was designed for.
A magnitude 8.9 earthquake, plus a tsunami on top of it, has resulted in the tiniest whiffle of radioactive steam, containing the type of isotope which ceased being radioactive in mere minutes. There has been zero radioactivity damage to anyone's health or the environment.
Want to stop fossil fuel dependence? Cut off the gasoline funding for terror organizations? Achieve peace in the Middle East? Save the environment? Nuclear power is the way to do it.
Here's an analysis in The Register.
Comments
tlatoani on Mar. 15, 2011 3:31 PM
While I support increased use of nuclear power for the reasons you mention, I think it's a little early to claim that the Fukushima complex has survived it safely. When the reactors are all confirmed shut down, I'll be happy to agree with you.
flinx on Mar. 15, 2011 4:02 PM
Actually, the Fukushima plants mostly withstood a single event 7 or 8 times greater than they were designed for: apparently they were designed for an 8.2 quake, and the quake intensity has reportedly been upgraded to a 9.0.
nicegeek on Mar. 15, 2011 6:06 PM
Ah, but an 8.2 quake where? With the epicenter under the plant? Before we can say anything about how much the plant's performance compared to design spec, we need to factor in the effect of distance.
flinx on Mar. 16, 2011 2:34 AM
Fair knock, yes. My understanding is that the designs were to withstand a direct 8.2 quake, i.e. with the epicenter directly and shallowly beneath the plant.
Then again, the plant was designed to fit, and constructed with, our understanding of earthquakes ca. the early 1960s.
What boggles my mind is that when they brought in the mobile diesel generators, the systemic failure stemmed from being unable to plug the new generators into the old systems. What, they never thought to update their external access points? Come on, they've designed multiple layers of triply-redundant systems, and they fuck up on that point?
Other than that particular sin of complacency, everything I've read demonstrates the operators and engineers have done admirably under remarkable circumstances.
amanda_lodden on Mar. 15, 2011 9:54 PM
Oh, thank you. I am *so* tired of friends saying "Japan is proof that nuclear is unsafe, because natural disasters happen." I've gotten tired of arguing with them.
So, kudos for being one of my sanest friends right now.
nojay on Mar. 16, 2011 12:20 AM
The one stupid and incredibly unsafe thing that was done was done almost fifty years ago and that was to site the Fukushima Daiichi and Daini plants on the south-east coast opposite a major undersea crustal boundary plate intersection. On the other hand fifty years ago humanity didn't understand plate tectonics and their links with earthquakes and tsunamis very well and so went ahead with the reactor complexes in Fukushima rather than, say, Niigata on the opposite side of the island.
After a few days the information coming from the news is tending to show that the earthquake didn't do the real damage, it was the tsunami that knocked out the secondary systems like the reactor coolant condensers, contaminated the fuel supplies for the backup generators and otherwise turned the faultless automatic shutdown of the reactors into a series of interlocking events that were forseen but could not be avoided with what was available on the site after the earthquake and the tsunami struck.
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