The Other Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant
May 25th, 2011
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Since the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the world’s attention has been fixed upon the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The six reactor plant suffered major damage that disabled the primary cooling systems on units one, two, three and four.
Yet there is another Fukushima nuclear plant, which was struck by exactly the same forces but has gone largely unnoticed, primarily because there have been so few problems. Fukushima Daiichi translates directly as “Fukushima Number 1,” and was built starting in 1967. In 1976 it was decided to construct a second nuclear power plant, Fukushima Daini, directly translated as “Fukushima Number 2.” The first units came online at Fukushima Daini in 1982, with a total of four reactors being built, the last coming online in 1986.
Both nuclear plants are located directly on the coast. Fukushima Daini is about seven miles south of Fukushima Daiichi. Both plants also have very similar breakwater designs.
Fukushima Daini is also where a worker took these amazing pictures of the tsunami surge flooding the area around the reactor containment buildings. The water actually came in even higher than these pictures show, but the worker didn’t stick around to take any more photos.
Fukushima Daini is also where the first death at a nuclear plant as a result of the tsunami was reported. A worker was trapped in the control booth of a crane at the plant’s exhaust stack by the inundation of water. Rescuers reached the worker several minutes later but found he was already dead.
The quake also triggered a shutdown of all four of the reactors at Fukushima Daini, which had been operating at full power at the time. Significant damage was sustained to numerous plant systems, both nuclear and non-nuclear. The fourteen meter high tsunami that struck the plant was more than twice the height the plant was designed to survive. Fires were reported in at least one turbine room. At least some of the on sight backup power systems were also destroyed.
Three of the four reactors at Fukushima Daini sustained significant damage to their primary cooling systems. Flooding of pump rooms rendered the essential service water systems inoperative for units one, two and four. Backup cooling systems continued to function. Even without the ability to dissipate heat into the environment, the internal cooling mechanism of the reactors assured that enough heat was dissipated into the wetwell of the reactor, providing more than a day of decay heat dissipation.
On March 12, officials began preparations for releasing pressure from the reactors at Fukushima Daini, but this was determined to be unnecessary before any pressure was released. Emergency cooling systems continued to function properly and within two days of the tsunami, the primary cooling systems of all reactors were once again functional. On March 30, secondary systems were once again required when a fault occurred in equipment that supplies power to pumps at one of the reactors. Full functionality was quickly restored.
Since then, Fukushima Daini has remained in a state of cold shutdown. As time as passed, the cooling of the cores has become less critical, and all cooling capacity has remained functional. There were no explosions or other major accidents. There have been no releases of pressure or radioactive material from the plant and spent fuel storage remains stable. At this time the plant is considered safe and secure.
Why Daini survived the quake and tsunami so much better than Daiichi:
There’s really only one glaring difference between Fukushima Daiichi and Fukushima Daini: the vintage of the nuclear technology of the plants. While Fukushima Daiichi was built with reactor designs from the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Fukushima Daini was built with technology of the early to mid 1980’s.
A comparison of the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi and Daini:
Both plants use boiling water reactor designs developed by General Electric, although in the case of Fukushima Daini, the vendors were Hitachi and Toshiba, who had licensed the designs of General electric. These are similar to reactors operated in the United States and elsewhere.
The BWR-3 and BWR-4 reactors are very similar in design. The primary difference is that the BWR-4 is larger. Otherwise, most of the basic systems and design features are the same. They use a similar containment structure and general layout to the BWR-1 and BWR-2. The containment system is the Mark 1 containment design, first used at the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in 1969 for a GE BWR-2 reactor. These reactors would be considered early Generation II nuclear power reactors.
The BWR-5 represents a considerably greater change in design and technology from the BWR-4 than the BWR-4 did from the BWR-3 or than the BWR-3 did from the BWR-2. The BWR-5 introduced newly designed core spray and auxiliary cooling systems. The BWR-5 also introduced the Mark-2 containment design, a complete redesign of the reactor structure. The Mark-2 design integrates more of the cooling and support equipment into the central containment area of the reactor building. It also includes a number of new safety systems. The explosions that occurred at Fukushima Daiichi were the result of hydrogen buildup from a reaction between the zirconium alloy fuel cladding and the water in the reactor vessels. The Mark-2 containment system includes a system that can purge the reactor coolant with nitrogen gas to avoid such dangers. Further refinements were made to the Mark-2 Advanced containment design.
The BWR-5 represents what would technically be considered a late Generation-II nuclear reactor, although many of the design features continued to be used in the BWR-6 and later the ABWR and ESBWR, which GE Continues to market, members of the Generation_III and Generation-III+ reactor classes.
The conclusion that one can draw from the events at the two Fukushima plants is relatively straight forward: While the older BWR-3 and BWR-4 designs are sufficiently safe in most situations, their designs are nowhere near as robust and reliable as newer reactor designs. Of course, despite holding up so well against forces far beyond what designers had planned, the BWR-5 is, by today’s standards, old technology. Newer reactors are much safer still and have even more reliable passive-based safety features.
This is all the more reason why we should be building more nuclear plants. As newer reactors are built we will be able to eventually shut down the older reactors, thus improving economics and safety even further. The events in Japan do not diminish the picture of safety we have when it comes to new reactors. Rather than assuming that reactors will fail in the manner that they did at Fukushima Daiichi, we should consider how well they held up at Fukushima Daini. This is far more representative of new reactor designs, although those are even safer and more reliable still.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 25th, 2011 at 5:43 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Good Science, Nuclear, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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September 2nd, 2011 at 4:22 pm
Matte said:
Richard Perry said:
If I were you, I’d focus a lot less on your posting techniques and a lot more on actually reading the comments.
How can you have an experiment that accounts for the amount of radionuclides that has been ingested or inhaled without ingestion or inhalation of radioactive material?
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September 2nd, 2011 at 4:25 pm
Richard Perry said:
[110] I thought about billions but creationists would abject so choose thousands to include current time and viewer can add as many zeros on to thousands that they wish so it covers all ages, I also thought of saying eons of time but then could again be viewed that it does not count for current. I used thousands meaning many years. There are several views as to how radiation was created in and on this planet from the small particles and gas in the early years to the forming of rocks, metals, molten center and cooling that have had their effects. My opinion is that the age from the beginning to now is much older than people think as Carbon dating is one that I believe is very inaccurate for dating over 10,000 years because of changes do to the apparent great floods etc., I have no proof just that there is materials that are dated that do not make since in the flow of history.
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September 2nd, 2011 at 4:53 pm
BMS said:
[110] Why I am probing more is because I have been given so many studies and have reviewed them and none of the studies have breathing and or eating radiation, I am tired of the time I have put into this so I wanted assurance that there are sum, I looked at about half a dozen of your suggested sites and all have been exposure only, when you said allowed I thought you might mean is that they extrapolated the findings to come up with what they would expect if breathed or eaten radiation. Thanks for clearing that up for me I will continue viewing the studies
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September 2nd, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Richard Perry said:
Don’t concern yourself with what creationists would think around here (I suspect more than half the regulars are atheists anyway).
Richard Perry said:
Maybe you should read up a bit on the basics of radioactivity.
Richard Perry said:
Actually the reason carbon dating doesn’t work past about 50,000 years or so is because ¹â´C has a short half life along with being relatively rare.
Richard Perry said:
Doing human studies like that is likely to run into problems with the ethics committee though animals studies have been conducted.
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September 2nd, 2011 at 5:24 pm
Richard Perry said:
First of all, one cannot breathe or eat “radiation.” All radiation is either some sort of subatomic particle or a photon, not something that is either edible or breathable. You can eat or breathe radionuclides or radioactive materials — that is, something that produces radiation. Please do us all a favor and use accurate terminology if you want a serious discussion of scientific studies.
Next, if you want a review of the recent epidemiological scientific literature involving internal exposure through inhalation or ingestion, then you might want to read Chapter 9 of BEIR VII. It’s available online from the National Academy of Sciences to read for free.
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September 3rd, 2011 at 8:46 pm
Anon said:
[120] Ha, Ha: Yes but they should have done this 60 years ago; it would not have been an issue then. They can do it in other countries as the chemical companies are now.
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September 3rd, 2011 at 9:43 pm
Richard Perry said:
They actually did do quite a bit of that (using rather high doses too).
Not that it was just radiation where they did that kind of crap.
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September 4th, 2011 at 3:08 am
Richard Perry said:
[120] See this site http://www.news.google.com/newspapers?id=OpsJAAAAIBAJ&sjid=nkkDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5123,1102573&dq=embrittlement+nuclear&hl=en
Was any of the material over 50 years old as I wrote before I had seen an article about this before and found this one? I only saw dry cast above ground at Fort, is the fuel pool water proof because I see almost everything under water.
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September 4th, 2011 at 3:20 am
Anon said:
[120]Many hand held meters do not read Alpha particles, I believe the plastic housing prevents Alpha particles from entering the meter, so zero times any conversion would be zero.
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September 4th, 2011 at 5:08 am
Richard Perry said:
Looks like a whole lot of nonsense to me especially since neurons are pretty much only going to be emitted inside the reactor (there are delayed neutrons from some fission products but those are emitted relatively quickly), not in the waste dump, the fuel would be sent to one when it can’t sustain a chain reaction, not to mention the lack of a moderator and there are so many other barriers in place which won’t ever be exposed to a serious neutron flux that it just isn’t a legitimate concern (even if a chain reaction starting up in a waste dump were a concern just putting a bit of boron in the containers should be enough to prevent it).
Richard Perry said:
The swimming pools are pretty hard to drain.
Richard Perry said:
True, though alpha emitters are really only dangerous when they’re inside you (the dangerous fission products are pretty much all beta and gamma emitters anyway).
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September 4th, 2011 at 9:36 am
High energy neutron bombardment does degrade the structural integrity of many materials it is true, and it is also true that this, along with neutron induced swelling, is a limiting factor in fuel rod life in a reactor. However, like most metal embrittlement, this only becomes a concern when the item in question is under load. Used fuel, in a dry cask is not under any mechanical strain, (such as on the walls of a pressure vessel) and at any rate the cask, not the fuel support, is responsible for maintaining integrity in long term storage.
This is another example of a half-truth being spun to insinuate something that is just not so.
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September 4th, 2011 at 10:34 am
Dry storage casks are overdesigned to the point of being almost obscene. Even the professional anti-nuke liars admit that they don’t have anything to hang their hats on there.
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September 4th, 2011 at 4:05 pm
Richard Perry said:
It depends on the instrument. It’s true that many geiger-muller tubes and scintillation probes will not detect alpha particles. Many will, however. They need to have a thin wall, typically made of mica. It’s sometimes made of mylar on some scintillation and gas proportional probes.
Alpha particles won’t travel far though. They’re blocked by a thick piece of paper and won’t go through more than a few feet of air. Even a few inches of air will attenuate alpha readings by quite a bit.
Normally you would not be scanning for background alpha levels anyway. Alphas are only harmful internally. The equipment used to assess the risk from alpha fallout is usually some kind of air sampler or something like that.
You don’t need to detect alpha particles to get a good assessment of the level of material present somewhere either. In nearly all isotopes, alphas are present in combination with gamma radiation. An instrument can detect the gammas easily and then that can be used to compute how much material is present or any levels of contamination.
If you want to assess the biological dose to someone, you have to consider the pathway of exposure, the type of radiation etc. There are formulas that have been developed to do this.
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September 6th, 2011 at 1:02 am
drbuzz0 said:
[130] Thank you all, this has been of great help for me and puts me at ease, I will take some time looking at all these studies, it will be awhile and again thanks for putting up with me. Richard
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September 6th, 2011 at 1:50 am
[130] I don’t know if you have seen this site about Canada.
http://www.youtube.com/user/connectingdots1#p/a/u/3/EBfvkCEr-Is
http://www.youtube.com/user/connectingdots1
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September 6th, 2011 at 2:55 am
Richard Perry said:
Looks like a typical crank to me.
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September 6th, 2011 at 2:59 am
Richard Perry said:
333 Bq, how is it measured? Did somebody stand too close to the detector? What was the background at the site?
1,5 micro Sv/h would equate to 17 mSv/year…but what isotope, not to mention that levels are much lower than at the powerplant so I wouldn’t take this very seriously.
What Anon said, typical crank…
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September 28th, 2012 at 1:25 pm
Isn’t the relative ages of the two Fukushima reactors a red herring?
The real issue is that due to the undersea topography, the tsunami which hit Fukushima Daichi was 14 m high, while it was less than 8 m high at Fukushima Daini and at Kashiwazaki–Kariwa (the reactor closest to the earthquake’s epicenter). Those other reactors would most likely also have been wrecked if hit by a 14 m tsunami.
(thanking Leslie Corrice for this…)
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April 15th, 2013 at 3:36 pm
So how do you propose we replace the 100 or so quote quote old technological reactors here in the US? Not only is it extremely dangerous but its extremely expensive when it comes to fixing and replacing pieces on a reactor. Not to mention how much it costs to shut down a plant and safely remove and demolish its structure. Your proposing that we should built more plants? Why do we want more of our precious land being devoured by concrete platforms where nuclear waste sits long after the plant is removed (see Maine Yankee). Why build when we don’t have anywhere to put the waste? Wake up!
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April 15th, 2013 at 3:44 pm
Steve Buchanan said:
please contrast and compare the amount of land occupied by the ash ponds from coal-fired generation with that of existing nuclear waste and get back to us. (hint: we’re not the ones that need to wake up!)
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April 15th, 2013 at 4:19 pm
DV82XL said:
Are you really comparing it too coal and other fossil fuel plants. I should of been more clear… IT’S ALL A WASTE OF VALUABLE LAND. Fortunately organizations like the Sierra Club have been shutting down coal plants left and right. Who is forcing the shut down Nuke plants? No hint common sense here
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April 15th, 2013 at 4:36 pm
Steve Buchanan said:
Because it is cheaper than wind or solar (which requires a lot more concrete for the equivalent energy production and magnitudes more for equivalent base load production), it is a h**l of a lot cleaner than coal .
Removing a single windfarm (VESTA 90/100 2MW) would cost in the region of $2-300′000 US not including the concrete slab, which is not much compared to a nuke plant. But considering that the equivalent energy production, 4000 windfarms cost 800 million dollars to remove (which happens to be pretty close to what Main Yankee cost to decommission) excluding the concrete base mat for the windfarm ofcourse. For baseload production from wind it gets even worse, then you would need to remove 16 700 of them, at which point the argument about decommissioning costs really goes out the window. Your argument about concrete slabs taking up land is just plain silly in this context…
Or did you actually have a valid point hidden somewhere in your post? What ever it was I fail to see it, care to elaborate please?!
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April 15th, 2013 at 4:40 pm
Steve said:
So you want to have people freeze and starve due to lack of power? Or go back to being medieval peasants dependent on muscle power only?
That’s the logical end result of your argument.
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April 15th, 2013 at 4:46 pm
Steve said:
Let me put it another way than Matthew did. What is your alternative? How should we produce the energy required for our hospitals, food production, heating our homes and cooking our food and lighting our streets and houses at night?
This is not trivial but I am dying to hear what you propose… literally!
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April 15th, 2013 at 7:30 pm
Steve Buchanan said:
Actually, older reactors have proven to be capable of operation for decades beyond their original estimated lifespan with upgrades and retrofits.
Replacing power plants should focus on the bigger offenders, the coal burners. That said, it’s not that hard to replace nuclear reactors with new ones, given a favorable regulatory climate. The USAPWR, produces 1700 MWe, the EPR produces about 1600. The AP1000 produces 1200. Most older reactors are smaller, so a single new reactor may produce as much as three reactors from the 1970’s.
Really, though, it’s not that big a problem, even with existing systems. Remember, we built most of those operating now in less than a 20 year period.
Steve Buchanan said:
Not really. Happens all the time. But there are circumstances where a new reactor might be the way to go.
Steve Buchanan said:
Actually, nuclear plants are the only type of facilities that are required to maintain the funds for full decommissioning from the start.
Connecticut Yankee is not far from me, and they completely decommissioned it. It’s amazing, really. You’d never see this in any other industry. Not only did they remove the reactor, they actually jack-hammered and hauled away the reenforced concrete and left it as a greenfield.
I actually think it’s a bit silly. The site would have been well suited to a new power plant, utilizing the existing transmission lines. But that is what they do. They allocate the money for complete removal.
Steve Buchanan said:
Are you kidding me? We lose more “precious land” to landfills, housing developments, graves and tombs, abandoned shopping malls, disused airport runways, ash dumps, quarries, mines… damn near everything we built takes up more space than that.
All the spent fuel ever generated by the United States could be placed in casks and stored in an area less than the size of two football fields.
Steve Buchanan said:
Yucca mountain would have been fine. It’s unfortunate, but it was built completely and then political rangeling shut that down. WIPP has been running well, but statutes prevent civil waste being taken there.
In any case, it will surely be reprocessed some day.
It can be stored where it is for the foreseeable future, however. It’s not expensive to warehouse. It’s chemically stable. There is no imperative to move it any time soon.
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April 15th, 2013 at 7:43 pm
Matte said:
RP: You are assuming that wind needs to relocate, why not repair or rebuild on same site. A high cost of building wind is the foundation, infrastructure of roads and power cables so why would this not be used over as long as possible with maintenance and rebuilds on the same site. Nuclear needs to be totally rebuilt from top to bottom and old site and waist decommissioned for many years at a cost that will probably be 100 times what the industry claims if it is like there estimates costs to build a plant that no company will insure against a plant meltdown or blow up and cover the extensive losses. If one used the cost to pay for insurance policies on a nuclear plant, electrical power would be 10 times the most expensive method of producing power. This is way to much.
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April 15th, 2013 at 8:59 pm
drbuzz0 said:
So i suppose you like the world to continue building nuclear power plants? Continue this old way of thinking… occupy foreign land for oil, build pipelines from sea to shining sea, frack until we can frack no more, eat genetically engineered food, and fill the ocean with plastics, oil, and radioactive particles. Why even worry/care about the environment the future is now and where its ends.
P.S. The NRC had underestimated the full cost to actually fully decommission a power station, so most stations are short 300 million dollars. Also places like Maine yankee will continue to spend 8 million dollars a year to maintain there mess for well the rest of existence of the world, which because of thinking from you guys will probably be another 20 years.
source for the so called “Trust Fund” http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i13/Nuclear-Retirement-Anxiety.html
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April 15th, 2013 at 9:49 pm
Wind and solar advocates like to get themselves whipped into a self righteous frenzy over the issues of other sources of energy without coming to grips with the fact that without the inputs these provide, wind and solar are next to useless as large scale generators. They also seem incapable of getting their heads around the problem of scale and have no conception of just how large wind and solar installations would need to be to replace combustion and nuclear as baseload generation, and what the environmental implications of that would be. The fact is is that wind and solar are nothing but figleaves for combustion (mostly gas) and that is all they will ever amount to.
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April 15th, 2013 at 9:51 pm
RichardPerry said:
Not a point in favour of wind as you can also build new nuclear power plants on the same site once the old ones have been decommissioned.
You also need a lot less such sites and are going to be rebuilding a lot less (though there is likely to be some downtime while you wait for the old reactor to be decommissioned).
RichardPerry said:
Nuclear reactors have already been decommissioned so there is no way it’ll cost 100 times what the industry says it will (they’ve done it, the regulator supervised it, I think they might know better than you).
Steve said:
Better than any alternative anyone has come up with.
Steve said:
I’d rather synthetic hydrocarbons produced using nuclear heat instead of the fossil fuel subsidy that is the US military.
Steve said:
Which is safer than the stuff that hasn’t been genetically engineered (no one has died from genetically modified food, people have died from ‘organic’ foods).
Steve said:
You realise that if those plants continue operating that they could easily raise that money?
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