China Syndrome

Who could ever have expected that it was worse than they admitted:

"Fuel rods inside one of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant may have completely melted and bored most of the way through a concrete floor, the reactor's last line of defence before its steel outer casing, the plant's operator said.

Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) said in a report that fuel inside reactor No 1 appeared to have dropped through its inner pressure vessel and into the outer containment vessel, indicating that the accident was more severe than first thought.

The revelation that the plant may have narrowly averted a disastrous "China syndrome" scenario comes days after reports that the company had dismissed a 2008 warning that the plant was inadequately prepared to resist a tsunami."

And remember,  this plant was built by an American company, which has produced many of our own reactors, and was located in a country acclaimed for the strongest nuclear safety regime anywhere in the world.  Also, please remember that every one of these incidents that has ever occurred has been followed by endless lies attempting to minimize public knowledge of the damage.

Comments

Anonymous said…
The odds are that there will be a nuclear disaster here in the foreseeable future too. The design and age of the failed Fukushima Daiichi plant are very close to what exist here in America. We have 104 nuclear plants.....all built in the sixties and the seventies. Of these only seven have eight hours of battery back up, which proved ineffective in saving Fukushima Daiichi, but the remaining hundred plants have less than four hours of battery back up.
Additionally the NRC has recently "uprated" many of these plants, allowing them to run harder to produce up to 20% more energy. If you couple this with the storing of spend nuclear rods in unbunkered pools near the plants, you have an invitaion for disaster.
The NRC, as much as any government oversight agency, has been run by that industry for decades and consistently puts profit ahead of safety.
IN the event of a disaster, the owners of these plants cannot be held liable, thanks to the Price-Anderson Act of 1957. It should be repealed. But it won't be. When the inevitable happens, the American taxpayers...whats left of them... will have to pay.
Poll P. said…
Oh, Man!!!!!
Anonymous said…
correction: 'but the remaining hundred plants' should read 'but the remaining ninety seven plants'
Magpie said…
You know the economic austerity mantra of the conservative government in Britain….? ‘Can’t afford this, can’t afford that…’

Get a load of this article from December 1st:

“The government has astonished the anti-nuclear lobby by outlining plans to spend £3bn of public money building a new mixed-oxide fuel (Mox) plant – months after announcing the closure of a similar facility that lost taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds….

Douglas Parr, policy director at Greenpeace UK, said the government's plans made no sense at a time of squeezed public spending and worries about funding solar and wind plants.

He said: "This is crazynomics – the reality is that the nuclear fairytale is a nuclear nightmare. Having announced the closure of a Mox plant because it was colossally inefficient and because there was no market for its service, the government now wants to build another one that will fast become a hugely expensive white elephant.

"This proposal will lead to a subsidised plant creating subsidised fuel so that subsidised operators can produce subsidised electricity and then receive subsidised waste disposal. The only winners in this are the nuclear operators, already rich with their 18% domestic fuel price rises this year."

The government has been cutting budgets for solar power, triggering a warning from builder Carillion that it expected to lay off 4,500 staff.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/dec/01/mox-u-turn-stuns-nuclear-campaigners

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