Japan Turned Down Early American Offers of Help for Fukushima Reactors

I suspect in the short run they will be some type of retrofits being deployed. It also pays to keep in mind that these reactors were on their way of being decommed, and #6 at the site is already one of the newer designs. That said, as much as it’s been reported that the mark-I’s have major known design flaws I have to wonder if GE hadn’t already tried to address the issues. I seem to recall a very quick, vague, and dismissive mention of how people were hopeful because these reactors have multiple ways to easily inject alternate coolant into the system. To me, that sounds like an afterthought to try and shore up potential cooling problems, and probably would have worked had the generators and the fuel tanks (which simply vanished) not been in a vulnerable spot.

A big take-away from this might simply be the placement of the generators and tanks. I understand they can’t put them on top of the buildings because they are very heavy as they are designed to withstand earthquakes. I noticed that there are high hills in the background, my thought probably as a way to dry and direct any possible incidents seaward. Now I’m no nuclear guy, but I do have some understanding of backup power designs as I’ve had to deal with specifying and approving co-location data centers and I had the following thoughts.

In a system such as this might it not be a good idea to move the generators and fuel to higher ground on the hills. My first thought is there would be possible electrical interruptions that way, ground lines could be severed by earthquake, lines on poles by tsunami. That said given the situation I could imagine a design with a three level fall back system, 1) ground lines 2) transmission lines on poles and 3) a manually deployed power feed.

The 3rd backup is essentially what they are doing now, trying to run new lines to the reactor, and I have to wonder if the cost wouldn’t be worth it to design power feeds that can be deployed (dragged down the hill from storage at this generator site) and attached to a patch panel that is specifically designed for a quick, temporary hookup as has been needed in this case. I suspect my idea would cost too much, but since you are probably looking at near a 5 year turn around of bringing up a newer reactor and decomming the older style, a more robust power backup system like this might be the more responsible option.