Someone Needs To Lead
From the ABC: Japan eyes water cannon to cool troubled reactor
Japan has asked its national police agency to send a water cannon to the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant after the military was forced to abandon an attempt to drop water from helicopters due to radiation fears.
The request comes as Japanese Emperor Akihito made a rare TV appearance saying he is “deeply concerned” about the unfolding nuclear crisis in his country and is praying for the safety of survivors of last week’s devastating earthquake and tsunami.
Broadcaster NHK says the National Police Agency has been asked to send a water cannon to cool a pool storing spent fuel rods at the troubled No. 4 reactor.
Workers at the plant have struggled to top up water levels as the rods have heated up the water, threatening to evaporate it and expose the rods to air, sending out radioactive material.
Earlier, Japan’s military abandoned a mission to use a helicopter to drop water into the overheating No.3 reactor because of radiation fears.
The majority of the radiation and hydrogen are coming from the open spent fuel rod pools, not from the reactors themselves. While dealing with the reactors, no one was watching the spent fuel rod storage and it started boiling off water and producing the hydrogen that has been causing the explosions and fires.
They have all of these “nuclear technicians” running around, and none of them seems to be able to see what is going on, or what is needed to stop it. Almost every volunteer fire department in the US has a ladder truck that can do what needs to be done. If you throw in a few wildfire aircraft and fill their tanks with a chilled boric acid – water solution, they would be a lot of help.
Don’t they have any emergency operations people in Japan? [I will ignore for the moment that the Japanese police have the water cannons, not the fire departments.]
2 comments
Not to mention that this power plant is by the ocean, and pretty much every tugboat on the planet has a powerful water cannon for dealing with fires. There’s so many resources that could be used that aren’t being used that it’s almost ridiculous. There is no — ZERO — reason why a light water reactor should *ever* catch on fire. I mean, it’s that whole “water” thing, the fuel rods are supposed to be immersed in water so they can’t catch on fire, unlike a graphite-moderated reactor like Chernobyl! You have to *work* to make a light water reactor catch on fire, especially one that is by the ocean with basically an infinite supply of water! Sadly, Larry-san, Curly-san, and Moe-san seem to be working hard to do what every expert thought was impossible — make a light water reactor emulate Chernobyl by catching on fire. Which is scary, because that’s the only thing that’ll make radioactivity spread beyond a small area around the site, the steam is mostly light particles that “cook off” quickly and dissipate, but you get heavy metals burning and spewing their heavy isotopes into the atmosphere…. yeow!
Read the BBC article I just posted. They explain the situation very clearly, and the danger. The spent fuel pool in reactor 4 doesn’t have spent fuel in it, it has the contents of the reactor that were pulled for maintenance. If that pool is dry, they really can have a “criticality”. I have no confidence in TEPCO to do what is necessary to stop this event.