INES level is up to 6 from 4 now according to French ASN. Chernobyl was 7. The situation is different in that Fukushima 1 (Daiichi) is not graphite moderated so there can be no graphite fire but a steam explosion isn't so bad either. All 6 blocks in varying degrees trouble now, at least 200 tons of "spent"fuel rods in cooling basins outside the containments, a broken containment in block 2, radiation levels too high in the control room etc... One expert named Mycle Schneider was quoted saying all being done now was "palliative". Oh, and two block cooling failures in Fukushima 2 (Daini) yet to evolve. Tokai and Onagawa look safe so far. Speaking of safe, French Sarkozy just announced there will be no stop to French nuclear plans as French reactors are (quote) ten times safer than those in Japan. Same from a number of other countries or to a similar vein. Fukushima Daiichi was built using a 60s GE design and hasn't been upgraded much since. So much for lessons learned from Chernobyl. Not even the Wallmann valves were redundant apparently. And Tepco was involved in a number of cover up scandals including forged maintenance docs.
It scares the living daylights out of me to think that noone seems to learn a thing from this. No matter how safe you make a nuke plant, you can never reach 100% and any failure of this order of magnitude will have similar effects. And it will happen again. Probably still in my lifetime. 2011/3/15 Boris Liberman <[email protected]>: > On 3/15/2011 1:28 PM, Larry Colen wrote: >> >> A friend of mine who is a Nuclear Physicist, and lives in Los Alamos, >> read and vetted the original post in this series, which has been >> moved to the MIT Nuclear Science and Engineering website: >> >> http://mitnse.com/ > > Thanks, Larry. Bookmarked. > > Boris > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and > follow the directions. > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
