[ExI] Two Japanese reactors on red alert.

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 11:42:54PM -0400, John Clark wrote:
> On Mar 15, 2011, at 5:12 PM, Keith Henson wrote:
> 
> > As it has turned out, shutting down reactors due to an earthquake was
> > almost certainly the wrong thing to do. Had they been left running, even if one had gone down, the rest could have provided station power. Of course, it's a bit iffy if they would have run at all with the
> > switch gear under water
> 
> To me the odd thing is that most of the radioactivity has not come from the damaged reactors themselves but from the dried up holding tank that stores 135 tons of highly radioactive used fuel rods near reactor #4. I don't understand why immediately after the quake, while it was still safe to do so, they didn't simply lay down a fire hose from the tank to 50 yards or so outside the reactor building, it would only take a few minutes for a skilled fireman and there was no radiation then. Fire hoses are cheap and it would seem to be a prudent precaution, as you already knew there would be problems keeping the regular pumps going. An average fire truck can pump 1500 gallons of water a minute and fill the 195,000 gallon holding tank in just a little over 2 hours even if it was bone dry. 

I'm sorry John, the reactor operator crew did not have
you on the side at the moment. Would you kindly clone yourself
so that there's a copy of you 24/7/365 on every site, so that
such can be reliably prevented in future? And I hope you do
think of everything else that could go wrong, right? 

Oh, yes, and we can't pay you. Of course.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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