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Originally posted by SignyM:
Ideas, anyone?

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Originally posted by SignyM:

Should be sent in to clean up the mess.

That's why they get the big bucks, right?

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Originally posted by Niki2:
There's got to be something going on beyond just the 'quake and tsunami, in my opinion, for all six facilities to fail in one way or another.

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Originally posted by Niki2:

There's got to be something going on beyond just the 'quake and tsunami, in my opinion, for all six facilities to fail in one way or another. You can't put administrators who don't know shit in to solve it, obviously that was a snark, but something serious HAS to be done, and quickly!

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Originally posted by Kwicko:

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Originally posted by Niki2:

There's got to be something going on beyond just the 'quake and tsunami, in my opinion, for all six facilities to fail in one way or another. You can't put administrators who don't know shit in to solve it, obviously that was a snark, but something serious HAS to be done, and quickly!

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Thing is, there DOESN'T have to be something else going on. They used human-designed systems, systems they were told couldn't fail. But as with anything human designed, there were flaws, and it failed.

The earthquake allegedly didn't really damage the sites. The tsunami overwhelmed them, and basically scrambled the reactors. Naturally, they have backup generators and backup battery power for such an emergency, and naturally, batteries being batteries, these ones apparently weren't really checked often or kept up to date. So the batteries kicked on to keep pumping coolant into the reactor cores, and they thought all was well. Then the batteries ran down, about 8 hours into this mess. Backup generators were swamped, and thus basically useless, to 8 hours in, things started to go very wrong. BACKUP backup generators were trucked in by the military, but it was discovered too late that they had the wrong kind of plug, and couldn't be used with this system. Meanwhile, the cores are heating up, and the hotter they get, the more of their cooling water they boil off, meaning more of the rods are exposed, and the hotter they get, and now we're into a nasty chain-reaction feedback loop, and as the zirconium casing around the nuclear material in the fuel rods is exposed to the air and start reacting and heating up, it oxidizes, a process which sloughs off huge amounts of hydrogen as part of the reaction process of the oxidation. Hydrogen builds up in the containment building, until BOOM! - there go the roof and walls of the containment building, and your left basically face to face with a naked core of molten radioactive lava.

It's even worse at the cooling ponds for the spent fuel rods, because there are so many more of those onsite. And apparently some of the cooling ponds for those spent rods were built into the tops of the containment buildings, but not WITHIN the containment structure. So when those go, they get to blow more hot radioactive stuff all over the place.

Lovely.

At least that's the way I understood the explanations I heard.

But don't worry; I've also heard several politicians say nothing like that could ever happen here. ;)

"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservatives." - John Stuart Mill

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This is a lot like the gulf oil spill, except that Rappy hasn't started blaming Obama for it. Yet, anyway.

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"My dad went to the Nuclear Plant. I never heard my mother cry so hard. People at the plant are struggling, sacrificing themselves to protect you. Please dad come back alive," read a tweet by Twitter user @nekkonekonyaa.

"My husband is working knowing he could be radiated," said one woman. He told her via email, "Please continue to live well. I cannot be home for awhile."

An email from the daughter of a Fukushima 50 volunteered was shared on national television and said, "My father is still working at the plant -- they are running out of food…we think conditions are really tough. He says he's accepted his fate…much like a death sentence…"

The nearly 200 workers are rotated in and out of the danger zone in groups of 50, taking turns eating and sleeping in a decontaminated area about the size of an average living room.

"They are probably drinking cold water and eating military style packages," said Michael Friedlander, who worked in crisis management at similar American nuclear plants. "It's cold, it's dark, and you're doing that while trying to make sure you're not contaminating yourself while you're eating."

Their mission is called "feed and bleed." They feed seawater onto the reactor to keep it cool, while steam bleeds away the heat.

These workers are aware that their lives are on the line, but they're equally aware of what is at stake.

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