nuclear-news

Design flaw in General Electric Mark 1 Boiling Water Nuclear Reactors

a design flaw that does appear to be at the heart of the crisis at Fukushima – the extraordinary practice of putting the pool where the highly radioactive used fuel is stored on an upper floor of the reactor building,

Nuclear accidents will happen: human error can’t ever be eliminated, Telegraph UK,  By Geoffrey Lean,  March 21st, 2011,Thirty-nine years ago, one of the most senior nuclear safety officials in the United States penned a stark memorandum to colleagues. It warned that a key bulwark against a catastrophic accident in the kind of reactors now in meltdown at Fukushima was so flawed it should be banned.

He got a reaction within a week. The idea of a ban was “attractive”, wrote an even more senior official, who went on to head the main US nuclear safety agency. But implementing it “could well be the end of nuclear power”.

This extraordinary exchange is only one of a series of warnings over recent decades about the safety of the General Electric “Mark I” Boiling Water Reactors, which comprise five of the six installed at the stricken complex in Japan – and all those so far hit by the world’s first multi-reactor nuclear disaster…..

a design flaw that does appear to be at the heart of the crisis at Fukushima – the extraordinary practice of putting the pool where the highly radioactive used fuel is stored on an upper floor of the reactor building, instead of, as is normal, having it at ground level. This has made it particularly hard for workers to try to fill it with the water needed to isolate the fuel, keep it cool and stop it from melting – and is one reason why helicopters have had to be used.

March 22, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, safety