16 July, 2007

Nuclear Safety in Japan

The headline "NUKE PLANT LEAKS AFTER EARTHQUAKE"

Oh my!!!

I might be calling this one a bit early because the news is just coming out but I suspect that this will be much ado about nothing.

From what I have read so far there was almost a gallon of water and it was contained in the containment building. No release of fission products.

So there is a 6.8 magnitude quake that left 3 foot fissures and the nuke plant only had a small leak that was contained.

I would call this a success in engineering. If this had been a gasoline or heaven forbid a LNG storage facility the result would almost certainly be worse.

Update:

Oh this is priceless

"Aileen Mioko Smith, of the environmentalist group Green Action, said the fire showed that some facilities at nuclear power plants such as electrical transformers were built to lower quake-resistance levels than other equipment such as reactor cores."

Duh - You think they might want to give higher priority to the safety of the reactor core maybe?? Sheesh presenting ggod engineering as a problem.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Jim I had almost given up on you lately, I thought you must have been snowed under. It is Summer you know! Hope all is going well.

Some critic's are not happy with the use of Nuclear Power, any chance to bag the technology is a good chance in their mind's eye.

Do the same people give viable alternatives? Answer usually No.

I bet they are the ones with the combustable stove and the vehicles that burn more oil per mile than gasoline!

I bet they don't know that coal fired power stations typically leak more "radiaton" from burning the coal imputities than what leaks from the typical nuke plant!

I thought it sounded like a good feat that the reactor did not become breached. given the level of the quake. It was not a little one!

Some good engineering!