ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area OT: The ring of fire is on fire

Another situation of the small minority being publicized over the great majority.

From a guy that lived in Newark, NJ before during and a short time after the famed riots, NOT caused by any type of natural disaster.

Think about the greif & loss of all of those that are within the areas that had the recent natural disasters.

"There are news team films of uniformed police pushing carts of loot amidst the other looters."

NEW ORLEANS — Four New Orleans police officers have been cleared of allegations that they looted a Wal-Mart store after Hurricane Katrina, but each was suspended 10 days for not stopping civilians from ransacking the store, the Police Department said.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11920811/ns/us_news-katrina_the_long_road_back/

Now that the off topic has been somewhat resolved PLEASE let stay on topic of the OP

Putting it all in perspective ...
The "Great San Francisco" quake is estimated to have been about 7.9.

The New Madrid quake - centered right here in scenic Blytheville, Ar., and the strongest to hit North America - is estimated at 8.1.

Now Japan weighs in at 8.9. That's nearly ten times stronger- and a good 1000X what hit NZ most recently.

It's a safe assumption that absolutely nothing was designed for this size quake. The miracle is that anything is left standing at all.

From a 'trade' perspective, I'd guess that not only will there be a return to the good, old overhead service drop, but that we'll connect the service using glorified cap & plug connectors!

The quake has been uprated to 9+ , and the tsunami has been compared to dropping a rock bigger than Martha's Vinyard in the ocean and then some. The main short term problems are the damaged reactors, now apparently at risk of meltdown and keeping survivors alive in what is effectively a wasteland with no services at all.
The new infrastucture will no doubt include provision against a repeat event, built away up from the shoreline.

I don't understand why the operators are not venting the excess steam through the turbine circuit.

The back pressure build up is the source of all of their problems.

It now takes a massive medium voltage pump to inject coolant against a pressure head of 100 atmospheres.

The turbine circuit would quench the steam without effort and should permit pressures to drop all the way down to atmospheric.

Is Homer Simpson at the controls?

The quake was under the ocean. I think that is why the quake itself did not do more damage. The tsunami it created did most of the damage.

From my understanding of the events so far at the nuclear plants in Japan, the major design flaw is the same one that bit us in Katrina. Locating the emergency generators and switchgear on the lower levels. If the emergency power was elevated in the structures, they probably would have survived the tsumnami.

20/20 hindsight is a wonderful thing.

If the generators were in an upper floor of a building, they might still be damaged if the building took a hit.

Generators are generally required to be low in the building for fire reasons. If there's an emergency you want to get the folks in the fire brigades there just as fast as you can.

I would have thought a good design for the generators would have been to build a hardened building to house them. Nothing as sturdy (and expensive) as the containment building, but something substantial and made of reinforced concrete might have helped out.

The design flaw was single node failure: water provision.

No dry stand-pipes so as to permit water injection of the storage pools.

Diesels set too low.

And a refusal to vent steam when Tokyo Electric had the chance: the first hour.

The residual steam should have been vectored through the turbines. They should have been braked by excited alternators. This low quality juice should have been bled off via electrolysis or resistors. ( in the ocean )

As it stands, the only way to get coolant into the reactors is with a high powered pump, really high powered.

Right now the big scare is #4. It has a batch of assemblies only ninety days out of the reactor.

Cross your fingers.