Recent content by Orcas George

That is a good link but he is still stating that the amount of radiation released was "%10 of Chernobyl." First, the IAEA is talking about release of radioactivity into the atmosphere (not the ocean), secondly the estimates of the early releases have been raised...

But do we know that the spent fuel pool at reactor #3 is leaking or ever overflowed? That would be big news in itself. I was under the impression that they were just "topping it up" to make up for evaporation, it certainly would not have been a great idea to deliberately overflow it...

Yes, which is why it is flooding downstream of the dam(s). The odd thing to realize is that these floods are "controlled"; the engineers have to make the heartbreaking decision to flood the towns downstream in order to prevent an uncontrolled dam collapse. Obviously the natural tendency is...

You may have just answered the question in the thread title. You can't really have it both ways -- that plutonium is too dangerous for terrorists to handle but perfectly safe for the good guys to play with. I think that of the major technical hurdles is that breeder reactor produce even...

This is what drives me nuts about the circle the wagons mentality whenver there is a nuclear "oopsie". OK, so this dam wasn't important or anything, they just put it in there as a backup. Redundancy, multiple lines of defence, defence in depth and all that good stuff. Somehow that...

There is a lot more water in the system than in normal times so the dam is near maximum capacity. That has more to do with anything than differential pressure which isn't usually a factor. There are a lot of things involved in a flood; the change in force from a normal river to one at...

I would guess that it has something to do with the seawater that they were pumping (did they pump seawater into SFP #3?) Not the seawater itself although it is more alkaline than pure water, but all of the sea creatures that they sucked up at the same time. Crabs excrete ammonia, for...

I do not agree. The design criteria for the structure is 25m/sec which works out to 55mph -- which I consider wildly optimistic for sheets of plastic blowing in the wind, but which is still far too low. They admit that they chose a wind velocity based on what the structure was claimed to...

I'm curious if you see this as evidence of reliability: If "reliability" means "no TMI or Fukushima incidents for the last few years" then I would question whether you guys are using the term in the same way as us other folk.

Tepco plans to destroy the treatment system: http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/ Can I shout "NO" loud enough for them to hear me in Japan? You do not do this. If a fuse blows, you do not replace it with a straght wire unless you want to burn up your house. It is the same with water...

Has anybody seen a report on how long it takes to replace the filter skid, and how many filter skids they have? It is a modular unit that is designed to be replaced. I hope the issue isn't that since Kurion is a start up, they don't have the resources to manufacture filter units very...

Here are some objections that I can think of: 1) You are giving the radiation more "legs"; disabled radioactive tanker drifting off of Tokyo would be a Tom Clancy novel, nothing you want in real life. 2) Tankers are not designed to be leakproof, so you could easily have a spill during the...

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/19_03.html They need to not panic; messing around with the system will wreck it. They should call in some other filtration professionals (Parker Racor) and brainstorm. Perhaps a big prefilter unit that they can remotely backflush with several in...

I agree that trashing the Pacific is a very serious matter and that the media and industry are too nonchalant about it. I live on an island, my wife trained as a marine biologist, I understand bioaccumulation better than the media ("oh, the sea is so big!)", and will contend that the scope of...

The contingency is to dump the water into the Pacific, which is terrible but not much different than what has been (and may still be) going on. It would be a big step backwards but better than flooding the plant grounds and making everything inaccessable. They have been working on turning...