Comment 60991

By Huffy (anonymous) | Posted March 15, 2011 at 15:19:13 in reply to Comment 60962

"...The facility is 40 years old and ready for decommissioning, while the earthquake was several times more powerful than the facility was designed to withstand even when it was new..."

The fact that they did not build for this or greater magnitude of quake is one more fact that suggests the plant was under-engineered from the get go. The cascading failures seen here suggest that nukes should be extremely redundantly over-designed and over-built, or not built at all.

"... There were actually four separate systems to provide continuous power to the cooling pumps: the grid, the generators, the batteries, and the mobile generators. It was the double-whammy of the earthquake and tsunami that knocked out the first two systems. I understand there was also some trouble getting the mobile systems in place and maintaining fuel supplies due to the damage and chaos from the earthquake..."

Ummm, lets see:
First we build a system that depends upon availability of cooling water in vast quantities - even after it is shut down.
1. Grid fails.
2. Generators have not enough fuel.
3. Batteries don't last long enough.
4. Mobile generators are brought in but are incompatible in some way.

Grid failure would seem predictable in large earthquakes. The generators and fuel and batteries seem to need to be far more redundant than they were. The availability of appropriate mobile generators seems to have been treated way too casually.

How is this an argument that the plant and it's systems have been a success?

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