Third generation plants would have fared better, and the coming 4th gen would be fine.
But, they should have come sooner. And, this plant shouldn’t have been built and sited there. The possibility of a tsunami taking out all the backup generators constitutes a single point failure mode. It just should not have been.
Somebody pointed out somewhere that the science of plate tectonics was still in its infancy when the plant was sited, designed, and built in the late 60s and early 70s.
True, Japan has had a long history of earthquakes and tsunamis, but much less was known about why they happen and where they’re most likely to happen.
Kirk Sorenson is putting up some good info at energyfromthorium.com that touches on the advantages of the liquid salt reactors in terms of cooling. And speaking of cooling (or not), steam comes out of my ears when I think of where we could have been with the molten salt reactors by now, and that nobody is currently funding them…
As Bart points out, even several decades old designs would have been fine.
Also, it remains to be seen how this shakes out but overall it may be less serious of a disaster than the gulf oil spill.
rickl,
[[[Somebody pointed out somewhere that the science of plate tectonics was still in its infancy when the plant was sited, designed, and built in the late 60s and early 70s.]]]
Indeed, construction started in 1967 so that means when the plant planning begin in the early 1960’s geophysicists still using theories of continental drift as examples of pseudoscience… Imagine, entire continents moving….
To be fair, the original notion of continental drift involved the continents plowing through the oceanic crust like enormous ships, not plates (which can include both ocean and continental components in the same plate) moving relative to each other. The original concept didn’t make sense geophysically. The introduction of the notions of seafloor spreading and subduction (to produce/consume plate material at boundaries) fixed those issues.
Third generation plants would have fared better, and the coming 4th gen would be fine.
But, they should have come sooner. And, this plant shouldn’t have been built and sited there. The possibility of a tsunami taking out all the backup generators constitutes a single point failure mode. It just should not have been.
Somebody pointed out somewhere that the science of plate tectonics was still in its infancy when the plant was sited, designed, and built in the late 60s and early 70s.
True, Japan has had a long history of earthquakes and tsunamis, but much less was known about why they happen and where they’re most likely to happen.
Kirk Sorenson is putting up some good info at energyfromthorium.com that touches on the advantages of the liquid salt reactors in terms of cooling. And speaking of cooling (or not), steam comes out of my ears when I think of where we could have been with the molten salt reactors by now, and that nobody is currently funding them…
As Bart points out, even several decades old designs would have been fine.
Also, it remains to be seen how this shakes out but overall it may be less serious of a disaster than the gulf oil spill.
rickl,
[[[Somebody pointed out somewhere that the science of plate tectonics was still in its infancy when the plant was sited, designed, and built in the late 60s and early 70s.]]]
Indeed, construction started in 1967 so that means when the plant planning begin in the early 1960’s geophysicists still using theories of continental drift as examples of pseudoscience… Imagine, entire continents moving….
To be fair, the original notion of continental drift involved the continents plowing through the oceanic crust like enormous ships, not plates (which can include both ocean and continental components in the same plate) moving relative to each other. The original concept didn’t make sense geophysically. The introduction of the notions of seafloor spreading and subduction (to produce/consume plate material at boundaries) fixed those issues.