facility:reactor no.

  • JAPON • L’ex-directeur de la centrale de Fukushima meurt d’un cancer | Courrier international
    http://www.courrierinternational.com/article/2013/07/09/l-ex-directeur-de-la-centrale-de-fukushima-meurt-d-un-cancer

    vu sur Rezo. Il FAUT rappeler que si tout n’a pas pété, c’est essentiellement à ce bonhomme qu’on le doit.

    En poste depuis 2010 à Daiichi, Masao Yoshida était très respecté par son équipe et avait confié au Mainichi Shimbun qu’il s’était préparé à mourir sur le site en réalisant à quel point la situation était critique. « M. Yoshida avait donné l’ordre de poursuivre le refroidissement des réacteurs par l’eau de mer, alors que le siège de Tepco avait ordonné l’interruption de cette opération depuis Tokyo », rappelle le Yomiuri Shimbun.

    Dans les descriptions de l’incident juste après, il y avait à ce sujet précis une description du coup de téléphone entre Yoshida et sa direction qualifiant le niveau des échanges quelque chose comme « musclé ».

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masao_Yoshida_(nuclear_engineer)

    On March 12, about 28 hours after the tsunami struck, TEPCO executives had ordered workers to start injecting seawater into Reactor No. 1. But 21 minutes later, they ordered Yoshida to suspend the operation. Yoshida chose to ignore the order. At 20:05 JST that night, the Japanese government again ordered seawater to be injected into Unit 1.[3]
    The week of June 7, 2011, TEPCO gave Yoshida a verbal reprimand for defying the order and not reporting it earlier.

    Article du 23/11/2012
    http://findognews.blogspot.fr/2012/11/give-thanks-for-masao-yoshida-fukushima.html

    Give thanks for Masao Yoshida, Fukushima plant manager, who ignored orders and prevented a meltdown

    Giving thanks to a rebel

    Luckily for him, Masao Yoshida, 55, was on watch. He was Fukushima’s plant manager, and he was among the 50-odd employees who stayed in the hot zone as radiation levels rose well above toxic levels. He was already a hero, although at that point only a foolish one. Yoshida knew that the reactor was vulnerable to seawater, and in the absence of emergency power or viable containment rods, that natural salty fluid was the only weapon he had. At the same time, he knew that the moment the reactor core came into contact with sea water, the plant itself would be effectively inoperable forever. His bosses at TEPCO ordered him to do nothing while they modeled the potential consequences of injecting seawater into the reactor core. An early attempt to flood part of the core was done improperly, and engineers worried that the contaminated seawater would simply flow back into the ocean. Also, by damaging the reactor this way, too much radioactive gas might be released.
    Yoshida and his workers figured out how to prevent backflow of seawater, but TEPCO still ordered him to wait on word from the prime minister. He ignored them, and on his order, decided to flood the bay. Problem: Getting seawater into the core was impossible, or almost impossible, because of the debris and damage done by the earthquake and the flood. Fukishima workers began to use abandoned firefighting equipment to literally pump water in, just gallons at a time, equivalent to a dropper of ink in a well.
    TEPCO told him to stop.

    He conveyed the orders to his crew, telling them simply to ignore what upper management was saying. He had cultivated enough loyalty among his engineers, and they obeyed his disobeyance.

    TEPCO then said in a press statement that said that there was little risk of a radioactive plume being released because the reactor core hadn’t been destroyed; in blunt terms, the radioactive particles were still contained. That was a lie. Yoshida and his crew were successful; they managed to corrode the core.

    ou encore (au milieu d’un récit long et détaillé)
    http://www.smh.com.au/world/heroes-of-the-meltdown-20130617-2ocz5.html

    The only one who didn’t appear confused at this point was Yoshida. He had just taken a call from Ichiro Takekuro, TEPCO’s government liaison, telling him to stop the seawater injections, which he had started.
    Showing the maverick streak that had endeared him to his colleagues inside the bunker, Yoshida disobeyed Takekuro’s order and continued injecting seawater into Reactor 1. As plant manager, Yoshida had the authority to ignore, overrule and defy head office. He was in the bunker. He was in control. He had hundreds of people’s lives in his hands. “Suspending the seawater could have meant death [for those at the plant],” he later revealed. Already, he felt they’d cheated death several times.
    (…)
    Nearly a year and a half after the meltdowns at Fukushima Dai-ichi, Masao Yoshida broke his silence. In a video message, the manager of the nuclear plant at the time of the disaster confessed he thought he and his fellow workers would never make it out alive. It was Yoshida’s only appearance since the meltdowns. He had preferred not to comment about what had happened until all the official investigations were completed and their reports were released. And the plant manager was also in hospital being treated for cancer of the oesophagus.
    In his message, Yoshida repeatedly praised the courage of his workers. “It was clear from the beginning we couldn’t run. Reactors 5 and 6 would have also melted down if people hadn’t stayed on site. My colleagues went out there again and again. The level of radiation on the ground was terrible, yet they gave everything they had. Pushing their physical limits, they would go out and risk their lives, come back in, then go out to do it again.”
    Yoshida is now regarded as a national hero by many. He was the man who ignored orders from his TEPCO superiors to stop pumping seawater into one of the stricken reactors, and he was the man who refused to be pushed about by pesky politicians like Naoto Kan. And he was a hero for staring death in the face to save his country from an even worse nuclear nightmare.
    The plant manager dismissed any suggestion, such as the one from the former prime minister, Kan, that an evacuation of Fukushima Dai-ichi was contemplated. At least, it wasn’t contemplated by him. “I never said to headquarters anything about pulling people out - it never occurred to me ... There was no way we were going to leave the plant,” Yoshida insisted.

    • C’est aussi la personne qui n’a rien trouvé à redire à diriger une centrale nucléaire sans protection face à l’océan et à avoir laissé les réservoirs de fuel de ses générateurs de secours vides.

      Bref, un bon collaborateur du Capital comme on aime, qui n’aura même pas le courage d’un minimum d’auto-critique.

    • Les générateurs de secours ? Il n’y en avait plus.
      (c’est dans le dernier lien)

      The diesel back-up generators had been submerged by the seawater that had flooded the basements of the turbine buildings and other generator sites. Electrical circuits had been shorted and generator fuel tanks washed away. There was no power source cooling the reactors. All that was left to stop Fukushima Dai-ichi’s nuclear fuel from overheating and disgorging radiation were banks of what are called “coping” batteries. They had enough charge to last just eight hours.

    • Ha....

      Le 29 décembre 2011, NHK World révèle que les générateurs de secours, tombés en panne lors de l’accident nucléaire de Fukushima, avaient déjà subi une inondation 20 ans plus tôt à la suite d’une fuite d’eau. À cette occasion, deux des générateurs de secours étaient tombés en panne. Malgré cet incident, TEPCO avait seulement fait installer des portes étanches mais n’avait cependant pas déménagé en hauteur ces générateurs30.

  • Gerd Ludwig’s ’Long Shadow of Chernobyl’ project
    http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2012/02/gerd_ludwigs_long_shadow_of_ch.html

    Internationally-renowned photojournalist Gerd Ludwig has spent years documenting the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

    On April 26, 1986, operators in this control room of reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant committed a fatal series of errors during a safety test, triggering a reactor meltdown that resulted in the world’s largest nuclear accident to date. Today, the control room sits abandoned and deadly radioactive. Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Ukraine, 2005 (Gerd Ludwig/INSTITUTE)

  • Core of reactor 1 melted 16 hours after quake | The Japan Times Online
    http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110516a1.html

    Monday, May 16, 2011

    Core of reactor 1 melted 16 hours after quake
    New analysis shows damage to fuel rods was surprisingly quick
    Kyodo

    The meltdown at reactor No. 1 in Fukushima happened more quickly than feared, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Sunday in a new analysis.

    The core of the heavily damaged reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant is believed to have melted 16 hours after the March 11 mega-quake and tsunami rocked the complex in northeastern Japan.

    Preliminary analysis shows that No. 1 had already entered a critical state by 6:50 a.m. on March 12, with most of its fuel having melted and fallen to the bottom of the pressure vessel, the plant operator said. Tepco released data Thursday showing some of the fuel rods had melted.

    The reactor automatically halted operations immediately after the 2:46 p.m. quake, but the water level in the reactor dropped and the temperature began rising at around 6 p.m. The damage to the fuel rods had begun by 7:30 p.m., with most of them having melted by 6:50 a.m. the following day, the utility said.

    While the utility had planned to bring the nation’s worst nuclear accident under control in around six to nine months from mid-April, it now has no choice but to abandon a plan to flood the containment vessel of reactor 1 because holes have been created by the melted fuel, an adviser to Prime Minister Naoto Kan said earlier Sunday.

    Nevertheless, Goshi Hosono, the top official tasked with handling the nuclear crisis, told TV programs the government had yet to revise the timetable for bringing the crisis to an end.

    Asked about initial plans to completely submerge the 4-meter-tall fuel rods by entombing the vessel in water, Hosono said, “We should not cause the (radioactive) water to flow into the sea by taking such a measure.”

    Hosono said the government will instead consider ways to decontaminate the water being used to cool the fuel so that it can be recirculated instead of letting it flood the facility.

    Hosono made the remarks after Tepco discovered a pool of water more than 4 meters deep and exceeding 3,000 tons in the basement of reactor No. 1. This suggests that the water, which is likely highly radioactive, is seeping through the holes after being injected into the reactor core.

    From there, it is probably leaking from either the containment vessel or the suppression pool, which enclose the pressure vessel, and into the piping.

    In a related revelation concerning a major mixup after the six-reactor complex lost power, Tepco and other sources said the same day that the utility had assembled 69 power supply vehicles at the plant by March 12 but that these proved virtually useless.

    The inability to use the vehicles delayed the damage control work at the plant, significantly worsening the emergency.

    Tepco earlier said it had tried to connect the vehicles to power-receiving equipment needed to operate the water pumps intended to cool down the reactors. But this failed because the equipment was submerged in seawater from the tsunami, which posed the risk that the equipment would short out.

    Tepco’s account conflicts with the one detailed by the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, which mentioned the first arrival of such a vehicle on the evening of March 11 but stopped mentioning it the following day, as the focus of attention had shifted to the need to release radioactive steam to relieve pressure that had built up inside the containment vessel of reactor 1.

    The different versions of the story given by Tepco and the agency might come to a head as investigations progress to determine why efforts to immediately contain the crisis failed.