Originally Posted By: GMFan
Originally Posted By: Mystic
This is exactly the sort of thing I have been talking about but nobody seems to listen. Why put electric generating plants in locations where they will be flooded? It goes against common sense. The Japanese disaster would have been far least severe if they would have been able to keep pumps working so that they could keep the reactors cool. But they wanted for the diesel electric generators to be near the dock so that they could easily unload fuel. That makes sense from an efficiency standpoint. But in the case of a nuclear power plant located in an earthquake zone it does not make sense.
I cannot understand why nobody seems to be willing to listen. Were there nearby hills? Put the nuclear facility and the backup generators on high enough ground so that it would be very unlikely that they could be affected by a tsunami. Is it really that difficult to understand? Now with the powerful earthquake maybe the reactors still would have been damaged. But if the backup generators would have worked the pumps could have supplied cooling water to the reactor cores. It simply can't be that difficult to understand.
But I guess it is and I give up.
Nuclear plants are located near water as they pump water from a river/ocean to flow through the pipes to cool the reactor and also the water is used to boil into steam, drive the steam turbine before it is condensed and released back into the river. However there is no transfer of radiation as it is a sealed operation. Typically they "recycle" the water many times as after the steam is condensed after passing through the turbine it is still hot so they send it back through the reactor to be reboiled.
The last ditch effort of pumping sea water directly onto the exposed reactor is a last resort and at the point of Fukishima the reactor was already melted down.
The flooding of diesel engine generators like Fukishima could be avoided by placing them above grade or locate them at a higher elevation however they typically need to be close to the plant and nuclear plants need to be next to a water source. Also, even if you located the generators a mile away the generator power sources still feed the same electrical equipment within the plant through transfer switches or switching breakers. Even if the generators are not damaged there is still a major risk to the electrical equipment, pumps, ruptured pipes etc. So even if the generators kick in they may not be any use at that point. I can almost guarantee you that the underground generator room at Fukishima had large sump pumps for flooding. However depending on the damage from the initial tsunami it is possible those pumps were left inoperable and never operated to avoid flooding of the generators, or the onrush of water was so great they never had a chance to pump out water before everything was damaged. Once the generators and control equipment is submerged in water all control systems are out the window and you can scream at them to start all day and they will sit there and do nothing. Even if the water was pumped out a few hours later the damage was already done. It isn't is simple as flipping a switch to get everything back online. Complex control systems were damaged and would take months to trouble-shoot and fix.
If I recall the original design of the plant's emergency systems were mainly concerned with typhoons/hurricanes which was the reason for locating the diesel engines underground as this plant was based on a United States design. See this article here:
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/analysis/AJ201106161216
" General Electric Co. and other U.S. enterprises took the helm in building the Fukushima No. 1 plant's No. 1 reactor, which was TEPCO's first nuclear reactor. The contract was called "full turn-key," which meant that TEPCO had only to turn the key to start operations. All technical questions were left to the U.S. contractors.
Design of the No. 2 and newer reactors, where Toshiba Corp., Hitachi Ltd. and other Japanese manufacturers had greater roles to play, also basically followed the playbook of the No. 1 reactor. There was not enough time to review the design to account for different natural disasters in Japan and the United States, including tsunami.
"We built them the way they told us to build them, because they said they wouldn't guarantee safety unless we built them according to the U.S. specifications," recalled a former senior official at the former Ministry of International Trade and Industry.
Forty years have passed since the Fukushima No. 1 reactor began operations, but the design was never reviewed.
"Emergency power generators are heavy and they cause vibrations. Their relocation would have meant radical redesign of entire buildings," said the TEPCO source. "
Very well done. However, you are casting pearls before swine. "The less they know, the MORE they know about how to do it "better".
