Japanese reactor meltdown2/28/2023 ![]() Wouldn't even a minor leak in Japan be disastrous for the country? When we look at Japan's population density, we see it's far denser than where the Chernobyl meltdown took place. Let's talk about the danger of a potential leak. Two explosions occurred at the Fukushima plant after the earthquake in Japan Image: dapd/Kyodo News The other point to keep in mind is that the information that we have from the Japanese in this case indicates that so far, both the pressure vessel - the steel vessel holding the fuel - and the containment vessel outside of that are intact. There won't be any power excursion of this kind. That is not the same, by any means, as the accident at Chernobyl in 1986, where because the reactor had a completely different design, the physics of the reactor produced a power excursion and that led to an explosion of the reactor under conditions in which the reactor had no containment to withstand the pressure from the blast.Īnd we know what happened: a hole was blown out from the side of the reactor, and a large amount of the radioactive inventory from the fuel was propelled outside of the reactor building. So that is the same basic scenario that we had in Three Mile Island. So now we have the reactor shutdown generating heat from the hot fuel but no cooling systems. An hour after the reactor shut down, for reasons that the Japanese experts attribute to the tsunami, the reactor coolant systems were disenabled. The second shock to the reactor was the tsunami, which I guess looks as if it hit the reactor perhaps about an hour later. The first on Friday afternoon was the earthquake, which led to a blackout and a trip of the reactor system. Unlike the case in Three Mile Island, the accident sequence was initiated by two events external to the reactor. In Japan, the accident sequence in some respects is similar, but there's a major difference. The reactor at Three Mile Island experienced a core melt accident because of mistakes that were made during the operation of the reactor. The reactors at Fukushima are in many basic aspects similar to the reactor that experienced the partial core melt at Three Mile Island in the US in 1979. How do the damaged Japanese reactors compare to reactors that have melted down in the past – like those at Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island in the US? These reactors have been very critically surveyed by safety experts in Japan, and the problems that we're seeing in the reactors at Fukushima right now are not because of any lingering safety issues. It dates from the early 1970s and it, like other stations in Japan from this period, has generally maintained a very high level of safety. ![]() Mark Hibbs: Well this is an older Japanese reactor. What is your impression of the safety controls there? Mark Hibbs has been following nuclear issues for decades Image: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace He is now a senior associate in Carnegie's Nuclear Policy Program, based in Berlin.ĭW-WORLD.DE: You have visited the Fukushima plant before. For over 20 years, Mark Hibbs was an editor and correspondent for the nuclear energy publications Nucleonics Week and Nuclear Fuel. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |