Fukushima #3 Using Plutonium Fuel?

Apparently, from what I am hearing, three of the reactors at Fukushima were shut down for refueling.....so that would be good news if that is a factual condition. I heard this is from an "expert" guest on a internet radio show....so I still need to do some checking.

Regards the plutonium: even as the process converts some amount of its fuel to plutonium, using plutonium on the front end as initial fuel vastly increases the total amount of plutonium available to create a poisonous mess if the containment vessel has been breached.

The explosion at Fukushima #3 looks, to me, like it blew the cement containment cap over the reactor vessel into the sky. From the videos available it looks to be falling back to Earth to the left in the videos. This cap is removable by a large trolley crane during the refueling process. It is massive and would require a HUGE explosive force to cast as far into the sky as it appears to fly.

That would indicate a reactor vessel breach and a resultant steam explosion as the seawater they have pumped into the containment vessel around the reactor superheated. I do not believe the Japanese government's story of a hydrogen explosion. They would have been able to vent much of the hydrogen before such a massive explosion occurred.....assuming they have at least some fundamental control over any systems whatsoever at the facility. Dave

Interesting assessment, Dave.

Ending with an implied question of do they have control of anything?

Actually, I was wondering what the motivation for misleading the world would be at this point. I mean, if you're hurt that badly, screaming for help seems to be the best option, not denying the injury ala the Black Knight... ("It's merely a fleshwound" guy from Monty Python's... Oh never mind. If you didn't know it, that won't help either.)

You can see the layout, including the cement containment cap in question here:

Face saving, and ingrained habit.

That is an interesting question. I worked for a Japanese auto parts supplier for a couple of years. If you can devise the workings of the Asiatic mind, please illuminate me. After close working with these people, I still find it to be a mystery. They seem to make a policy decision, and then right or wrong, stick tenaciously to it to the bitter end. Banzai style. Unless you've seen it up close, as a Western individual, you will not even be aware that this mode of thinking even exists. It involves a concept called "face". Loss of face is a huge thing in Japanese society. If you loss sufficient face, you must kill yourself. Obviously, the nuke plant operators must maintain face. It is a matter of life and death to them. Right or wrong, they will attempt to maintain "face". Does this make sense from a Western perspective? No.....but....they're Japanese. You cannot possibly fathom that from a Western perspective. Dave

Even if the vessel did not breach -- they may not even know -- the piping surely did.

"Panic prevention", plus everything that J. Carroll said

I would certainly concur. That explosion was MASSIVE.

What is killing me about this whole thing is this: Who designed this facility to have the emergency diesel back-up generators staged at an elevation level where operating them would suck in water, and cause them to immediately fail, in a KNOWN tsunami environment?

These generators should have been located on a man made earthen/cement works 80 feet or so above ground level.

The quake occurred, caused the control rods to drop, emergency power kicked on via the diesels, giant tidal wave showed up, diesel generators immediately sucked water, and core cooling pumps switched to battery power. Batteries die after 8 or so hours of operation. Diesels still full of water.

I am also unsure as to why the grid didn't seem to switch power to Fukushima to run their pumps. The only possibility I can come up with is that transmission lines were torn down by the tsunami. This possibility was a double reason to locate the diesels at a higher elevation then ground level.

A cascade of errors as is usual in these types of situations. Dave

I was talking to a friend yesterday and the subject indirectly went back to that. He was ranting about the fact that emergency generators were brought in to run the pumps, but they couldn't be used because the cable connectors were incompatible.

I told him that this was an excellent example of the difference in mindset between US and Japanese engineers. Japanese engineers, when faced with something not explained in the documentation or outside of their scope of work will, invariably, kick the problem up the chain of command. In no case will an old guy step up and say "get me some 3/8 bolts, nuts, drill and some flat bar and we'll make something that will work". It is absolutely not in their mindset.

I posted this elsewhere but it's appropriate in the context of this discussion.

Japan's national debt currently stands in the neighborhood of 250% of their GDP. They have been struggling for two decades with serious deflation. They are the worlds third largest economy. It's impossible to know but at a guess, the Japanese people are going to need to come up with an entire years GDP to recover from this natural disaster and its follow on consequences. That's a lot of s*it.

IOW, while it might be an inconvenience not to have the stuff they make avaliable, Japan could fall right over the financial and economic precipice they've been dancing around for two decades and if that happens, the financial and economic world as you and I know it will be fundamentally altered. They could tip the US into a deflationary cycle of unknown proportion or severity. We are already on the edge now, and have been.

The Chinese might decide to use their Navy to settle oil rights in the South China Sea and Micronesia. There has been a low level shooting war going on for the last twenty years.

So don't eat any.

This is a contradiction. If it's got "high radioactivity," then it can't have an "incredibly long half life."

It wears out, you see.

Hope This Helps! Rich

Actually, you don't need to eat it. If you breath in merely a few plutonium dust particles, you will die. This is nasty stuff.

Radioavtivity and half life depend on the isotope. Those present in reactors are not the good kind for human health. Dave