GE Defends Design of Stricken Japanese Reactor

I don't care who is to blame. I really don't.

Let's just get over blaming others, and start decommissioning these reactors asap.

More uber-accidents are waiting to happen. It's inevitable and vast portions of Earth could be rendered uninhabitable due to mass pollution from these facilities.

I would not be surprised by a moratorium and subsequent ban on this technology.

Anyone with a Brain should realize by now these "nuclear physicists" are just mere toddlers playing with fire. Radioactive fire.

They aren't responsible enough to justify keeping this technology online.

Originally posted by muzzleflash
I don't care who is to blame. I really don't.

Let's just get over blaming others, and start decommissioning these reactors asap....

I would not be surprised by a moratorium and subsequent ban on this technology.

It's not a finger-pointing exercise. The root causes of failure must be determined to make existing reactors safer, the same way we investigate air crashes to make the rest of the airplanes flying safer.

In the US, the construction of new facilities came to a halt after three mile island. I suspect this event will have a similar effect in not just Japan but other countries as well.

The problem as far as I can see, is that the design basis for the plant has been vastly exceeded. The plant was not designed for this. Clearly, it should of been, else not located there at all. Since GE were clearly not told to build the reactor to survive the event, then perhaps the blame lies with those who decided to locate the plant there or those who devised the earthquake and tsunami requirements. With that said, the containment on mark-1 Boiling Water Reactors has known to be rather weak, and I've seen some people criticize the location of the spent fuel pool. So yes, maybe some blame lies with GE.

Are you sure about that? I read the plants were built to withstand a 7.0, though I'm not 100% sure if that source was right, but I'm 100% sure that's what it said. In either case, the plant was underdesigned for the earthquake, and was also underdesigned for the height of the tsunami.

Richter magnitude scale just assigns an amount of energy that was released during an earthquake. The actual amount of shaking depends on how far away from the epicenter the plant was and the depth of the quake. The plant was designed for an horizontal acceleration of 600 gal or 0.6 times the force of gravity. The horizontal shaking at the plant was 507 gal which affirms my belief that the plant was not damaged by the earthquake, but rather the tsunami which was much bigger than they had anticipated (10 meters versus 6 meters if I recall correctly), flooded all the diesel generators, and destroyed the fuel supply.

Remember, nuclear plants are designed to handle design basis accidents. The Design Basis Accident (DBA) for a nuclear power plant is the most severe possible single accident that the designers of the plant and the regulatory authorities could reasonably expect. If the DBA is exceeded then no guarantees can be made about the safety.