Dr Iven Mareels Dean of Engineering at University of Melbourne School Of Engineering on Fukushima Daiichi Crisis - "Engineers Likely Understood C

[link to news.lucaswhitefieldhixson.com]


The GE Reactor 1 was for very good reasons not repeated. It has no real passive safety features, the new designs really concentrate on passive safety features. Whereas in the GE Mark 1 you are reliant on 1 passive safety feature, so the barriers to an accident are much smaller in a GE Mark 1. In fact for the moment, even if you have really good safety features no one can sign a piece of paper, in black and white that a meltdown will never occur.

“It seems that at least in the US with the NRC, they have taken the approach that a breach of containment was impossible before the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi, what has this taught us about that?”


I think that was a mistake

You are quite right, so the engineers I’m pretty sure knew that, you could have a containment breach, because the first reactors had a big Taurus on the bottom, and that’s for normally can dump excess steam and condense it so that they can have some circulation by natural convection. As soon as you can break that thing, you have a containment breach, it’s not a huge breach, but you do have one. So one of the Taurus blew up at TEPCO, automatically you will have containment breaches. Now I’m pretty sure that the engineers knew that very well, it is certainly not something you wouldn’t be aware of because if you look at the generations 3 and 4 design they don’t have that Taurus design at all.