Cluster Fukushima (Engineering Screwups)

The Tsunami in the ocean was only a little over four meters in height. Just like a wave that washes up on the sandy sea shore, the run up on the beach usually far exceeds the swell height. There was an estimated run up on Fukushima that exceeded forty feet.

What is amazing about this is that Japanese history has numerous accounts of run ups well in excess of 40 feet from tsunamis. It all depends upon where in the ocean the tsunami originated. The fact that the engineers did not prepare for a forty (or more) foot wave is indicative of structural engineers not understanding what a swell in the ocean can do when it "runs up on land." Some thing was seriously wrong with that site engineering.

Compound that with the fact that the Emergency Diesel Generators were placed in low spots in the turbine buildings for each reactor, and you know that somebody was seriously lacking in gray matter when it comes to site engineering.

The Emergency Diesel Generators are there in case of a scram of the reactor. A scram, the insertion of the Boron Rods to shut down the nuclear reaction is automatically programed into the computers that operate the reactor in a case of an earthquake. One of the considerations for the scram is the fact that the electrical generating Turbine Generator (what the Nuclear Reactor plant is there for in the first place) needs to be protected from having the turbine blades destroyed as the turbine is shaking up and down while steam is still entering the blades. That can cause severe damage to the turbine, so the main steam piping has a shutdown valve in it that stops the steam from reaching the turbine and diverts the steam directly to the condenser under the turbine. Flowing through the pipes of the condenser is sea water that carries the sudden surge of heat to the ocean.

Because the reactor is not needed to heat up the ocean there is a rapid insertion of the Boron Rods and the Reactor starts its slow shut down phase. Something in excess of 94% of the heat from the fissioning of enriched Uranium is quickly stopped because the boron has a great affinity for grabbing neutrons and stopping the nuclear fissioning reaction. That drop in power is tremendous when you consider the heat generated at full power down to five or six percent that gradually slows down over days. Still that excess heat has to be carried to the condenser or it can start doing damage to the Reactor Fuel Rods (which are not the Boron Rods - Two different things entirely.)

You need pumps to pump the sea water through the condenser and you need pumps to pump the condensed steam (condensate) that was dumped to the condenser back to the reactor where it can be heated up and turned into steam to be dumped into the condenser to continue the cycle of heating the ocean.

Unfortunately, at Fukushima their Emergency Generator electricity was shut off about a half hour after the Earthquake stopped shaking when a 40 foot wave swamped the Turbine buildings and shorted out the condensate pumps, the sea water pumps and all of the instrumentation for the reactors.

Instrumentation? Yep, those same engineers who screwed up the site layout with the diesel generators down where they could be douched by the ocean also ran all of their local power and instrumentation cables underground where they were standing in feet of ocean water thirty to forty years after they were installed. They do not work too well when the insulation is brittle and the sea water shorts them out. Amazing stupidity! Absolutely amazing.

Well, with no pumps to remove the heat that the Uranium Fuel rods were generating, they started to melt down. (There is mention of battery backup, but after a short while it was useless). My guess is that the Uranium Rods in Reactors One, Two and Three were well melted by March 12th, the day after the tsunami. They might be 100 percent melted or only 90 percent, but the fact of the matter is that they are melted.

The only issue after that is the simple fact that the melted Uranium and Zirconium cladding of the fuel rods pools down at the bottom of the reactor and has the capacity to eat its way through the bottom of the metal (usually nickle-iron alloy - Inconel) Reactor vessel. When it does this, they give it a name - Corium.

Corium (with a slightly different composition) was flowing everywhere at Chernobyl and it would only stand to reason that it was flowing in Fukushima. Just like at Chernobyl, it probably melted a lot of metal wherever it pooled. Over the course of the next few days after March 12th, Reactor Two and Reactor Three lost pressure. That means holes somehow opened in the reactor or the reactor piping. A good guess would be that the corium had something to do with this.

Numerous posters to the physics forums around the internet have been talking about a nuclear explosion at Reactor Three three days after the earthquake. I am not convinced that is right for the simple fact that the radioactive particulate measured in proximity to Reactor Three is not as high as that around Reactor Two.

Reactor Three had a Big "dirty" explosion while there were lesser explosions in Reactor One and Four (even though there was no fuel in Reactor Four's Vessel)

The explosions in Reactor One and Four were clearly Hydrogen Gas explosions, but the explosion in Three was something else. I think (theory only) that the Corium (Ten Tons of it or more at 2000 degrees Fahrenheit.) ate and fell through the bottom of the reactor vessel into a massive pool of water in the concrete containment structure that is built around the reactor. That sudden flashing to steam was the source of the explosion. That steam carried some of the Uranium and Plutonium and other radioactive materials from the fission of the fuel rods into the atmosphere, but not contaminate the area around Reactor Three as heavily as an actual nuclear explosion of the stored fuel rods at Reactor three.

What do you think? The only way that could have been a nuclear explosion was if the Japanese were not telling us the truth about their radiation surveys of the Reactor sites. Again, the site contamination was not indicative of a nuclear explosion but was indicative of ruptured fuel rods and contaminated water and particulate from contact with Corium.

Everything is getting royally screwed up. Weeks ago they were reporting that they were pumping sea water into the reactors. At that time I questioned that report. To pump sea water into a reactor with a melting core without massive additions of boron could result in criticality. Boron is usually in the control rods because it scarfs up neutrons and makes it difficult to sustain a reaction in the uranium. When the core melts it is assumed that the boron control rods melt also. the only problem with that is that Boron dissolves in the hot water of the reactor and forms boric acid. If they were flushing the reactor with sea water they were effectively flushing the boron from the reactor. When I posted on the various physics and science boards of my fear I was told that the Japanese would not be that stupid.

Guess what?

And then they wondered why there was a BLUE GLOW over the reactor site?! Amazing!

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Again, I post the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Why are there so many people who can not accept the truth?

It does amaze me how often we find generators and pumps put where they are vulnerable to flood conditions. Low ground, pits, why not protected elevated platforms or rooftops?

Putting those Emergency Diesel Generators where they could be flooded by a fifteen foot wave was total insanity. They should have had an emergency Generator building on the hill behind the site. While they were at it, they could have built a buss tie electrical distribution system to provide power to any pump from any of the generators. Instead they had generators at each plant without the capacity to cross connect in the case of the failure of one.

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Again, I post the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Why are there so many people who can not accept the truth?

Radiation forecasts in Japan kept secret to avoid “panic in the whole of society” « Energy News

The accident response headquarters, formed jointly by the government and the plant’s operator Tokyo Electric Power Co, said Monday that roughly 5,000 estimates of how radioactive substances would disperse had been made since the beginning of the Japanese Clusterflux but they had not been made public, Kyodo said. The secrecy was to avoid “panic in the whole of society,” lawmaker Goshi Hosono, head of the secretariat of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, was quoted by Kyodo as saying.


* Official: Japanese gov’t withheld radiation forecasts to prevent causing panic (VIDEO)
* Fukushima forecast shows Cesium-137 and Iodine-131 over Northwestern US on May 5 (VIDEOS)
* Public authorities avoiding details that may trigger alarm or panic — “They don’t want to go there” says former advisor to US secretary of energy
* Japan report: “Nuclear fuel has melted in three reactors” — Risk of “massive radioactive release”

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Again, I post the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Why are there so many people who can not accept the truth?

Not only did the Japanese have all of their electrical circuits that were crucial to the emergency operation of the Nuclear Plant located in places where they could be douched by the ocean, but their motor controller boxes ended up being under water as well. Their pumps' electrical housings were not waterproof. As previously stated, TOTAL INSANITY. No electrical engineer in his right mind would have designed such a system! And to think this was for an electrical power company. UNBELIEVABLE.

The explosions of Hydrogen Gas never should have happened. They had those tall smokestacks to vent the steam and gasses from the reactor in case of an emergency. They were specifically built to vent at altitude so the winds which are usually from the west could blow the radioactive steam out to sea. But guess what? Yep, they screwed that up, too. They installed a shutoff valve in base of the smoke stacks that stayed in a permanent shut position unless an electrical current was passed through it to open it. That is right, it stays shut unless you have power to it. Some electrical genius designed this system for an EMERGENCY that could only be caused by a loss of electricity.

So, when they had to vent the reactors, they could not vent in safety to the higher altitude because the valve was shut. So, the radioactive steam and the radioactive gases ended up escaping inside the Reactor building. When enough Hydrogen built up in the reactor building, two of them blew up. One building had holes punched through its sides and top so the Hydrogen would vent that way, and the third building (Reactor Three) exploded as if it was a Hydrogen Bomb.

The IAEC should tell the Japanese to stop operating their nuclear plants as it is too risky to allow them to do so.

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Again, I post the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Why are there so many people who can not accept the truth?

It's reasoning like this, or the lack of it, that undermines confidence in what we are being force fed about the advantages of Nuclear Power. Loose ends, misinformation, control over the media. Shutting down Monitoring so there is no record of the details, (at least public record). Really convenient for the masters to spin illusion. The price Trust and Credibility. I had thought things had gotten better. I am starting to feel that this is not the case.

Indeed!

Take a look at the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant in San Diego County California. Some of their Emergency Diesel Generators are out in the open. I saw that on the news the other night and was flabbergasted.

I did a little bit more careful looking and am absolutely convinced that San Onofre needs to be shut down as of yesterday.

They have a "supposedly" 30 foot sea wall, which in some places is only cinder block thick. I see electrical control boxes out in the open. I do not know what is in them, but that leaves me very insecure about their site construction. Did they have Japanese engineers design their site?

A strong low pressure area coinciding with a High high tide (Yep, that is a valid expression.) could put San Onofre at risk of being douched by a two meter tsunami. The run up of a Tsunami is the issue, not the height of the swell out at sea. The tsunami at Fukushima was just over four meters, but the run up was in excess of forty feet.

What could cause a two meter tsunami? An underwater landslide could do that at any time. I point things out to people who think things are safe in Southern California. Use Google Earth to look at the East side of San Clemente Island off of the coast of San Diego.
There is a Large Fault line that has not been extensively explored because it is underwater just east of San Clemente running parallel to the eastern shore of the island. It is obvious that there is potential for a landslide down that steep slope. You can easily get a three meter tsunami from that site and ironically, it is pointed directly at San Onofre.

Nobody seems concerned. Our fantastic American engineers have designed OUR Nuclear Power plants for almost everything except the unexpected.

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Again, I post the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Why are there so many people who can not accept the truth?

The Trojan Plant had serious flood issues when St. Helen,s blew and the Columbia River flooded. Diablo Canyon, which I have a personal history with, is elevated, but still on the Oceanfront, and on a fault line.

Japan is finally admitting what I said had happened at the three on line reactors on March Eleventh, Twelfth and Thirteenth. They melted down and Corium ate its way through the bottom of the reactor vessels and possibly through the cement containment structure. The Corium is either in the Ground under the Reactor building or very close to entering the ground.

Radioactive pollution is abundant, but most of it is ending up in the Pacific Ocean.

We are getting radioactive particulate in the United States. I say it is cause for concern. The EPA says not to worry.

I'm 63 so am not too worried. Younger people should be worried.

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Again, I post the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Why are there so many people who can not accept the truth?

The EPA (who is worried about plastic bottles) raised the safe limits for radiation by 25,000 times, so I'm not worried.

Besides, I've got more important things to worry about: The NBA Playoffs!

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"If you let your Government act like criminals abroad, then they will act like criminals at home."

it gets better

f*koshima's reactor is a GE design that was not only protested by engineers there, the colition of concerned scientists chimed in as well

and there's something like 2 dz of them in the usa, subject to the same ills in oversight

but most wouldn't think of bringing good things to life in such deadly context....

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I was so depressed last night thinking about the economy, wars, jobs, my savings, Social Security, retirement funds, etc., I called the Suicide Hotline. I got a call center in Pakistan , and when I told them I was suicidal, they got all excited, and asked if I could drive a truck...