Hall of Fame

I read this today and made me feel much better. It is very long but easy to understand. At the end of the day very few if anybody will be affected by radiation.

Take 30 minutes and read this and also the updates and it may ease our concern from the overblown hysterical media coverage. I think it is updated often and I not saying it is totally under control but this is very educational.

I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt..........a water injection directly from a lake, ocean, river, or whichever body of water lies nearby, is indeed a planned final failsafe to help cool and keep the fuel submerged, and is a safety system.

I never said it was the primary safety system. When you get to that point, you are willing to sacrifice the operability of the plant to keep the public safe.

"any body of water could be used as a make-up source or back-up source after proper chemical and mechanical treatment. But again, thats not whats going on. "

In your opinion, what other body of water would have been available to serve as the source of waqter to generate power at this plant?

"Viable back up plan for retarding exposure..."

It's hard top argue that between the backup generators and the use of seawater, meltdown was probably delayed for about 5 days. Which means that it served its purpose in allowing humanity time to escape the impending disaster.

The press that is telling us what a horrific event this is that will change the world forever is the same press that was telling us that it would take the Gulf Coast 15 years to recover from the BP oil spill.

They are media equivalent of the little boy who cried wolf.

So the salt water was already being pumped in as water to be treated for cooling usages?

And now the salt water is being forced in without being treated, circumventi g treatment?

Is that what is occurring?

It appears that as is the case most times, a decision was made as to what eventualities were economically reasonable to prepAre for. In this case the designers either did not account for the possibility of such a quake, were aware and chose not to prepare for it, Or the steps they took to deal with the possibility were insufficient.

Given the magnitude of the risk, and the relatively short period of time before the safety fratures of the plant was breached it bares considering that the worst case scenarios were not worst case and that additional safeguards are necessary in the practical rather thantheoretical sense.

Of course that would cost money which will bother folks.

It would seem the worst case remains that Tokyo and it's surrounding area become exposed to life altering levels of radiation.

The NYT says the plants are GE Mark I designs whatever that means.

Big Blair - where do I start:

Lets go back to the beginning. You stated that these cooling systems were closed loops so they required very little make-up. No matter how you slice it, you could not possibly be more wrong. Whether a plant uses cooling towers or once-through cooling ponds for the heat exchange process, water on the condenser side is evaporated and that water needs to be made-up immediately - not whenever the gas in the atmosphere turns back into rain. LOL. I'd like to hear the nuclear plant engineer's response when you tell him that there is no need for make-up water - you're just going to count on rainfall making it back up. Hilarious.

I haven't stated a single thing that you can point to is incorrect. I never said water on the closed loop side is prone to scale. Unless you have a leak, there is no water loss on that side and there is no evaporation, so naturally there would be no scale.

On TOS, blackflag was "blackflag", what is blackflag's username here? I was unaware he posted here. He got banned on TOS for saying something to Calicock. Never found out why.

"I knew exactly what I meant" lol. Look, the more you post the more obvious it becomes that, while you do seem to have some general working knowledge of a nuclear power plant, you don't know a whole lot about the inner working of the cooling systems. But I have enjoyed the conversation nevertheless.

This is what you posted in a reply to Beatris earlier: "Your statement about power plants using "tremendous quantities of water" is inaccurate. You're making it sound like millions of gallons are sucked from the ocean (or lake, river, etc) never to return, and that is wrong.

The reactor cooling system is a closed loop. Makeup water may need to occasionally be added, but not very often. When it is, the makeup water comes from tanks onsite. The water in these tanks is pulled from the local body of water and treated by chemistry to make it suitable for site use. Again, makeup water is not added on a constant basis."

But now you admit that the open side of the heat exchange process, does in fact use quite a bit of make-up. So much, in fact, that (as you correctly stated) some plants actually have man-made lakes that are used as the make-up source. You're talking out of both sides of your mouth. At this point you may want to consider changing the subject.

Are you capable of deciphering English?

My statement, as you see above is:

"You're making it sound like millions of gallons are sucked from the ocean (or lake, river, etc) never to return, and that is wrong."

If you suck water out of a lake and don't replace won't the lake dry up?

Not to mention you're still insisting that the open end of the system uses makeup water.

Makeup water is for the closed end, not the open end.

And again, you've already been PROVEN wrong when you posted:

"The only water that can be returned to original water source would be the bleed off water in a system where cooling towers are used."

You keep trying to convince people I'm wrong, yet you haven't provided one fact to back it up. I have PROVEN you wrong more than once.

I also notice you failed to answer any of the questions I asked. Probably because you can't.

I have training in nuclear systems. Do you?

Blair, the only thing you are proving is that you have no clue what you're talking about. You just said above: "make-up water is for the closed end, not the open end." Its hard to continue to have a technical conversation on this subject with someone that doesn't even understand the basics of heat transfer. The closed loop absolutely does not require and should not require any make-up unless there is a problem causing a leak. (Thus 'closed' loop) The open end of the system is the side that requires make-up, because this is the only side where there is water loss that would need to be made up. Now I see where you may be confused regarding a once through system where a cooling pond or lake is utilized instead of a cooling tower, but in system where cooling towers are used there should be no confusion whatsoever. The water runs down the tower, is cooled via evaporation, and that water is constantly being made-up via a water source. If there was no make-up the open end would eventually run dry. My training isn't specific to nuclear systems but I have an awful lot of training and experience in water treatment and heat transfer systems in power plants, industrial plants, etc...where I've worked as a water technologist and sales mgr. for a treatment company for 15 years.

You can find a pretty good write up of how this works here: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Industrial_cooling_tower.

Cheers.

Thanks for posting those updates. They are very informative and well written for the understanding of the layman.

March 17th update