Major Earthquake Hits Japan

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[Colonel Sun]

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[Endovelico]

[Colonel Sun]

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[Colonel Sun]

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[Mr. Perfect]

I admit to being "perplexed" by Endo's "passion", my only explanation is that there is something about being Marxist that makes one congenitally recoil at nuclear energy. As much as I have studied the Marxist mind I cannot explain this one.

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[Colonel Sun]

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Armchair experts with their 20/20 hindsight would do well to note how extraordinarily well these Mark I containment structures (designed in the '60's) performed after being hit with a MILLENNIAL disaster.

After witnessing just how well they did under conditions not even before imagined, I'm more bullish on Western-style nuclear power than ever.

[Mr. Perfect]

Amen.

[Ammianus]

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[Mr. Perfect]

A lot of people like him are liable to fall victim to such a disaster, if it ever occured.

[Endovelico]

[Sparky]

Events at the quake- and tsunami-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear powerplant in Japan went well at the weekend, with two reactors there successfully brought into cold shutdown under off-site power, power lines hooked up to other cores being cooled using seawater and some progress in refilling spent-fuel storage pools. Initial food sampling from the region around indicates that no significant quantities of hazardous radioisotopes have escaped from the plant.

World Nuclear News reports that reactors 5 and 6, which were hooked up to a new power line from off site on Friday, were then able to restart their cooling systems and bring their cores to "cold shutdown", where the core coolant is at less than 100°C. Spent-fuel cooling ponds at these units are also being chilled effectively and brought to normal status.

Elsewhere at the plant, operators reported that offsite power was now also available at reactors 1 and 2, bringing various instruments and readings back online. As of Sunday, plant owner TEPCO hoped that main cooling would also be brought back at these units as it survived the quake in functional condition and was only lost when backup diesel generators were destroyed in the following tsunami. TEPCO expects to restore power at units 3 and 4 within days.

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The situation at the Fukushima Daiichi plant appears to be moving into its closing stages. Barring an unexpected change in circumstances there, the problems will soon be firmly under control without any worker at the site having sustained measurable health consequences from radiation - a testament to the steely professionalism with which they have managed the incident. The Fukushima Daiichi and Daini plants (the two hardest hit, with one worker who was in a crane cab as the quake hit being killed and two others missing since the tsunami struck) seem to have been very, very safe places to be compared to just about anywhere else in the stricken region.

Public health consequences also look to be nil based on reports thus far, apart from possible psychological problems from needless stress and panic.

The reactors involved are a 40-year-old design and much less safe than modern ones. They were hit by an earthquake five times as strong as they were built to take, followed by a tsunami wave now assessed as having being more than 12 metres high - twice the height their defences were specified to withstand. It now appears that despite all this they have not and will not harm a hair on anyone's head radiologically. Even everyday physical-trauma casualties have been very low compared to those seen elsewhere in the disaster zone.

Consider that if you simply work in an office or do something else generally considered very safe, there still exists a tiny chance of fatal disaster. Your office might be hit by a meteorite or a crashing plane or a runaway truck. A factory nearby might burn down or blow up, releasing dangerous pollution, and you might get ill or die. There might, as we see in Japan, be a terrible earthquake and tsunami.

You in your office might also cause harm or risk to others, for instance by filing misleading news stories and causing needless panic and stress, or by directing the operations of a normal not-very-safe industry or sector of activity which could present dangers to people in the event of a disaster striking - housing, transport, financial services etc.

If instead of working in your office you went out and spent your time operating a nuclear powerplant, we now see that the chance of any harm resulting to you or anyone else would be almost nil no matter what happened.

Operating nuclear power stations is not just very safe, or safer than other methods of generating power. It has to be one of the safest forms of activity undertaken by the human race. ®

[Endovelico]

Let's suppose one of you would have drunk a bit more than he should, got into the car to drive home, nearly have an accident but nothing happened in the end, and finally arrive safely home. Conclusion: since there was no harm to anyone, it is all right to drink and drive...

We may have been lucky this time at Fukushima, but some things should not have happened. The reserve generators should not have been within reach of a major tsunami, and alternative power sources should have been readily pluggable. None of which was beyond present engineering capabilities nor would have significantly increased the building costs. Easy to know with hindsight? Sure. But we pay engineers and planners to foresee all possibilities.

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[Colonel Sun]