Chuck Norcott & Andrew fildes wrote
>Thanks for the generator details. I was curious how that happened.
>This may well go down as the worst engineering design disaster in
>history. Also, I'd never heard of "The Black Swan" and have just added
>it to my Amazon wish list.
>Chuck Norcutt
On 3/14/2011 2:15 AM, Andrew Fildes wrote:
> > That would make sense but it may be at the cost of other
> > functionality - I'm too tired to check. But making it the default -
> > dumb stuff. I was listening to a story about the Japanese tsunami on
> > the radio an hour or so ago. It appears that the designers of one of
> > those nuclear (nooculer if you're murkin :-)) power plants built a
> > big concrete sea wall to protect the plant. The tsunami simply swept
> > over the wall and drowned the plant generators which had been
> > cleverly positioned just below the wall. This shut down power to the
> > cooling system and made it impossible to Scram the reactors. It
> > sounds really dumb now but I'll bet it didn't at the time they built
> > it.
A UK nuclear engineer lecturing locally tonight stated that the
Fukushima generators were raised high enough to cope with the highest
anticipated tsunami, but the one last week was half a metre higher than
that highest expected.
Another lesson learned. But already the proposed designs under
consideration for possible future UK reactors should not require
generators or other external power supply for some time - with
instrumentation powered by batteries for a significant period.
Personally, I am inclined to congratulate those who forty years ago
designed and built the pressure vessels which have stood up to so much
in the last few days. A very expensive accident in financial terms
but not, so far, in human terms.
Brian Gray
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