Environmental Disaster in Japan
It is hard describe just how badly the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 has affected the people of Japan. This double catastrophe has affected the people living in the coastal areas of the Tohoku region which is located in the northeastern coast of this country. The Japanese people have done everything possible to protect themselves from earthquakes and tsunamis by using technology to build structures that are resistant to the power of nature. However, nothing could prepare them for the assault of a wave that is now estimated to be more than 70 feet in height. It is projected that the death toll will top 18,000 people.
What makes this disaster even more chilling is that it has resulted in an environmental disaster that is still in the making. The physical damage to land and infrastructure that is caused by an earthquake and tsunami is usually cleared up in a couple of years because of the amount of aid that reaches a country where this has occurred. The Japanese government has to deal with another calamity in the making because of the presence of a crippled nuclear reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant that has been damaged by the earthquake and tsunami.
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in the Fukushima Prefecture has four nuclear reactors that are in danger of suffering a meltdown because the reactor cores are unable to get the water they need to cool down. The uranium fuel rods in the damaged reactor are heating up dangerously because there is no power to run the water pumps that cool them. Officials have tried to use sea water to cool it, and the US government has even had helicopters dumping sea water on it.
An explosion seems very likely and that will have dreadful results as everybody knows. People will die because of exposure to radiation, and it will be very difficult to contain the spread of air and steam carrying radioactive elements. Food and water will also be contaminated by it and the land around the reactor will be made useless for a very long time to come. Most recently the levels of contamination have shot up offshore of Japan. Radioactive iodine in the ocean surrounding the area of the reactors will, if it hasn’t already, damage fish supplies and marine life. The workers who are trying to fix the problem in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant have being exposed to highly dangerous levels of radiation. This environmental disaster from the earthquake and tsunami is particularly hard for the Japanese to process considering their history with nuclear power.
People in Japan and around the world are now questioning if nuclear power is really a viable source of alternative energy considering the safety aspect when things go wrong.
Brixey,Several questions,As has been dcusissed in other posts here as well as yourself, this is a beyond DBA event.So from my viewpoint there are two critical questions to be asked of the containment structure. Did it keep the public as safe as possible considering this was a beyond DBA event and secondly, will it continue to hold while mitigation work continues? In both cases my conclusion is that Fukushima 1 is not a failure. It can be vastly improved but it is not a failure.So my question is if you are stating that this is a failure of the containment since the reactor is now effectively destroyed? And as such that means this is a containment failure because the reactor cannot be restarted. That is how I am interpreting your comments. If I misunderstood please let me know.My second question concerns your comment about venting the drywell. I have not kept up on this question but were the operators in a position to vent post-tsunami? Post earthquake they were however post-earthquake the plants were not in a beyond DBA. But what about post-tsunami 45-50 minutes later? Would you fail a crew if they were faced with the same plant setup and post-tsunami crisis the operators had at Fukushima or can you point me to some root cause analysis that the crew did not follow proper protocol for their situation. It is my understanding that Fukushima cannot be compared to our facilities in the US as they did not update their plants to the same specifications as the NRC required years ago. If I am incorrect please let me know on this as well.My commentary goes to the idea of how the industry defines failure in a beyond DBA event. Containment failure in my viewpoint would be a complete breach of all barriers allowing fuel to migrate unimpeded into the open environment and/or a massive release of radiological material that makes the surrounding area uninhabitable. Neither of which has happened at Fukushima (the area can be cleaned up and people allowed to orderly go back home, it is a political decision not to right now).We know that components will be lost in a beyond DBA event and more than likely the plant will be unrecoverable. That is no different than a natural gas plant explosion or a coal explosion where the plants are effectively destroyed and need to be rebuilt.What I am concerned about is the problematic concept that a nuclear power plant must survive fully intact even in the event of a beyond DBA event which goes to the issue that nuclear power must be perfect to be used. I am not saying that the nuclear bar should be lowered to the level of natural gas or coal; in fact I am an advocate their bar should be raised closer to the nuclear design level. What I am saying is that if we in the industry define this as a failure then the public will then themselves define a future beyond DBA as a failure because the plant will not be recoverable and reusable. Reply