Nah, that has likely happened before, I’ve heard of something similar. Basically, sitting at home doing jack $hit is way way frowned upon. Another quick story- this guy I know came to the US for a work assignment. He comes in the first day, wonders why everyone takes off by 5:30 PM. He’s home by 6 PM, and his wife is like “hey what are you doing here is this your day off?” and he has to sheepishly admit “well there’s no one left at the office.”
Thanks.
Ya buddy… Turbine and Generator would be in another building. For a nuke plant, the reactor creates the heat to bring the circulating water in the system to boiling. Similar to a steam power plant (where say a coal-fired boiler is the steam generator), there is a multiple stage axial flow turbine that the steam then expands through. The turbine rotor is coupled to a generator and as it turns electricity is generated. There is a lot of other auxiliary equipment but that’s the general layout.
See above.
Nagoya is like 250 miles from where the reactors are. Not that close, but not that far I guess. It’s southwest of the damaged site.
Japan is extremely conservative in terms of planning and countermeasures, not to mention upkeep and outage / inspection planning. I can tell you that here in the States utilities are fine with opening up say, a turbine every 8 or 10 years. In Japan such inspections are done usually every 2 years. What tends to happen is units here are opened up prior to their “scheduled” inspection because of something else in the plant that gets screwed up resulting in a forced outage.
Have there been issues with utilities in Japan not recording inspections properly, etc? Yeah of course. But for each incident / failed reporting / etc that has happened there, I’m sure it’s happened here (and other sites in other countries). Or worse, it wasn’t even verified. I guess my point is the design culture is so conservative there that budget is usually secondary to safety.
Cost per kW for generation in Japan is significantly higher than in the US, yet maintenance supervisors and the plant will still have outage inspections every two years, as opposed to being cowboys running the plant at elevated temperature and pressure with questionable steam purity for five or more years going “Yee hah” as the dollars pour in…
Depending on how big the plant is, one day of lost generation could be $700k here. So figure $1M a day in Japan as a conservative estimate. Yet inspection outages there are twice as frequent and usually last twice as long. Cost is definitely not a consideration.