TEPCO Readies Plan To Bring Reactor Under Control 116
Kyusaku Natsume writes "TEPCO has released details of their plan to bring Unit 1 of Fukushima Daiichi under control, to improve the working conditions inside the reactor building of this unit and install a new cooling system. From the success of this operation maybe we will know how they will address the emergency in the remaining damaged nuclear reactors."
Meanwhile, three TVA nuclear sites survived (Score:2, Interesting)
A disaster just fine. Only one of them had anything resembling an issue, and that was the transmission lines going down, which mean the reactor had to shut down.
Nothing major in danger there.
Yet there's little in the way of coverage out there.
At least the people are getting some attention.
Re:Reasonable first steps (Score:5, Interesting)
Humans are not entering the "containment". They are entering the reactor building. Reactor building was damaged - especially the top floods. It was not damaged at the bottom, where the cooling equipment is.
Reactor 1 is being tried first because the building as the least amount of radiation. The robot that went in measured about 40-50mSv/h. This is reasonably low and can be brought down further.
The reactors are not in cold shutdown because there is no water cooling. They *could* achieve cold shutdown quickly by water in faster, but it would not help the situation. They need to repair the recirculation pumps and find the leaks and plug them. They also need to find out if there is any hydrogen in the reactor vessels and to deal with that. These 2 reasons is why cold shutdown mode is very BAD right now - they had to slow down water pumping to prevent pressure from dropping as that could cause air to be sucked into the reactor and hydrogen could burn (explode), if there is any hydrogen there.
Don't second guess them now. They are doing things very carefully.
TEPCO failed at not having prepared for the scenario when the plant suffers complete blackout, including all backups being flooded. That's all. Had they had prepared for this scenario, this would not have happened. Period. Now they are dealing with consequences and I'm certain that plans will now be in place that no nuclear reactor will melt even if they lose all cooling - ie. external emergency cooling will be setup before coping batteries die.
Re:Just Unit 1? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Reasonable first steps (Score:4, Interesting)
Can we get some objectivity please? TEPCO are far from blameless but equally a bunch of links to blogs, forums and YouTube videos are not all that convincing either. Expendable workers? This isn't China.
The flaws that led to this disaster are not limited to TEPCO or Fukushima Daiichi. The tsunami defences which failed were based on government projections of the most severe waves that would ever be encountered, and they were inadequate. TEPCO built them to what was considered a safe standard, but the the best experts on earthquakes and tsunami in the world got it wrong.
If you didn't notice these flawed assumptions also resulted in 25,000 people being killed. TEPCO made mistakes, some of them should have been preventable and some of them I think it is fair to say were due to people having to react to a difficult situation with incomplete information under a great deal of pressure.