Japan hit by powerful earthquake

[Boyiee]

I'm getting tired of seeing the word chernobyl on almost every single page of this thread

[Yeyoking]

I'm getting tired of seeing the word chernobyl on almost every single page of this thread

And I'm tried of people undermining the severity of the situation by comparing it to bananas......

[jmc]

I'm getting tired of seeing the word chernobyl on almost every single page of this thread

Blame the media.

[Corrderio]

And I'm tried of people undermining the severity of the situation by comparing it to bananas......

Yes the situation is bad, but to see anything like Chernobyl a lot of shit would have to happen first. From how it sounds they're slowly getting control of the situation so I'd say the odds of something that disastrous are pretty low.

[Boyiee]

And I'm tried of people undermining the severity of the situation by comparing it to bananas......

You must've gotten wooshed

[Xno Kappa]

Sweet, just came down on orders for a humanitarian mission to Japan!

[Boyiee]

Lucky, I'm still trying to see if I can get sent out for rescue but it doesn't look like it's happening.

[Fottiti]

And I'm tried of people undermining the severity of the situation by comparing it to bananas......

You're retarded. People are sick of the media endlessly going on about the possibility of the nuclear power plants causing any real danger to the public instead of the far more immediate dangers.

[Kryssan]

I'm getting tired of seeing the word chernobyl on almost every single page of this thread

Since it does keep getting brought up, I'm reposting my old explanation with some edits (to remove elements of specific discussion) of the event here (I posted it a long time ago in another thread). Spoilered for length.

Spoiler: show

The Chernobyl reactor system did catastropically fail. Yes, this was foremost a result of human stupidity. That doesn't change that it failed; it had several inherent design flaws that led to worsening the casualty. Would the reactor have been safe otherwise? I can't answer that question; but perhaps the casualty wouldn't have been as severe.

Most notable of these design flaws were the boron control rods and the rod followers, the positive temperature reactivity coefficient (also called a void coefficient), the excessive steam piping and design complexity of said piping, and the design at-power refueling pressure housing.

Yes, Chernobyl was one of the safest reactor plants at the time, until the operators decided to go all rogue on the safeties; but that didn't make it a good design. In fact, one could say it was because of that false sense of security that they proceeded as they did.

The operators at Chernobyl-4 believed the reactor to be so safe, and had so much faith in it, that they did not believe a major accident could occur. Wanting to proceed with the experiment (because said engineers had noted the massive deficiency of the diesel generator backup system not providing DHR flow for upwards of about 90 seconds after complete loss of power), they disabled all of the safety interlocks.

They planned for the experiment to occur on April 25th, during the day shift, and like all nuclear things, it got massively delayed and didn't start until the early morning of the 26th, with an extremely junior crew. They set themselves up into a bad condition where they wound up with extremely low reactor power densities concentrated in the core. The reactor test was performed when Chernobyl-4 was scheduled to be transferred offline for a maintenance shutdown and the test was proposed to occur in tandem with that, maximizing power production. However, the shutdown was delayed further still due to wanting to maintain power grid production for peak-hours.

The test called for them to be at a power level less than a third of the typical operating power level (low power levels being extremely dangerous areas of operation for the RBMK reactor type), the relatively junior operator inserted rods too far and dropped reactor power levels to near shutdown, and concentrated the neutron flux in the bottom of the core.

To compensate for the xenon preclusion they experienced as a result, they overrode the safety interlocks of the computer system for rod control (Chernobyl actually had a very advanced rod control system (actually two independent systems, an automatic and a manual one) involving rods that were pulled out of the top of the core and pushed into the bottom of the core allowing for severe flux distribution changes in order to allow for refueling at power), and then yanked them out, trying to get power restored.

The junior operators did not understand the condition they were in nor why reactor power didn't restore as a result of their actions manually overriding the rod control systems. In addition, they fired up more pumps to raise the flow rate, setting up what in essence was the precondition for a massive cold water casualty - one of the worse casualties that can occur to a PWR/BWR plant.

When they attempted the test, water flow was severely reduced as the turbines sped down off their regulators, causing the formation of steam voids inside the core; that combined with their positive coefficient of reactivity led to a runaway reaction rate that eventually overwhelmed the xenon preclusion (via burnout) they were experiencing as a result of initially driving power down too low.

No one really knows why the operators decided to scram when they did, reports go both ways of operators noticing the massive power transient or simply having concluded the experiment, they attempted to shut it down. However, one of the design flaws mentioned earlier also came into play here, further compounding the casualty.

The scram that should have shutdown the core actually increased the reaction rate, leading to core meltdown (if you can call it that, the meltdown at Chernobyl-4 was extremely energetic). The core meltdown and subsequent violation of critical heat flux led to a massive steam void formation that blew off the lid of the core; since the lid was rated for a meager pressure transient as it had to be in order to allow for the at-power refueling of this particular type of reactor. The 90 degree turn of the piping and the fact that water likes to take the easiest path further led to complication and expounded the casualty.

Then the real explosion occurred, that being from the hydrogen generated in the metal/cladding/water reaction as a result of fission product release and fuel element failures combined with the massive heat and power distribution. That explosion is what sent chunks of super-heated fuel plate material into the atmosphere.

Granted, the stupid humans shouldn't have removed all of the engineered safeguards. Same thing with all of the other reactors that have failed. All of them had wonderful safety features, just human beings decided they knew better and wound up breaking the plants.

No matter which reports you read, that of SL-1, HTRE-2, HTRE-3, TMI-2, or Chernobyl-4, or the multitude of mishaps/accidents involving nuclear fuel (such as the INES level 4 incident in the Ibaraki Prefecture), they all share one thing in common: the stupidity and ignorance of humans who lack the proper respect for what they're playing with.

The level 4 INES incident I refer to here was actually a few (probably several now that I think about it) years back where a fuel handling complex in Japan managed to achieve intrinsic critical mass and killed a few workers.


The hydrogen thing might confuse people. Hydrogen has a variety of uses and is employed in gaseous form at power plants for specific controls it happens to be good at. If stored hydrogen bottles were exposed to heat without cooling, this could cause a pressure buildup in the storage containers and if unchecked an explosion.

This is different from a hydride reaction, which is where the fuel and cladding shells melt away exposing material to superheated water that violently react and explode. To cause a hydride reaction you need crazy amounts of power and heat, and a hydride explosion will only happen in a runaway reactor.

This is still further different from hydrogen buildup as a byproduct of the radiolysis of water.

The reports we're getting is that the hydrogen explosions at Daiichi are from the third example. This is further proven by the fact that the containments remain intact - if these explosions were occurring inside the reactor core, they wouldn't just be blowing the roof of the building off. Given that Daiichi's cores have been shutdown for a very long time now, not to mention filled with boron to prevent criticality at all, we can essentially rule out a hydride reaction.

Daiichi is nothing like Chernobyl with one exception - it happens to be a nuclear power plant undergoing a severe situation. The causes, methods, plant designs, attitude, people, actions taken - pretty much everything else - is different.

[Salodin]

You're retarded. People are sick of the media endlessly going on about the possibility of the nuclear power plants causing any real danger to the public instead of the far more immediate dangers.

Yes...because there is no real danger associated with the power plants. The ever growing evacuation zone around them is just for shits and giggles =).

Both sides of the coin are over and under exaggerating everything, which only leads to more confusion. Thank god for some of the expert in the thread that at least try to educate us to some level.

[Plow]

yeah, sorry, I meant to dispel that discussion with that little part really...

[Boyiee]

Which is why I said I'm tired of chernobyl being brought up when it's been explained 3 dozen times already. And I know that plow, I just had to get it out. Honestly was hoping for a Kryssan repost, or tyches I think from a page or few back - and I got it.

[Tagus]

All nuclear threats aside, I think we should all take a moment to ponder the biggest disaster of all... the premature demise of Gilbert Gottfried's career as the Aflac duck. Apparently there is a such thing as too many earthquake jokes, told too soon.

RIP, Sweet Prince

[Hyan]

Breaking news from NHK, quoting Tokyo Electric Power: Fire breaks out at Fukushima Daiichi No.4 reactor -Reuters 22:45 CET

Fuck. How can I go to sleep now???

2157: Tepco says efforts are underway to tackle the fire inside the building which houses the number four reactor, Reuters reports.

I'm really starting to think that they can't recover from this anymore Reactor 4 is the one with too high radiation levels already. I hear reactors 5 and 6 may be in trouble as well.

Stream: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nhk-world-tv

[Correction]

All nuclear threats aside, I think we should all take a moment to ponder the biggest disaster of all... the premature demise of Gilbert Gottfried's career as the Aflac duck. Apparently there is a such thing as too many earthquake jokes, told too soon.

RIP, Sweet Prince

Gottfried told a 9/11 joke before the month was even over and they didn't fire him then. Goes to show you Aflac is run by weeaboos.

[Tomiko]

Gottfried told a 9/11 joke before the month was even over and they didn't fire him then. Goes to show you Aflac is run by weeaboos.

Can't remember where I saw it, but someone had mentioned the Japan was Aflac's biggest market. If so, that would make some sense even though I imagine the US is a pretty big market for them as well.

Anyone know what the joke/comment was?

[Kerberoz]

I figured they would have just paid him a lump sum for saying "aflac" a couple hundred times. Why even bother with a long-term contract?

[Tagus]

I saw some of them online earlier... I'll search for a link.


As far as the nuclear stuff goes, I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that this is going to continue getting bad until a cataclysmic event of some sort occurs. Kryssan knows more about nuclear reactors than possibly anyone else I know and seems to think that this is nothing like Chernobyl, but unfortunately that is not the entire truth. In many ways the only differences between the two sets of circumstances are the causes, and that there simply hasn't been a meltdown in Japan yet. The problem with radioactivity is that the longer you take to contain the problem, the more of a chance of contamination there is. They might be able to contain it, they might not. But after a decade of working with radioactivity for a company with a variety of interests, many of which involve the control of unfortunate circumstances, it just feels to me like the event that they're going to be cleaning up hasn't fully happened yet. If it was solved, they would say it was solved. The longer it takes for that declaration to occur, the greater the risk of it getting worse. Just my two cents.

[Dantrag]

Can't remember where I saw it, but someone had mentioned the Japan was Aflac's biggest market. If so, that would make some sense even though I imagine the US is a pretty big market for them as well.

Anyone know what the joke/comment was?

I think one was something along the lines of: "Want a Japanese girlfriend? Just wait, one will float along soon enough."

[Cephius]

Can't remember where I saw it, but someone had mentioned the Japan was Aflac's biggest market. If so, that would make some sense even though I imagine the US is a pretty big market for them as well.

Anyone know what the joke/comment was?

It is. They do 75% of their business in Japan and already made a sizeable (100m) donation to relief efforts. They clearly want to do everything they can to keep Japan's business.

His jokes:

"Japan is really advanced. They don't go to the beach. The beach comes to them"
"Japan called me. They said "maybe those jokes are a hit in the US, but over here, they're all sinking."

Really not all that funny....