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More Trouble From a Crippled Nuke Plant
Posted by Lew Rockwell on March 15, 2011 05:46 PM

Writes Jay Roberts:

Although I’m in the U.S. at the moment, my family remains in Osaka. FWIW, as a submarine officer, I went to the U.S. Navy’s nuclear power training and then operated naval reactors. Following this, I worked in the commercial nuclear power industry for a couple of years and then moved on to software development. While my motivations would require a long explanation, let’s just say I’m neither a booster nor an opponent of the technology but I do have a pretty clear eyed view of reactor operations and what people do in crises.

I was pretty comfortable with the Fukushima situation for the first few days. If anything, the fact that they still maintained their integrity after an epic quake and tsunami is a testament to the design margins built into western reactors. However, two recent bits of news really gave me pause.

The first was the fire caused by low water levels in the spent fuel pool in Unit 4, which was shut down and defueled for maintenance. Normally, there would be all sorts of alarms about this, but with electricity gone, one would send people around to check on things. And with a plant defueled like Unit 4, the first thing one would want to check would be the spent fuel pool.

This is not to suggest malfeasance though — rather, that the people on site are completely overwhelmed by events to the extent that they can’t even spare somebody to go take a look at the fuel pool in Unit 4. One wonders what else may be going unnoticed.

The second item was that the staffing on site was down to 50 people. Even under normal operations, this is a small fraction, but in an emergency, where all power and indications (gauges/alarms) are lost, it is in effect throwing one’s hands up in the air. This was about 24 hours ago when I read this stuff at which point I told my wife she should tell her sister-in-law to take her kids, get out of Tokyo as a precaution. It is an excellent time to visit grandma.

My opinion was confirmed with the recent suggestion of using helicopters to dump stuff on the reactors, which is clearly well beyond the point of utter desperation in nuclear ops. If one recalls, this is what the Soviets resorted to at Chernobyl, shoveling boron out of helicopters into the smoking morass. Several days ago, discussing this incident with friends, I said that when they start talking about helicopters, that is when the situation is officially out of control.

This all being said, there are still some positive shreds of hope.

The first is that time is on everyone’s side. The more time that passes without devolution into catastrophe the less likely it is to happen. The residual fission products that cause the heat in fuel rods decay quickly, by orders of magnitude over the days following a plant shutdown.

The second is that this is not Chernobyl. Chernobyl used a graphite moderated design that was well understood in the west to be extremely dangerous and had been abandoned after the Windscale incident. Similarly, there was no containment structure. This comparison is not apt.

The third is that western reactors were built with huge design margins. Back in the 60′s, they didn’t have cheap computing power, so they would figure out the numbers on a slide rule, then multiply everything by 4 when designing a critical component. I was involved in reanalyzing a lot of reactor design in the early 90′s when we had relatively powerful PCs with which we could do a more extensive analysis; everywhere we looked we found huge, unbelievable design margins. So while things aren’t looking so great at Fukushima, one can be assured that there is a great deal of ruin in a typical western reactor.

The bad part is that this stout design is all we really have to rely on any more at the moment. With reactor buildings in shambles, high radiation levels, no power, etc., there truly is little way to figure out what is going on inside these reactors to the extent necessary to take actions. And even if this knowledge were available, the ability to take action at the moment is nearly nil — after explosions and tsunamis and fires, simply identifying which valves/systems/controls are which is probably an enormous task, and the consequences of making a mistake are dire.