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TEPCO Doesn’t Get It
TEPCO, the Japanese regional power monopoly which managed to have its Daiichi nuclear plants ruined by an earthquake and tsunami, doesn’t get the political and social consequences of the catastrophe. It also seems to be slow to get a grip on the technical consequences and their remediation.That might all be somewhat understandable.
But what is not understandable is that it doesn’t even get its routine business.
The Daiichi plant number 5 was shut down in an normal automatic emergency “scram” when the earth quake hit. One of its emergency diesel generators survived the tsunami and cooling proceeded as planed. There was, if at all, only small damage to it.
But now we get this:
The seawater pump in the cooling system for the Fukushima power plant’s No. 5 reactor broke down Saturday evening, prompting repair crews to install a backup pump 15 hours later on Sunday afternoon, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said.
Tepco discovered the pump had stopped at 9 p.m. Saturday but didn’t announce it to the public until Sunday morning.
According to this chart the number 5 core, even though it was shut down six weeks ago, still produces some two megawatt of thermal decay heat. Without cooling the water surrounding the core will inevitably boil off and the core will melt which will likely lead to release of radioactive substances into the environment. Why, six weeks after the catastrophe, isn’t there a secondary cooling system for number 5?
By noon Sunday, the core had reached a temperature of 93.6 degrees
Why does it take fifteen hours to replace the seemingly only cooling pump that keeps the number 5 reactor from boiling off?
The Japanese government should immediately revoke the license for Tepco to run anything technical but a one liter tea water heater in its office. If it does not get the basics of operating an undamaged nuclear plant – safety through redundancy, defense in depth – how can it be trusted with running the emergency measures on the damaged reactors that still need to be done now?
Cautiously for nuclear power. Not dead set against it anyway.
That is understandable, almost all the energy I personally use, 95 + %, is from nuclear power, hydraulics, and wood. (Switzerland.) I do take the bus, Mercedes top class runs on diesel for 5 kms to then get on a tram or trolley – electric, again. Many ppl live and feel the same.
Switzerland’s recent semi moratorium and willingness to exit nuclear power will be reversed as soon as there are brown-outs. The ‘economic’ community is up in arms, nuclear power is cheap and steady, they don’t want to give it up.
The problem rests with alternatives. None are acceptable.
CH could augment its hydraulic power stations, plenty of water and mountains, but that would involve massive flooding of valleys where ppl live and work, they grow food. Never fly.
Renewables, so called, in the form of solar and wind, could be upped, but with a very low EROI, massive investment by the tax payer, with all the difficulties often quoted – grid and intermittence, cost and care for solar panels, plus this ain’t quite the Sahara, and of course these in themselves do damage to environment. Will never be more than far, far under 10%… (Spain is the good ex. to look at for what happens when massive state investment goes to renewables. At the same time as a mad housing bubble…)
Geothermal, very popular here for now, is very expensive and requires constant maintenance and electricity to function. Plus, the latest exploratory drilling caused earthquakes and therefore was scrapped. One news article:
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/Home/Archive/Geothermal_project_shakes_Basel_again.html?cid=46284
Importing coal and nat gas, which some pols are advocating, is a CO2 unfriendly solution, stupid, expensive, and exposes CH to greater energy dependence. (Energy dependence is 100% for oil, used mainly in transport but also for heating and in a few industrial processes.)
So besides green pie in the sky, there are no alternatives, or only desperate, foolish, ones. None suit, all are awful.
CH is not a special example, just one I know about. The conundrum can’t be solved. Nature is a bitch, the laws of physics can’t be cancelled, the state of the Earth can’t be changed by decree.
Posted by: Noirette | May 30 2011 16:15 utc | 10
TEPCO isn’t the only one b. I fear western civilization is plagued by many who still don’t.
Yes, it is true that nuclear power has dangers, and I am a strong advocate of robust safety measures.
Best Case
Don’t be confused by the smoke and mirrors: nuclear catastrophe is not simply the result of “Preventable Mistakes.” It wouldn’t matter if the Dalai Lama were the head of the NRC and the executives of Entergy Nuclear, Inc., were not millionaires who have lied on record, but rather the world’s most revered saints. The technology demands perfection, and humans are imperfect. Indian Point, Fitzpatrick, Nine-Mile Point, Vermont Yankee, Seabrook, Pilgrim, and 98 other nuclear power plants in the United States contain the possibility, every day, of becoming a Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or Fukushima Daiichi. Even worse, a nuclear plant could be the target of a terrorist attack. Yet, those are only the worst possibilities. The constant and certain one is what we know will unfold: Even if all operating nuclear power plants were shut down tomorrow, an intergenerational project the likes of which humanity has never attempted is just beginning, as our children, and their children and theirs, will struggle to guard each of these sites from leakage, terrorism, and weathering for thousands of years.
The notion of relative levels of risk seems not to figure much in these kinds of “discussion”
Nuclear technology is surely humanity’s most enduring legacy. What of our works will be present on this planet in 5,000 years, in 20,000 years? To think we can manage a lethal material for hundreds of human generations successfully without error defines insanity. There will be more Three Mile Islands, more Fukushimas, more accidents, more design flaws, more cover-ups, more acts of God. The genie is out of the bottle, we must live with it now. We have been signed up, against our will (polls show that nuclear energy has never been supported by more than 30 percent to 40 percent of citizens in any nation) for an impossible task. At best we will contain the radioactivity we’ve produced to as few areas as possible, we will close the reactors down immediately, and we will rapidly develop bioremediation techniques for sopping up, isolating, and sequestering radioactivity. Radiation, like heavy metals, cannot be diffused or broken down; it is elemental. We must deflect it, isolate it, bind it, and let it “cool” in sequestered locations, which only long spans of time can do. Humanity must now engage in a space-race-scale mission to preserve the functional capacity of human chromosomal and cellular activity in the face of an increasingly radioactive home planet.
ScuzzaMan, do you regard these reports as
just hysterical emoting and shrieking:
or perhaps just plain lies.
EPA Finds Japan Nuclear Radiation In Milk ABOVE EPA Limits And In Drinking Water In 13 US Cities
Hawaii Farmers Treating Milk With Boron After Finding Radiation 2400 Times Above Safe Levels
Aaarrgggh, turn it off! Turn it off!
Please forgive me, I guess I’m just irrational emoting. But then again Fukushima is still very rationally emitting and increasing the Northern Hemisphere’s atmospheric concentration of radioactive isotopes which none of us have any choice but to breathe and ingest.
When I was younger and much more gullible I bought fully into the Nuclear industry’s claims of safety and “energy too cheap to meter” but as experience and my powers of discernment developed I realized that I had been buying into propaganda and disinformation campaigns. Edward Bernays (the father of modern public relations and propaganda) and fine tuning by the tobacco industry, perfected the telling of lies to the unsuspecting public at the expense of their well being and for the profit of unconscionable corporate managers and investors. Public Relations and Propaganda have become the daily faire of corporations seeking profit by selling their dangerous and lethal products to the ill-informed and unsuspecting.
My hope ScuzzaMan, is that you are either uninformed or naively misinformed and not a shill or dupe for the psychopaths foisting the abomination of nuclear Armageddon on us in return for short term profit.
Posted by: juannie | May 30 2011 17:28 utc | 12
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