Nuke disaster was easily prevented...

At dinner Saturday night, I told a bunch of friends that I strongly suspected the backup coolant pump generators worked perfectly until the tsunami hit, and that they would have easily survived the tsunami if only the air intake stacks had been tall enough to not take in water. Today, a WSJ article suggests I was correct. From the article: "When nuclear plants lose grid power, emergency on-site generation is supposed to furnish backup power. But some diesel generators at the Fukushima Daiichi plant failed a short time later due to the damage from the tsunami that followed the earthquake."

Here's the LINK to the WSJ article.

(I've experienced hydraulic lock in race engines with constant flow injection a handful of times. If you try to crank the engine when a cylinder is locked up like that, you'll often bend a rod. The solution is to put the car in gear and pull it backwards several feet, which releases the pressure in the cylinder. Well - try to imagine the damage if an engine, running at speed, takes in enough liquid to experience hydraulic lock - you'd break rods, cranks and probably heads and blocks, destroying the whole engine in less than a second!)

Seems pretty clear that a 50 foot tall intake stack for each generator would have prevented the whole mess!

 

That was a similiar problem with the pumps in NO after Katrina. I was there several years prior and noticed the location of the generators. Common sense should have had them higher than the water outside the gates.

 

The same thing had been going through my mind all along. Better yet I think is that if the rooms the generators were stored in were water tight with the exhaust and intake stacks straight up through the ceiling. You could have mounted water tight hatch doors to gain access to the gennies, much like a sub hatch door

 

They would have had to water proof all the electronics and had the fuel tanks be watertight

 

Put the whole Genset on a 50 ft tower.

 

With water not being compressable, and many many BILLIONS of metric tons of it coming in inexorably, man's constructions must fail. Walls, towers, ditches - nothing works all the time. Nature will always conquer, and when she gets PO'd, she's one mean old broad........

 

I cant seem to understand why if they failed they couldnt air drop a genset and have them hooked up??? in the meantime all this occured