Explosion rocks Japanese nuclear plant damaged by earthquake

[polaris93]

http://www.thonline.com/article.cfm?id=314690Read more... )

Comments

[operations]

True, so true about the power plants.

I'm waiting for our anti-nuclear crowds to start wailing about this again.

[polaris93]

Oh, I'm sure they're tuning up nicely about now. If they didn't have that to rant about, though, they'd find ten dozen other things to vent their ire on. "The religion of perpetual outrage" isn't just Islam -- it's the First Church of Anything Serving as an Excuse to Riot Over for Anyone Who Wants To, and it has millions of worshippers from all over the world, whose ethnic backgrounds, official religions, cultural surrounds, and everything else varies as widely as humanity itself. (Alternate name for them: The First Church of People Who Never Grew Up.)

[brezhnev]

Sounds bad, but could be worse. I've seen worse. I'm wondering, though, why the relief valve wasn't engineered to handle such a scenario. A flare tower, like at an oil refinery, should do the trick.

[polaris93]

I'm not sure exactly how that would work in a nuclear reactor, but there should be some sort of fail-safe like that. I guess nobody envisioned this particular problem. Or they did, and somebody else decided to cut corners, and . . .