http://www.bloomberg.com/...
Japan is about to do something that’s never been done before: Restart a fleet of mothballed nuclear reactors.
March 2011, The Japanese suffered the Great Tohuko
Quake an event that killed 15,000 people, and threw the country in chaos and
started the Fukushima Nuclear
Disaster which melted down 3 reactors and critically
damaged 9 others, poisoning vast areas of Northern Honshu and the oceans.
And Now Japan wants to restart 25 nuclear reactors after they were allthrown into emergency shutdowns and mothballs for 4.5 years....
More after the eerie orange glowing blob.
so out of some 56 reactors, they think they might be able to restart 25, maybe ultimately 44.
Now all of these reactors were shook really hard. Usually when a nuclear reactor is shut down for an extended time period it's due to serious design/construction problems and operator problems.
Restarting these will not be pretty.
A nuclear reactor isn't something simple, these are big 5-6 story machines the size of a city block, filled with water, valves, plumbing, pumps, controllers... These things are not designed to sit for 4 years down. Usually they are in maintenance outages for 90 days or less. When a car sits for 4 years, it's all sorts of interesting challenges to get them rolling again, when an airplane sits for 4 years it's a lot of work and for a nuke? well
Of 14 reactors that resumed operations after being offline for at least four years, all had emergency shutdowns and technical failures, according to data from the International Atomic Energy Agency and regulators in the U.S. and Canada.
In Sweden, E.ON Sverige AB closed the No. 1 unit at its Oskarshamn plant in 1992 and restarted it in 1996. It had six emergency shutdowns in the following year and a refueling that should have taken 38 days lasted more than four months after cracks were found in equipment.
http://www-pub.iaea.org/...
Now in Japan like much of the World, their nuclear fleet dates from the 70's and middle 80's. Restarting aging racs that are already near their design life, well, it's not going to go well.
Think of a really big aging navy vessel brought back out of retirement. Here Japan
is doing that to 25 at the same time. The regulators are known for a captive
mindset.
Well, I hope people in japan know what is happening, so we don't have
a repeat of this.