Japan - Chronicle diving bomber
Explosion of block №3 from space
So, as a result of the earthquake, half of Japan suffered. The 1 Scheme identifies areas affected by the earthquake. The brown line stands for very severe damage, the yellow one - strong, and the green - moderate. From this diagram it is clear that buildings and communications, located approximately on 20% of the area of Japan, were severely damaged.
The world's attention is now focused on the situation at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. In connection with the interest in more complete technical information about the causes and consequences of the accident, caused by my previous publications, I am specially publishing a diagram of the unit of this nuclear power plant.
1 schema
We look at the block diagram of the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The operating temperature of the water in the core of a typical BWR reactor is approximately 285 degrees, the pressure is 75 atmospheres, the mass of nuclear fuel, according to updated data, in each reactor is about 40 tons. At the time of the earthquake, 1,2 and 3 units were in operation. 4,5 and 6 blocks were stopped.
Why didn't the reactors at Fukushima shut down? A "standard" accident occurred, which NPP personnel practice during training - a complete loss of power supply during an emergency shutdown of the NPP due to the activation of protection during an earthquake. As a result of the earthquake, the plant's automatics were triggered, which introduced control rods with an absorber into the active zone, thereby reducing the energy release of the reactors to a minimum. However, there was a complete loss of power supply from autonomous sources. In world practice, these are diesel generator stations, and each unit has its own, personal one!
The black outline around the reactor is a shell into which sea water is pumped.
I studied for a long time how the Japanese eliminate the accident and could not understand why so far diesel generators are not running on the NPP units to supply electricity to the reactors' emergency cooling pumps. For some reason, the super smart Japanese began to pump seawater into the reactors and continue to do it with surprising persistence, losing all interest in emergency cooling systems, which the reactor has as many as six!
The second question that tormented me is why the Japanese do not wish to allow Russian specialists in the field of nuclear energy and the elimination of nuclear accidents to be allowed into their nuclear power plants. And finally, it dawned on me. It turns out that not only the Americans are so stupid, the Japanese also caught this infection from them - they are now even dumber!
Indeed, the Russian writer Griboedov was right when he wrote his unique work and called it “Woe from Wit”. At one of the sites I dug up the information that instead of diesel generator stations, Fukushima was installed ... gas generator stations! This is not at all possible, but ... Perhaps that is why, when the gas pipeline was damaged during an earthquake, all nuclear power plant generators began to present metal trash to no one. And I am increasingly convinced that this is so. Otherwise, why for so much time the Japanese did not promptly deliver other generators to the nuclear power plants and did not replace them? It turns out that the Japanese emergency generators were not autonomous sources of emergency power.
March 16 morning - steam is visible from the block №3
The units have a backup emergency reactor cooling system in case the main one fails. These are tanks with water saturated with boron, which almost completely stops the reaction. It is unclear what happened to them. Since this system does not work without a pump, its own batteries are provided to power its pump. The operator of the Japanese nuclear power plant should turn on this system only in extreme cases, because to repair the reactor, it will be necessary to grind the entire inner surface of the vessel from the boron absorbed into it. It is cheaper to throw away the reactor. It seems that these systems were located on the street not high and were washed away by a wave.
Readers often ask me a question about whether the Fukushima nuclear power plant is different from the Soviet nuclear power plants with VVER reactors installed at the Novo-Voronezh, Balakovo, Rovno, Zaporizhia and other nuclear power plants. Now I can confidently answer: Yes! Soviet NPPs are notable for their emergency reactor cooling system. What, you ask? The fact that the Soviet designers in the calculation of the emergency cooling system of a nuclear reactor in the calculations put the most incredible situations.
For example, at NPPs with VVER reactors, there are steam generators that will dampen the reactor within one hour by means of natural circulation automatically. No batteries are required. In addition, the system of filling the reactor with borated water, in contrast to the Japanese system, is in full readiness. In a tank with water is nitrogen under pressure 70 atmospheres. As soon as the pressure in the reactor becomes lower than 70 atmospheres, without asking the operator, a valve opens automatically on the pipeline and water fills the reactor with borated water. In other words, at the Soviet reactor, there are TWO reactor cooling systems, which in any conditions are put into operation without any help and without the intervention of the NPP personnel.
At the Japanese NPP, such emergency cooling systems do not exist in principle! It is incredible, but if you press the emergency stop button of the reactor of the Soviet NPP unit and de-energize it, prohibiting the personnel from doing anything, the unit will stop itself! Some equipment will be damaged, but not the reactor. But the reactor of the Fukushima NPP unit, in such a situation, will certainly explode!
Already after the explosion at block 1 and the next explosion at block 3, the leading US nuclear expert Dr. John Large, who returned from the NPP to the US, said that he was very concerned and that the radiation situation was "in God's hands". Even then, the Americans admitted their complete powerlessness to influence the development of the accident. They realized what they had done and gave God the right to act. "The "forbidden zone" continues to expand. At first it was 3 km, then 10, now 20. This NPP has gone through all the stages that the Three Mile Island NPP went through in its time, and now it is experiencing a complete meltdown of the active zone" - John Large.
But the Japanese government at that time asserted like a parrot that everything is fine with the active zones.
And nuclear expert Joe Cirincione told the Sunday Express: "It appears that the automatic shutdown of the reactors when the earthquake hit caused a complete collapse of the power grid." "The worst-case scenario is that the fuel rods fuse together. The temperature gets so high that they melt and merge into a single molten mass of radioactive material that breaks through all the protective barriers and contaminates the ground, the air and the water," he told Fox 43.
Now it suddenly became clear that the Japanese government ignored the clearly worded warnings of a Japanese nuclear energy expert more than three years ago. Professor Ishibashi Katsuhiko of Kobe University, then stated that the regulations imposed in Japan to protect nuclear facilities were “seriously violated”, and that the stations are vulnerable to strong earthquakes. “If radical steps are not taken now to reduce the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to earthquakes, in the near future, Japan can be grasped by a real nuclear catastrophe,” he warned back in the 2007 year!
By the way, representatives of the Japanese television channel NHK, whose correspondents are the only outsiders who are allowed into the accident zone, keep their reports constantly. But we didn’t see any pictures from a close distance from NPP units.
How are the events going on at the NPP? On 10: 00 16 March, white smoke appeared above the building of the third power unit (see photo). The Prime Minister, at the morning press conference, announced that perhaps this vapor is radioactive. And who doubts it? Except from the reactor, there is no place for a couple to come from. It turns out that the tightness of the reactor vessel №3 - lost. Workers were evacuated from the station, since their exposure reached the 125 limit of millisievert allowed by Japan’s government regulations. But in 12: 30, the Japanese government has increased staffing levels to 250 millisievert (an international standard for trained personnel, according to NHK 500 millinivert,) and workers began to return to nuclear power plants.
How do the smart Japanese present the situation at nuclear power plants? And very entertaining. For example, they say that fuel assemblies in the reactor No. 1 are damaged by 70%, in the reactor No. XXUMX by 2%, in the reactor No. XXUMX - simply damaged. I would like to ask, is there anyone who opened the reactor buildings and looked inside? Measured the length of the collapsed assemblies tape measure or stick?
Only today they found that the hermetic containment shell was damaged not only in the second reactor, but also in the third one. Strange, I wrote about this on the day of the explosion on the third block. After all, the presence in the wall of the block of a hole in the shape of a bottle, repeating the configuration of the protective shell, clearly testified to a powerful explosion inside this protective shell and its destruction. They pumped seawater into a tank that was no longer existing for several days and could not understand why it was not being filled. And, at the moment, sea water is pumped into the protective shell of the first reactor and, apparently, therefore, it has the greatest damage to the core.
So far, the Japanese have called fire trucks with water cannons to attempt to pour water into the spent fuel pools. Yes, do not be surprised, the 3 and 4 blocks have low water levels there, the 5 and 6 blocks are experiencing a temperature increase, and 1 and 2, as they say sly Americans, are endurance pools "in the hands of God"!
The media report that cracks were found in the vessels of reactors No. 1 and 3 did not cause any emotions in me other than laughter. Anticipating reproaches for the callousness of my soul, I declare that in previous publications I said that only thick-headed Yankees and Japanese could think of such a thing. By this time, instead of boiling water, there was already a steam-gas mixture in the reactors. The temperature of the reactor vessel could well have been more than 700 degrees. When the vessel is filled with sea water, the metal cools down. And stainless steel, when slowly cooling in the region of 700-600 degrees, has one bad property - chromium oxide begins to fall out in it, which leads to the formation of cracks. In addition, stainless steel, already when heated to 500 degrees, sharply loses its plastic properties, and at 700-800 and even more so. Cracking of the reactor vessels was inevitable given such a barbaric attitude towards them. And they shouldn't be surprised now that God didn't help. Apparently only Russians have a saying - Trust in God, but don't be lazy yourself!
I do not want to upset you, but the words of the representative of Rosatom that the moment for taking the accident under control has already been missed, confirmed me in the opinion that the Japanese are stupid. This is confirmed by the fact that rescuers from South Korea decided to return to their homeland. I am not at all consoled by the fact that at the American reactor, designed for an explosion, the Japanese continue to conduct their insane experiments. Now they are training on helicopters to fill the station with boric acid. It is very likely that boiling water will, like at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, rise to the clouds and sweep around the world by radioactive fallout.
Information