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Meltdown Likely Under Way At Japan Nuclear Reactor


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Fukushima: Mark 1 Nuclear Reactor Design Caused GE Scientist To Quit In Protest

 

 

Thirty-five years ago, Dale G. Bridenbaugh and two of his colleagues at General Electric resigned from their jobs after becoming increasingly convinced that the nuclear reactor design they were reviewing - the Mark 1 - was so flawed it could lead to a devastating accident.

 

Questions persisted for decades about the ability of the Mark 1 to handle the immense pressures that would result if the reactor lost cooling power, and today that design is being put to the ultimate test in Japan. Five of the six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which has been wracked since Friday's earthquake with explosions and radiation leaks, are Mark 1s.

 

"The problems we identified in 1975 were that, in doing the design of the containment, they did not take into account the dynamic loads that could be experienced with a loss of coolant," Bridenbaugh told ABC News in an interview. "The impact loads the containment would receive by this very rapid release of energy could tear the containment apart and create an uncontrolled release."

 

The situation on the ground at the Fukushima Daiichi plant is so fluid, and the details of what is unfolding are so murky, that it may be days or even weeks before anyone knows how the Mark 1 containment system performed in the face of a devastating combination of natural disasters.

 

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I would put money down that the truth will never come out. Too much money and liability involved, IMO.

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Strength of deadly Japan quake increased to 9.0

 

 

The move Monday comes after Japan's Meteorological Agency did the same. It's not unusual for scientists to tweak the magnitude of a giant quake after some number-crunching.

 

U.S. government scientists originally put the Japan quake at 8.9. The change to 9.0 means that the quake was about 1.5 times stronger than initially thought.

 

The Japan quake is now the fourth largest in the world since 1900 behind the 2004 magnitude-9.1 Sumatra quake.

 

 

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Each day is worse than the previous day. :help:

 

Back in 2004,

Japanese power companies, whose reactors provide a third of the electricity in the world's second-largest economy, are trying to win back public support for nuclear energy after scandals over a lethal radiation leak, falsified safety documents and unreported cracks in nuclear plants in the past few years.

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