Watched some of it live, and watching the news now. Terrible destruction. the video of that giant wave washing ships, and debris far inland was hard to watch.
Uh Oh
Developing emergency at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
When the earthquake and tsunami hit, the reactor shut down normally but they also had a fire and loss of coolant to the reactor core.
They are trying to inject cooling water now but the pressure inside the containment vessel is so high they will have to release some of the radioactive gas first in order to lower the pressure enough to inject more cooling water.
It sounds like they are worried about uncovering the core.
Please, please, please, don't go off of this POS article for updates about this issue.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karl-grossman/japan-nuclear-fukushima-_b_834559.html
I seriously want to smack this dude upside the head. As much as I've forgotten about nuclear power(after working through a refueling process and an initial startup of a new reactor, in addition to a year or so sitting on both sides of the reactor operator, controlling reactor power myself) I can see the liberal anti-nuclear energy manifesting itself in every sentence of this article.
Yes they're having issues. Yes,they are serious issues. No, this is NOT going to turn out like Chernobyl. In the absolute worst case scenario, they will place gas/diesel driven pumps in line with the emergency cooling systems and pump seawater into the facility. What they are doing right now is everything but that to try to savage the hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment that goes into a nuclear power plant, as well as minimize and prevent a gaseous fission product release.
Nuclear plants release gas all the time. It's a planned procedure that occurs often. They don't release it directly to the atmosphere, it is filtered and then discharged through water filters before eventually being allowed to pass into the atmosphere.
Unfortunately, I was afraid this kind of news agenda was going to occur as soon as I read about Fukushima this morning. The article above is written by a d-bag to assist in a political agenda. If you don't want to live with nuclear power, then I suggest you go ahead and move to a 3rd world country and see how long your light bulbs stay on, or how long the haze stays in the air.
ETA: I'm not saying anybody said anything about nuclear power here, just that this "we're all going to day because of a Chernobyl event halfway around the world" crap pizzes me off.
Bloomberg Financial channel
And THIS gas WAS released into the atmosphere. They had no choice.
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