TT's Lost in Tokyo — by TokyoTom

I ran across an interesting WSJ piece today that I Tweeted as follows:

#Nuclear=EXPERIMENT: Tepco Let #Fukushima Pressure Soar to Twice Design Limit Before Venting that then Exploded WSJ http://on.wsj.com/fwKNXC

Here are some excerpts of the WSJ article,”Reactor Team Let Pressure Soar“

The operator of Japan’s stricken nuclear plant let pressure in one reactor climb far beyond the level the facility was designed to withstand, a decision that may have worsened the world’s most serious nuclear accident in a quarter century.

Japanese nuclear-power companies are so leery of releasing radiation into the atmosphere that their rules call for waiting much longer and obtaining many more sign-offs than U.S. counterparts before venting the potentially dangerous steam that builds up as reactors overheat, a Wall Street Journal inquiry found.

Japan’s venting policy got its first real-world test in the chaotic hours after March 11’s earthquake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power complex. By the first hours of March 12, an emergency was brewing inside the plant’s No. 1 reactor.

By around 2:30 a.m., the pressure inside the vessel that forms a protective bulb around the reactor’s core reached twice the level it was designed to withstand. Amid delays and technical difficulties, it was another 12 hours before workers finished releasing radioactive steam from this containment vessel, via reinforced pipes, to the air beyond the reactor building.

About an hour later, the reactor building itself exploded—a blast that Japanese and U.S. regulators have since said spread highly radioactive debris beyond the plant. The explosion, along with others amid overheating at reactors 2, 3 and 4, contributed to radiation levels that led to mandatory evacuations around the plant and the government’s admission that the Fukushima Daiichi disaster ranks alongside Chernobyl at the top of the nuclear-disaster scale.

Experts in the U.S. and Japan believe the venting delay may have helped create conditions that led to the blast. In one possible scenario, pressure built so high that it damaged gaskets and other parts of the venting system, through which highly explosive hydrogen gas leaked from the core into the reactor building. It was Japan’s cautious approach to venting, an outgrowth of its profound concern over nuclear contamination, that may well have made the accident worse, they say.

Containment vessels can withstand higher pressures, some studies have indicated. Among these are studies conducted in the 1990s by Japanese operators and equipment manufacturers, in preparation for Japan’s first set of severe-accident protocols, that say such vessels can withstand twice the design pressure. Many Japanese operators have adopted this as their benchmark for releasing contaminated air.

Tepco spokesman Yoshikazu Nagai confirmed that if there is a risk of releasing radiation, the company doesn’t vent until pressure hits roughly twice the design limit. “Venting is a last resort,” Mr. Nagai said.

General Electric Co., the designer of the vessel at Fukushima Daiichi, said it is unaware of any such Japanese studies or venting protocols.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said it doesn’t have specific guidelines on venting and doesn’t comment on the appropriateness of actions taken in member countries.

U.S. protocols on handling accidents at similar reactors call for venting before pressure exceeds the design level. The same protocol is followed by plant operators using similar types of reactors in Korea and Taiwan, industry experts in those countries say.

I am reminded of the article by Bill Keisling on the Three-Mile Island that I cross-posted earlier; here’s a relevant excerpt for those of you who missed it:

Rule 1: Commercial atomic energy technology is a pseudo-science and is not based on proper scientific experimentation.

As we recently witnessed during the multiple nuclear accidents at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, a damaged reactor (or reactors) often has broken controls, computers systems, and gauges that make monitoring a runaway nuclear reaction difficult, if not impossible.

Confusion and fright in the control room(s) at the time of emergency create what can almost be called A Fog of War. Indeed, war it is. They’re at war with a runaway nuclear reactor.

At Fukushima, as on Three Mile Island, operators wished they could simply peer into the containment building with their own eyes and dispense with the broken alarms, computers and gauges that tell them nothing, and often mislead them.

But that’s only a small part of the problem. Truth is, no one really understands the behavior of tons of melted nuclear fuel in a reactor.

For a variety of reasons, the commercial nuclear power industry and its government regulators never conducted a single experimental meltdown of a full-size nuclear reactor.

So, until one melts, no one knows how a runaway reactor will behave.

As most of us remember from high school, scientific knowledge has advanced over the centuries because of what’s called the Scientific Method.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the Scientific Method as “a method of procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.”

In simple words, real-world experiments must be designed to test a hypothesis, and results must be reproducible.

As we know, cars and planes are rigorously tested and crashed all the time, in all manner of ways, in all sorts of conditions. That’s how designers and regulators learn how these complicated machines behave in real-world accidents, and whether they’re safe.

Not so nuclear reactors. For a variety of reasons, including half a century of financial and political considerations, regulators in the United States side-stepped or outright ignored the issue of full-scale reactor safety testing, and continue to ignore it to this day.

This inescapable and troubling fact is entwined with the history of atomic power regulation in the United States. 

Perhaps it’s time for us to try the experiment of ending all government support for nuclear power, “public” utility monopolies, and corporations in general (which could not exist in their present form without state grants of limited liability to shareholders)? Maybe then – when investors and power companies are faced with a greater share of the actual risks generated by their businesses – we will see a more responsible and prudent form of capitalism, one that generates true wealth, and noty simply moral hazard and risk-shifting, plus profits for a few?