Nuke plant trouble after Japan quake; 3,000 evacuated

[Hannah Bell]

Japan's massive earthquake caused a power outage that disabled a nuclear reactor's cooling system, triggering evacuation orders for about 3,000 residents as the government declared its first-ever state of emergency at a nuclear plant.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said the 40-year-old plant was not leaking radiation. The plant is in Onahama city, about 170 miles (270 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo.

If the outage in the cooling system persists, eventually radiation could leak out into the environment, and, in the worst case, could cause a reactor meltdown, a nuclear safety agency official said on condition of anonymity, citing sensitivity of the issue.

Another official at the nuclear safety agency, Yuji Kakizaki, said that plant workers were cooling the reactor with a secondary cooling system, which is not as effective as the regular cooling method. Kakizaki said officials have confirmed that the emergency cooling system - the last-ditch cooling measure to prevent the reactor from the meltdown - is intact and could kick in if needed.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/international/nuke-plant-trouble-after-japan-quake-3-000-evacuated-1.348635

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[FBaggins]

2. It "was not" leaking radiation. But it probably will soon.

That's not intended as an overly doomsday prediction, but pressure is reportedly building up (1.5 times normal at last report) in the building and will need to be vented. There is some small amount of radioactive material that would necessarily be released when they do that.

It's almost certainly not a very significant amount (though no doubt some will play it that way), but they won't be able to say that nothing has leaked out unless they get a handle on it very quickly... and these plants operate with much tighter standards for radioactivity than other industries.

Still not a panic situation, but far FAR closer to one then we've seen in awhile.

[TheWraith]

3. The coolant water in the core is boiling off.

Unless they get the cooling system operational again soon, they'll have to vent that steam, which is mildly radioactive. It's not really a significant public threat unless something else happens--the failure of the secondary system, for instance.

This is one of the reasons that new model reactors like the Westinghouse AP-1000 are so highly regarded for their engineering--they have a gravity-fed cooling system, meaning that it's borderline impossible for their cooling system to fail to operate properly.