back to article Fukushima switchboard defeated by rat

A careless rat is being blamed for a power outage that left the Fukushima nuclear plant's storage tanks without cooling. Late on Monday, March 18, TEPCO experienced a power cut at cooling equipment serving the nuclear fuel storage tanks, in an incident that took 30 hours to overcome (the company emphaised that during the …

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        1. Loyal Commenter Silver badge

          Re: You actually take TEPCO's word for it?

          Nowhere have I read that 'independent experts' have said that there will be a substantial death toll.

          The 'article' you link is an out-of-context quote from a winess of the thee-mile-island accident, flasely comparing the fukishima meltdown to the explosion of the Bhopal isocyanate plant which kileld thousands of people in a pretty horffic way.

          The actual facts are, that during one of the worst natural disaters in living history, in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed, a nuclear plant, which was swamped by the tsunami, and melted down, did, in fact, kill noone*, and that radiation levels are now pretty much back to the background level. Your scremongering is nothing less than astounding.

          *Some people did in fact die, or a listed as missing, in the Fukushima plant as a result of the tsunami, but none are directly attributable to the nuclear plant itself, rather than being swamped by millions of tonnes of water and debris.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: You actually take TEPCO's word for it?

            @Loyal Commenter

            Bhopal??? Did you even read the article?! He's talking about the FUTURE not today :-

            “The problem is there are 130 million people (sic) in Japan,” he said on a recent visit to Tokyo. “A third of them will die from cancer in the next 30 years. One million more is less than 2 percent — are you going to find it?”

            http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/09/16/news/the-government-could-still-save-lives/

    1. itzman

      Re: You actually take TEPCO's word for it?

      Pardon? No one has died because of TEPCO at all.

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        1. Loyal Commenter Silver badge

          Re: You actually take TEPCO's word for it?

          If I took the time to read all the obviously partisan rubbish on the internet, I'd have to spend my entire life debunking bullshit. How about you engage your brain and try using rational thought. A million extra people have not died as a result of Chernobyl; an accident where an un-contained reactor caught fire and essentially showered the surrounding area in bits of burning reactor core. if you believe very unsubstantiate made up number spouted on the internet, thenthere is little hope for you. Fukushima was nothing like Chernobyl, the core was contained, it didn't burn, no core material was released (although radioactive gases were released from the reactor coolant). This accident was orders of magnitude less serious, and yet the accident you compare it to killed relatively few people, most of whome were plant operators, and the clean-up crew, some of whom actually survived being dosed with amounts of radiation normally expected to be fatal. IIRC, one of the survivors actually accidentally looked directly at the exposed Chernobyl core as it was burning, something that should have killed him many times over, but actually didn't.

          It's probably worth pointing out also that increased cancer risk doesn't equate to increased deaths. The most common type of cancer caused by such types of exposure is thyroid cancer, caused by exposure to radioactive iodine. The survivability of thyroid cancer is >95% over ten years, which is very good, because such tumours are generally easy to locate, easy to remove, and don't metastasise.

          So no, I don't take TEPCO's word for it, but I also rate your AC rantings as considerably less reliable.

      2. Rampant Spaniel

        Re: You actually take TEPCO's word for it?

        Thats not entirely true, a rat did valiantly perish whilst trying to initiate an unplanned test of backup cooling systems (i.e. a bucket chain).

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Windows

    Rats, whilst

    they are exterminated here, are routinely let loose in houses in Japan as a sign of prosperity, if you have rats in the house, then the house is good as the rats are happy to live there. Sort of mentality.

    Now, as japan doesnt have a sewerage system like ours (apparently) they are far less likely to carry diseases. Personally, i'd still kill the buggers though....Prosperous or otherwise.

    1. Francis Boyle Silver badge

      "japan doesnt have a sewerage system like ours"

      Citation needed. Seriously, I really want to know where the shit from all those internet enabled toilets goes.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Windows

        Re: "japan doesnt have a sewerage system like ours"

        I was only made aware of this myself yesterday (hence the disclaimer) but its due to the amount of minor earthquakes apparently....

        No reason to doubt my source...

        Anyone????

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: How does the Corp who caused the mess by cutting corners for $ get to run the clean-up?

      Good grief! There's still someone who trusts BBC reports and views!!!!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: How does the Corp who caused the mess by cutting corners for $ get to run the clean-up?

        Downvoted as this has nothing to do with the BBC. The Fukushima nuclear crisis was 'man-made'

        It was widely reported all over the internet due to a damning Japanese Parliamentary report.

        http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-07-05/fukushima-nuclear-disaster-was-man-made-investigation-rules

        http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/05/world/asia/japan-fukushima-report/

        http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/05/fukushima-meltdown-manmade-disaster

        http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0705/328017-fukushima-nuclear-disaster-was-man-made/

        http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-05/fukushima-nuclear-meltdown-labelled-a-man-made/4113028

        http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/05/japan-nuclear-disaster_n_1650264.html

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  5. Horridbloke
    Holmes

    Black Sheep is not a Peter Jackson film

    That is all.

    1. Gazareth

      Re: Black Sheep is not a Peter Jackson film

      But his company Weta Workshops were heavily involved.

      And it's more or less a remake of Brain Dead, which actually is Peter Jackson's best work.

  6. Andydaws
    WTF?

    Pity no-one did the maths......

    One thing that was notable in the Press coverage, (and, to be fair, the TEPCO intial press release) is that no-one bothered doing the numbers on how hot the pools were likely to get (not least since they'd have to be boiled to call cause a problem).

    all of the following, btw, is the sort of stuff you'd be taught in the first term of the heat transfer course of an engineering degree (or cold work out from A level physics), so we certainly aren't talking rocket science....

    First off, how much heat is being produced. The Unit 4 SFP is the "hottest" so we'll wok around that.

    At the time of the accident there were 784 older assemblies in there, making about 400KW of heat in total, and 584 "new" assemblies which had been out of the core for about 2 months, making about 1.87MW.

    For the newer fuel, taking an initial average production of (1870/584) = 3.2 KW/assembly. but that was at the time of the accident. The standard decay curve for spent fuel is shown in the slide headed "Decay heat in Light Water Reactor Fuel) from

    http://www-ns.iaea.org/downloads/ni/embarking/argonne_workshop_2010/Braun/L.6.2%20Braun%20Operational%20Safety%20of%20Spent%20Nuclear%20Fuel.pdf

    60 days is about 6*10^6 seconds. We're now at about 800 days from the fuel being removed from the reactor, so about 7*10^7 seconds. Using the ratio between 10^6 seconds after shutdown and 10^7 seconds (which will be near enough for a rough calculation), that says the newer fuel assemblies will be making about 1/3rd the amount of heat they were at the time of the accident. So about (3.2/3=~ 1000 watts each).

    The older ones will also have decayed, but not by much - so we'll ignore that.

    total heat production will therefore be about 1MW. (584KW from the newer fuel, 400KW form the older)

    OK, what's the heat balance...

    .

    The pond contains about 1240 cubic metres/tonnes of water - there's also racking etc. in there, but we'll ignore that for the sake of simplicity.

    If it's heating that mass of water through 1C takes 1.24*10^6*4.2*10^3 joules = 5.2*10^9 joules. 5.5C in 15 hours is 1*10^-4 C/second.

    So, 5.2*10^5 joules/second (or 520KW) was going into heating the water on average over the time that the active cooling was off. The rest is being lost to ambient (in the absence of forced cooling) - so about 480KW, or about 50% of the total for this rough calculation

    Heat loss from a fluid surface (in the absence of boiling), and by convection/conduction through the walls of the tank is proportional to the temperature differential to ambient.

    If ambient is about 12C, then the average delta so far has been about (30-12) = 18C. 2 times that is 36C, which suggests the whole system would be in equilibrium with the water at around 48 - 50C so, no mass boiling.

    You'd nee to periodically dribble some water in to make up for evaporation - but that's about it. Any boiling seems highly unlikely.

    1. Andydaws
      Happy

      Re: Pity no-one did the maths......

      Always amusing to see downvotes, but no comment arguing the point made.

      I can only assume it's done by people who don't like the message, but lack the firepower to make an argument against what was said!

      1. dwieske
        FAIL

        Re: Pity no-one did the maths......

        or people are tired wasting time on comments made by clueless people and just want to get rid of the comments... not a single doomsday scenario has even come close to fruition, barely a single argument contra has any basis in science.....people need to learn to be quiet about topics they are totally clueless about (which sadly seems to be pretty much all the science articles)

  7. Schultz

    Will it survive an earthquake?

    Who cares, I demand that all nuclear installations are rat-proofed immediately!

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

      Re: Will it survive an earthquake?

      "100% rat-rated"

  8. sandman

    Smelling a rat

    Something similar happened at a place I was working. Our control panels were housed in a shipping container. One day we lost all power and a thin stinking smoke started coming out of the top of the door. naturally we didn't panic (much) and carefully opened the door....

    Took us ages to find the fault. A rat had crawled up the main cable through the hole in the floor, put one of its tiny feet on a 440 volt bus bar and exploded. One foot print on the copper and singed body parts everywhere else behind the panels.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Boffin

      Re: Smelling a rat

      There are reliable figures that suggest upto a 3rd of unexplained house fires are rodent related and i can well believe it. I have seen rodents (Rodents, from Rodere "to gnaw") gnaw through copper, thin sheet steel, wire reinforced water pipes, bricks, wood, cement, plastic, in fact, there isn't much they wont gnaw to keep those teeth sharp!!!

      They are (in the UK) a dangerous pest that should not be sharing our homes or buildings.

      As a trained pestie i have no compunctions about killing them....

  9. a_mu

    Nuc, why not

    Strikes me that its not the Nuc thing thats the worry, its the shocking in competence of the operators and managers that's the killer.

    did any one else see the bbc 2 Challenger program the other night ?

    could be re titled, Nasa ups and downs Apollo 1 to Challenger.

  10. M7S

    Spooky timing

    James Herbert dies and rats have been found trying to infiltrate our nuclear facilities.

  11. ecofeco Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Further Proof

    Further proof that Fukushima was an old plant that wasn't properly maintained.

    It's as plain as... a rat in switchboard.

  12. David Kelly 2

    Outlaw Rats!

    Sadly I don't hear a cry to outlaw rats.

    Is surprising this sort of thing hasn't happened more often as the plant was 45 years old, which means it was at least a 50 year old design. Back then we had no experience in nuclear power, and knew less than Sen. Dianne Feinstein knows about guns. Today we have lots of combat experience and could build much safer nuclear power plants than even 10 years ago, if only we were allowed.

    Sadly the only state of the art nuclear plants being built are in China, by Westinghouse. And you know good and well once these reactors are finished and in operation China will clone them without paying foreigners or license fees.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Devil

      I am Bear ... WELCOME TO RUSSIA!

      Amazingly, it seems that in spite of the Yurop and the USUK FEARTRAIN, fast breeders are being built. Mainly in Russia though (insert picture of a flaming taxi with bear riding shotgun barrelling down a street):

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Future_plants

  13. Matto in AUS
    Coat

    Nuclear mutant rats wreaking havoc?

    Has anyone called the Turtles?

    Seriously, has anyone????

    1. Rampant Spaniel

      Re: Nuclear mutant rats wreaking havoc?

      It sounds more like the Whales outsourced their revenge!

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