Jet streams could carry radioactivity from Japan to the US

The Diablo Canyon plant starts at about +80, but that's natural.

John

I didn't know there was anyplace in Florida that was at that high of an elevation.

Thanks, Rich

Google Earth shows the plant at +2 feet. Tsunamis are unlikely there, but hurricanes aren't.

John

Mt Garbage (well, that's what I call their dump - I don't know what they call it, or if they just pretend it's not there) near Miami is much higher than that. I assume it's the highest (albeit somewhat variable) point in South Florida.

Standard procedure is to shut down the reactor in the event of a quake.

Unfortunately, natural disasters often cause that.

Hindsight is 20:20. I don't think anyone was expecting all of the backup generators to fail.

No amount of redundancy helps against events which affect all instances equally. Incorrect assumptions of independence have been at the root of a great many incidents which had been considered "can't happen" (due to the level of redundancy) until all of the redundant instances failed simultaneously for the same reason.

I grew up in New Orleans. The highest I'd ever been up through high school, excepting the Hibernia Bank building and the river levee, was Monkey Hill in the park, +12 feet.

In geography class, they taught us about rocks, sedimentary and igneous and metamorphic. Nobody believed them: the world was made of mud, and rocks come down the river in barges from rock factories.

John

They brought some in after the on-site generators failed, but they "had the wrong connectors". At least, that's the media's version, which seems a bit unlikely; how long does it take to change a connector? It seems more likely that they have specific constraints (900V @ 400Hz, 5-phase or whatever) which mobile generators can't provide.

Could be. Its not like it would have hurt in the design specs to have called for STANDARD voltages and connectors... ;-)

Charlie

Space Mountain.

Is that plant near open water? The Crystal River plant is next to the Gulf of Mexico. The waste head warms the water in teh Gulf, and Dolphins live in it, year round.

Sugarloaf Mountain is the highest point in Florida.

Part of Japan is 50 Hz, the other is 60 Hz.

They make them at the prison - they have the convicts glue grains of sand together. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

On a sunny day (Sat, 19 Mar 2011 00:05:23 -0700) it happened Rich Grise wrote in :

I grew up in the city of Amsterdam. One day we went by train to granny, and passing through the country I did notice those big animals with white and black spots. Cows.

I was also surprised that they could not bring in some portable diesel generators, enough fuel to run them and patch them into the plants switchgear at some level. It must have been a priority from early on.

Given that they had fire tenders involved in crucial pumping operations running out of fuel there too there must be some additional logistical complications that are not being reported. No single generator was up to the job and no way to synchronise them perhaps?

I got the impression from something broadcast on the BBC that as well as flooding the generators and some electronic control gear the tsunami also washed away the external bulk kerosene storage tanks. Not having them bunded or generators behind watertight doors was clearly a mistake.

But that usually means that their kit is very catholic in what voltage and frequency inputs it will tolerate and still work OK.

Doubtless it will become clear in due course what problems they encountered and why a lashed up power supply was not possible.

Regards, Martin Brown

From the Amsterdam Rotterdam motorway, you can see a lot of those animals and suddenly there is a small ship going between these animals:-). There are no clues that there might be any channels or other waterways in that area, so it is quite surprising to see a boat in the middle of the field. Hopefully the tsunamis stay away from these places.

Though to be fair to the plant operators in this instance it was the largest quake since the industrial era began and it scored an almost direct hit on these reactors. Not too surprising the turbines shutdown on vibration monitoring - shame there wasn't a small sacrificial turbine to maintain critical circuits when under duress in the aftermath of a SCRAM. Once they ran out of batteries they were stuck.

Modern designs are meant to have intrinsic safety systems based on convection emergency cooling and not relying on pumps.

I don't know about that. Scientists and engineers status in Japan is higher than in the West and penny pinching beancounters & MBAs lower.

The deference works both ways. The good CEOs know when they need expert advice and rather disconcertingly come to your office (not too bad for a Westerner but possibly quite disconcerting for a Japanese worker).

I would be far more worried about the naked maximise profit now and let the future go hang attitude prevalent in US style energy companies of which Enron was the prime exponent.

The radiation from impurities in coal are real enough. Uranium is a lot more common than most people imagine there is 2ppm in almost everything and slightly more in most igneous rocks. Mineable uranium ore is rare.

They are a bit too close together for comfort, with the benefit of hindsight.

But I'd have thought that once a site is researched and has obtained planning permission putting more than one in place makes best use of infrastructure and expertise. In the UK getting planning permission for a new nuclear site runs into tremendous NIMBY opposition. As a result all new build will be on existing nuclear sites (if they go ahead).

And the high level waste repository will by built under an existing remote site with entirely unsuitable geology because the correct site is under land in the prosperous south where the rich and powerful live.

Regards, Martin Brown

I would expect logistics problems on a power plant high in the mountains at the end of a single narrow road :-).

However, these problematic power plants are at the coast (and hence tsunami damage), so it should not be too difficult to receive supplies by ships.

Where I grew up in New Orleans, near the river, we could look UP at ships on the Mississippi.

The first time I took a plane, it was for a trip to Bell Labs that I won in a science fair. They put us (me and my science teacher) up in the Algonquin Hotel in NYC for the weekend, then bussed us to Murray Hill in New Jersey. I remember looking out the bus window and thinking, "who put all those rocks there?"

I saw one of the first LEDs in the world, had lectures on information theory, and had lunch with Walter Brattain. Cool stuff for a poor kid from nowhere.

John