Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Nuclear Plants Love Faults

Article

And so do dams!  They all love being near deep water, and what is the cause of that?  Yep, faults.

The plant's design includes piping with shock absorbers intended to prevent breakage in a quake. "Before the plants are even built, there's research done by seismologists and geologists to determine what the maximum earthquake could be," Schneider said. "The plants are designed beyond that."

So much wonderful garbage!  Those 'hydraulic' piping restraints have been shown to be worse than useless, and most plants have removed them.

Anyway, I have moved beyond the mere definition of a fault, so that my union geologist friends can't file a grievance for crossing their defined boundaries.  I just do fault mechanisms, which are much more complex and require a geophysicist to define.  :)  I just hope all this controversy causes some changes.  I notice that Food Safety people are touting more transparency, it's time for the nuclear gloomies to do the same!

I hope everyone realizes that I am not defending the Universal Opaque Nuclear Management, but hope for a change.  I find that the nuclear operations people are the same everywhere, and if that has led to disaster in Japan, where else?

3 comments:

Harold Asmis said...

Did you know that 9 mile point on Lake Ontario is almost an exact copy of the Japan reactor? I'm amazed, and the spent fuel storage pool is 140 ft up. No wonder they can't get water to it!

Peter said...

They should have reversed the placement of the spent fuel and the backup generators

Harold Asmis said...

LOL!