Questions for Japan’s Nuclear Meltdown Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxu

Question

Questions for Japan’s Nuclear Meltdown

Link:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxuUVPKzXJA

1.      What was supposed to happen at the powerplant in the event of an earthquake?

2.      Why did the emergency plan not work?

3.      What was the danger of venting steam?

4.      Why couldn’t TEPCO vent steam to reduce pressure?

5.      What happens when the zirconium sheath around the uranium fuel heats up and reacts with water? Why is this bad?

6.        Why didn’t the TEPCO executives want the power plant managers to use seawater to cool the reactors?

7.      What would have happened had the fuel in the storage pools be exposed?

8.      Why didn’t unit 2 blow up?

9.      Why was this still bad?

10. How long did it take for the reactors to cool below the boiling point of water?

11. How long might it take to clean up from the Fukishima Daichi disaster?

Explanation / Answer

1) In an event of earthquake,the seismometers in the plant would issue a warning signal and the plant undergoes an operation called 'Scram',the objective of which is to stop the nuclear fission in the reactors, so that the nuclear reactors would shut down after the procedure.

2)The nuclear rods were to be cooled by the water that was to be flown,after the reactors were shut down,after the earthquake ,the electricity supply to the equipments was lost and then the tsunami later drowned all the generators.so the nuclear rods had no operative cooling systems and the emergency plan failed.

3) The danger of the venting system was that,it would be turned off when the power supply is interrupted.

4)The reactor1 in Daichi plant have isolation condenser valves ,which helps cool the rods ,when the isolation condensers were working properly,the vents in the side of the reactors would be releasing steam,but after the power failure the isolation condenser valve gets completely closed and the rods heat up the left over waters in the chamber producing stream,as the vent wasn't releasing steam at the required rate,this lead to pressure increased in the chamber.

The valves in the vents were pneumatic and needed power supply to operate, which wasn't available at that time.

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