Operator overload & nuclear troubles at Fukushima 1

I'd actually written my last blog post on monday, thinking it was tuesday, and wednesday in Japan. Shows how much sleep I've been getting.

The quality of media coverage has improved significantly, but the scope of the cascading failures at the Fukushima nuclear plants has grown - with secondary damage from the explosions and over 500 aftershocks in Japan complicating matters.

The original links I pointed to in my first post have been updated and revised, with MIT's department of nuclear energy doing a better job of filtering through the events involved than any other media organization.

MIT has not addressed the questions raised about the Mark I containment facility that concern me the greatest. I daren't speculate.

Several other aspects of the news coverage and analysis bother me:

A) lack of understanding of the effects of all those aftershocks, and for that matter, coverage seems to be limited to talking about the first quake, even on wikipedia. It's obvious that these had effects, in part, making post-quake inspection difficult.

B) lack of understanding that these were some of the oldest and most obsolete plants in the world, not just Japan. I keep seeing calls for increased safety, or damning nuclear plants for their lack thereof, when these were generation II plants, kept running long beyond their initial design life, due, in part, to the difficulty in getting new plants built.

Generation III+ plants such as the AP1000 have, for example, entirely passive cooling systems, and have safety ratings 1000+ times better than the Gen II plants did. Furthermore they use their fuel more efficently with less waste. Nuclear energy is much more well understood now, nearly 50 years after these plants were designed.

C) The on-going storage of the fuel rods - due to being unable to find another place to store them - is likely the largest danger now, as it appears as though at least one storage pool was damaged in one of the quakes and explosions.

Everybody - on all sides of the nuclear debate - agrees that continued storage of the fuel rods at the facilities was dangerous - and most facilities were not designed with long term storage in mind.

Now, that after the fact, the "out of sight, out of mind" nature of the ongoing storage of fuel rods in ad-hoc facilities in the presence of such debate has been exposed - perhaps some rational decisions about what to do with the spent fuel will emerge.

I doubt the US will become rational on this point anytime soon. I suspect Japan will become so. I also think we'll see a surge of interest in solar power worldwide.

D) with less than 50 operators on duty, that translates out to 12 or less operators managing the 4 reactors in trouble - I imagine that some of the additional failures since monday were in part caused by exaustion and overload, and the inattention to other pre-emergencies due to these factors. It's unclear how many people are monitoring plants 5 & 6.

One of the big causes of both prior major nuclear accidents was operator overload. Too many things beeping, and buzzing and alarms going off, and too much complexity in the control systems.

Future plants - if they are ever built - should have a good offsite management and monitoring facility inconceivable to those in the pre-computer design era.

For all that, I do wonder that the world-wide reaction is overblown. I can't imagine, were I in charge - not sending in every available qualified volunteer and resource available.

For all the worry reported in the press, this (via wikipedia as of about 10AM Wed MDT), remains true:

“To date, the radiation leaks beyond the plant's boundaries have not reached a level high enough to constitute any significant detriment to public health. However, there is still significant risk that a leak at levels high enough to affect public health may occur.”

E) There have been more than a few hair brained schemes floated to cool the reactor pools - for example, cooling the overheating fuel pools by dumping water via helicopter. Dumping water by helicopter cannot be done gently, and would release a great deal of radiation to the crews dropping it.

There is a huge amount of mis-information on the web regarding the deaths of the pilots that flew over Chernobyl, I've been unable to determine the truth of matters.

I find myself tearing up at the dedication of those working to stop an even worse nightmare not just at Fukushima, but throughout the country and the world. I wish I could help.

I also remain in awe and admiration at an high-tech engineering culture and country that could go through a disaster this size, and have under 20,000 dead.

Labels: Fukushima, japan quake, nuclear energy

  ¶ 9:39 AM 0 comments

  bad wednesday for nukes in japan...

after my last blog entry, lots of bad, scary information came to light, 2 more reactors ended up with more problems than the first two.

Notably, the presence of spent fuel rods onsite and old flaws in the mark 1 containment system led to my greater concern, particularly after more hydrogen explosions damaged the surrounding area.

According to wikipedia, after a fire at reactor 4, hourly radiation reached 100 000 μSv. That's a big number. A scary, bad, number. But not a (rapidly) deadly number. Reactor unit 3 reached 400,000 μSv. Why people are reporting micro (10^-6)rather than milla (10^-3) bothers me,

Years ago, I wrote about the dangers of running nuclear plants past their design life. Now, with accident cascading into accident, the operators are tiring and making mistakes, and all seems grim in Japan to constrain meltdowns in several plants.

My heart goes out to those attempting repairs. Things may turn for the worse as it gets tougher to spend time at the site, safely.

Update: Wednesday 8AM MDT

I'd written this blog entry on monday, actually, thinking it was tuesday in the US and wednesday in Japan. Shows how much sleep I've been getting.

Labels: japan quake, nuclear energy

  ¶ 11:19 PM 0 comments

  Rad Decision

Tonight's online reading was Rad Decision, a novel about the events leading up to a nuclear accident in the US that didn't happen, but could have.

I found the the plot gripping, the situations utterly believable, the characters decent, the backstory quite plausible, and the denouement worth thinking about. Recomended.

I still think nuclear technology belongs in the mix of energy sources for the future.

I'm impressed with how far Nanosolar has come in the past few years, although I find it weird that they are concentrating on Germany rather than in places, like Central America and Mexico, that have boatloads of solar power.

I do appreciate the rush towards greener consumer technology, LED lighting in particular, seems to be getting better at a rapid rate. Earlier today I'd given up on getting any sheeva plugs this year, and went with an open-rd box, which promises about 1/3 the power consumption of a nearly equivalent PC. I also decided not to build out another quad core machine to replace my broken one.

Whether or not the open-rds could be used as a desktop and be as useful as an atom (the nearest competitor for the desktop) remains to be seen, but I intend to retire one of my computers in favor of it for use as the first iteration of Pocobelle 2, probably with added duties as a music server, and perhaps it - or the next Arm A9 based generation - will give intel a run for their money.

I read David Rowe's blog religeously. Here he talks about the power audit he did on his house and what he did to improve his negawatts. He also talks about what he did for his pool system to improve it, too.

I'm also big on geothermal power - I've been watching a Nicaraguan company, formerly known as Polaris Geothermal, now known as Ram Power complete a merger and obtain 150+ million in funding to bring up (at least) 70MW more geothermal power here. A terawatt is feasible, long term.

Nicaragua has enough geothermal energy in the ground to power 3 countries, if only they'd - or someone - would try, harder.

Through such slow, incremental change is the future made.

I'd had a really bad week last week. Nothing for me, personally, was really working, and I'd had some bad news about the Montavista merger that basically tore up some retirement plans entirely.

I took a cheap cab out halfway to Rivas, as I was too broke to get all the way to the frontier to renew my passport and return - and started walking south. I made it as far as the windmill project down that way, which has been under construction ever since I'd got here, with numerous hassles and delays.

The wind off the lake was blowing hard, and every last one of those enormous shiny white windmills was turning, and they'd finished running the power lines out - They were actually delivering power!

It was so beautiful that I sat down in front of the land, watched those windmills turn and turn, and cried. Maybe only another engineer can understand what it is like to struggle and fail and flail and fail again and then see something else that was actually working.

Shortly thereafter someone picked me up and took me to the border.

I made it home with 70 cordoba in my pocket, but my good friends at El Pozo let me run a tab, and all the friends I hadn't seen in a month showed up that night to visit.

So my life goes on, with a few moments like these to make it worthwhile to struggle on, and to keep trying. I keep saying to myself that the only way to win is to not play the game, but it's deeper than that, you need to invent new rules for the game. Better ones.

Labels: nuclear energy, pocobelle

  ¶ 5:15 PM 1 comments