What is needed on all nuclear reactors is a manually operated

[shraby]

cooling mechanism. Maybe the coolant stored above and a large wheel to turn and let the coolant into the reactor. Then if the power is out and the back up generators don't work, the manually operated one will. It would have solved a lot of problems right now in Japan.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. The runaway heat should be what forces the water in, it's called a failsafe type

of a thing.

[shraby]

3. Mr. Shraby worked for about 20 years at nuke plants and he

said he thought a manually operated cooling system in a case like at Japan would do the job and it shouldn't be outrageously expensive to have.

[rzemanfl]

2. I toured a nuke plant once as part of my job and I used to use

hand pumps to get water at fishing resorts as a kid fifty some years ago. The pipes at a nuke plant are huge and would drain a water tower quickly.

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. They are... it is not working very well

the workers turing them have been exposed to a few RADS...

[joshcryer]

5. There's no passive safety on these designs.

[nadinbrzezinski]

8. I guess NHK has been lying goodbye

[truedelphi]

6. Sounds all right by me.

But you still have the problem of storage, and of security, and health risk factors, and when you consider all the money that the nuke industry has pilfered from the unsuspecting public, how nice it would have been if that money had gone to solar or wind industries instead.

By tail end of the Jimmy Carter Administration over 17% of all the upscale housing in the USA was being built with solar. That fact scared the be-jesus out of the nuke and gas and coal people.

So the first thing that happened when Reagan came in, the lobbyists for those non-renewable sources hit Washington DC and overturned the tax exemptions for solar.

And now these many years later, we are still debating the F___king nuclear problem.

[RKP5637]

10. Reagan and Bush fucked this country up so badly we well might never recover. n/t

[Old and In the Way]

7. I wonder why the back up generators weren't mounted on the roof.

Losing the generators in the flooding seems to be the root cause of this disaster...why weren't the bright minds in charge of emergency planning thinking about where to site the generators?

[sharesunited]

9. That and lead-lined underpants.

[Travis_0004]

11. I think these types of reactors exist

It is newer technology, so it can be done, but these are older reactors. As somebody else said, the idea of a water tower or something just wouldn't work. The worlds largest water tower holds 1.2 million gallons. With nuclear plans using up to 10-15 million gallons a day, so they would need about 10 of the largest water towers ever built, to get one day of passive cooling