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Canuck57[_9_]

On 16/03/2011 12:04 PM, wrote:
On Wed, 16 Mar 2011 01:46:39 -0400, wrote:

On Tue, 15 Mar 2011 21:11:11 -0700, wrote:

On Tue, 15 Mar 2011 21:10:12 -0400, wrote:

On Tue, 15 Mar 2011 14:42:48 -0700, wrote:

On Tue, 15 Mar 2011 16:11:19 -0400, wrote:

On Tue, 15 Mar 2011 12:37:00 -0700, wrote:

On Tue, 15 Mar 2011 02:19:14 -0400, Wayne.B
wrote:

On Mon, 14 Mar 2011 20:35:01 -0400, wrote:

I haven't been opposed to nuclear power. I live about 20 miles from one.
But this latest incident in Japan sure gives one pause.

I think the significant thing is that the problem wasn't the 9.0
earthquake, it was the tsunami. That makes most of the US reactors
somewhat immune to the biggest problem.

It does highlight how vulnerable the cooling systems are to unexpected
second order effects. The Japanese had diesel generators for backup
power and then the diesels got knocked out by the tsunami. There are
a lot of other things that can knock out diesel generators however.
The track record of standby diesels performing reliably in an
emergency is spotty at best. It takes an extremely rigorous
maintenance and testing regime starting with fuel storage, filtration
practices, etc.

Why not just put a big water tank on top of the building... then all
you need is gravity.

The size of the tank.

How big would it have to be? Seems like you could build a pretty big
one that would work for at least some period of time... long enough to
get the backup online.

They have been pumping sea water into those reactors for days using
big barge mounted pumps and it is still hot. You are talking about a
good sized lake, not a tank.

Seems to me that if the water was released in a controlled fashion at
the beginning of the problem, there wouldn't be a requirement for that
vast an amount of water.

These reactors do not stop on a dime and the fuel rods continue to
generate heat long after the reactor is "scrammed"

Yes, I understand how they work. What I'm proposing is that there be a
reservoir that is gravity fed. If there's a backup pump failure, the
water in the reservoir would be deployed over a period of time until
either it ran out or the backup pumps came back online. It wouldn't be
perfect, but it would at least delay the over-heating. It would add
some time to the equation.

Dumb idea. Go for the most simple approach. The one that stops the
chain reaction, pull the rods out.