Explosion At Japanese Nuclear Power Plant
UPDATE: There are definitely two, and possibly three reactors that have lost cooling. They are pumping in sea water and boron to cool these suckers, but the pressure keeps building.
The BBC reports a Huge blast at Japan nuclear power plant
A huge explosion has rocked a Japanese nuclear power plant damaged by Friday’s devastating earthquake.
A pall of smoke was seen coming from the plant at Fukushima. Four workers were injured.
Japanese officials say the container housing the reactor was not damaged and that radiation levels have now fallen.
A huge relief operation is under way after the 8.9-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami, which are thought to have killed at least 1,000 people.
…Television pictures showed a massive blast at one of the buildings of the Fukushima-Daiichi plant, about 250km (160 miles) north-east of Tokyo.
A huge cloud of smoke billowed out and large bits of debris were flung far from the building.
The Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco), the plant’s operator, said four workers had been injured.
The Japanese government’s chief spokesman, Yukio Edano, said the concrete building housing the plant’s number one reactor had collapsed but the metal reactor container inside was not damaged.
He said radiation levels around the plant had fallen after the explosion.
Officials ordered the evacuation zone around the plant expanded from a 10km radius to 20km. BBC correspondent Nick Ravenscroft said police stopped him 60km from the Fukushima-Daiichi plant.
Plans are being made to distribute iodine, which can be used to combat radiation sickness, to residents of the evacuation zone.
I have heard all of the “experts” talking about the massive experience the Japanese have, and the technological abilities of their science community, and comparing it to the video and pictures of this sucker exploding because their fail-safe systems failed.
It was probably a hydrogen explosion caused by the water in the building breaking down at extremely high temperatures. What is a fact is that the containment building for that reactor isn’t containing anything any more and the reduction in radiation was caused by it shooting into the atmosphere.
This will only get worse.
3 comments
Yes, the Japanese have massive experience — in mismanaging their nuclear reactors. A small but significant number of Japanese workers have died over the past three decades because of the way their reactor program has been mismanaged, and TEPCO (the utility in question) has in particular a long and sordid history of mismanagement including submitting fraudulent inspection data to the Japanese government and covering up previous nuclear accidents. Unfortunately the problem is one of Japanese culture that doesn’t get mentioned often — in Japan, if a boss is drunk and incompetent, said boss will remain in power pretty much forever, because firing him would be an admission that you made a mistake hiring him and thus bring shame upon you. And there’s far too many of these roadblocks to competence scattered in halls of TEPCO…
– Badtux the Glow-in-the-dark Penguin
When people talk about the Japanese nuclear industry I immediately think of the Tokaimura Criticality Accident. They had Moe-san, Curley-san, and Larry-san making highly enriched nuclear fuel in buckets. They were stainless steel buckets, but buckets none the less.
They used the precision equipment one normally finds in a broom closet to mix together enough uranyl nitrate solution to create the wonderful blue glow of the Cerenkov radiation.
They had all of the expensive and complicated, fail-safe, robotic, computer-monitored equipment to do the job safely, but the people who know how to use that stuff want to be paid a decent salary, which is not in the best interests of the corporation.
That was pretty much the first thing I thought of too, Bryan. But it wasn’t really penny-pinching that caused the Tokaimura Criticality Accidnet, but, rather, incompetence and featherbedding. It’s the flip side of the American system of at-will employment where you can be fired at any reason… in Japan, it’s almost impossible to be fired even if you are utterly incompetent and drunk all the time. Most of the companies I’ve worked for have had layoffs due to a drop in sales from time to time, and we always used that to dump the low achievers — people who just weren’t very productive. (And I was always the last to be laid off as the company shut down, which says something there, I think 🙂 ). That just doesn’t happen in Japan. If a Japanese company is particularly well managed, Moe-san, Curley-san, and Larry-san’s manager will end up promoted to a job where he manages the managers that manage the janitors or something like that, where he can’t do any harm. If not… well, they end up glowing in the dark 🙁 .