Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire - IRSN - 2012-06-19
This film presents the sequence of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in March 2011.It explains how the boiling water reactor (BWR) operated in Japan, describes the scenario of the accident and details the actions conducted during the crisis. For more information: http://www.irsn.fr/fuku-lessons/ See also: IRSN in-depth analysis of the accident http://youtu.be/ZJwg_McDGSI
This is the first time I've totally understood exactly what happened- 8 years after the fact. Thank you, IRSN
It seems to me that in a country prone to earthquakes and the resulting tsunamis, it might've been prudent to elevate the diesel generators off the ground so that they couldn't flood.
Thank you Captain Hindsight.
Or dont use nuclear energy
@SMGJohn A long-term plan to continue nuking Japan, you say?
@*Atimatik Army* As if such thing as "cooling tower" doesn't exist.
@C- it's not radioactive just because it's been through the cooling process of a nuclear reactor, that's a very uninformed statement to make
You are dealing with something that has already occured on this planet before
imagine walking in and seeing the cooling pools just boiling and realizing shit was not good
No one was anywhere near those buildings by the time they popped, everyone was in the control rooms, they just knew the pools were evaporating because they had no cooling systems operating.
One scary sight that must have been really eerie happened at Chernobyl and to the first guy who visibly saw there was a major problem, the only person in the reactor hall of reactor 4 at 1am was a crane operator who took a shortcut across a ceiling gantry instead of going down his ladder and said that when he looked down to investigate the loud chirping sounds he heard he could see that all of the square lead plates that cover the various rods inside the reactor were bouncing and shimmering like waves across the top of the reactor, as though something was sliding around under them.
He sprinted to the control room to tell them to shut it down but the reactor exploded just as he entered the control room.
So desu ne
Unlike chernobyl, which was an older plant and was in the 80's, fukushima had more advanced systems which allowed remote supervision, thus reducing the risks of anyone getting caught in an unexpected explosion
@CJPortugal Chernobyl exploded because of a human error and a bit of a mechanical error. Fukushima went cablamy due to mother nature
This is what happens when you let TEPCO run nuclear power plants. They knew that the seawall at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant wasn't high enough, yet they still did stupid things like put the emergency generators in the basement of all places. The Onagawa nuclear power plant which was closer to the epicenter survived perfectly intact thanks to its 14 meter seawall.
Why was there no help in the form of emergency diesel power airlifted to the sight to restore electrical? Is that beyond the capabilities of all interested parties? How sure are you, nuclear community, that they didn’t have an open loop? As it happened and days following, the extent of damage and potential for radioactive pollution was downplayed when they should have been screaming from the highest window!
That’s just my 2 cents having pressurized water reactor training.
@Krystal Myth stu weeaboo, anime holds no true merit in the world.
Yet the people of fukashima are not dying in droves, why? Because, nuclear fallout is a hoax perpetrated by the energy cartel. The people building power plants are well aware of the hoax. Yes nuclear radiation is real but fallout is not. Nor does nuclear radiation cause genetic mutation, also a hoax. Look at Chernobyl, its a god damn nature reserve, perfectly healthy animals i might add. Youtube gailen winsor if your want the truth that has been hidden from you about nuclear energy.
Virginia Baca that’s only if it’s an American design 😂 the Japanese and french designs didn’t even have a dent in them
@3ggt3 “It could have never happened in 700 years”? how did you get this number? As a mathematician, I would have to say the method to derived those number has never be widely agreed upon in academic community.
Great video. All the necessary details and easy to understand. I would like news reports to be like this, not the very superficial coverage that is usually available to the public.
Failing to better protect the backup diesel generator (which cools the reactors when main power fails) from flooding was truly unfortunate.
I agree mostly, however the hydrogen part is a little off. Yes it does produce a violent explosion. But only with an ignition source. Say the heat generated from the coriom and fuel rods.
Andrés Mlinar unfortunately, even this level of clarity in explaining what happened is beyond the grasp of the average news viewer.
Repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and 1995 Telecommunications Act brought us here. Thank Clinton.
And some say being a mother is the hardest job
Always make a backup of your backups of your backups of your backups of your backups.......
I wish Japan had at the ready the nuclear power expertise available from this comment section.
The cleanup workers were heroic. They paid the price for management incompetence.
None have died from radiation exposure.
Good Video, focusing on the facts
Graham Ariss 3v
Graham Ariss gvveee
Really? No even one guy died? Or is not an important fact?
Nicolas FERNANDEZ only one person died due to the disaster and that’s because of radiation
THE US was testing a mega nuclear bomb and thats what caused the earthquake that caused Fuku!
TL:DW: Whoever decided that building the backup generators on ground level, with no protective walls, on the coast, of a country prone to earthquakes and tsunamis, is directly and solely responsible for the entire meltdown and everything that resulted from it. End of story.
well the thing is that japans entire coast line dropped 4 ft during the earthquake. lots of seawalls were rendered useless as a result.
It seems that elevating and distancing their backup power sources would've at least reduced the risk of reactor damage, and at most would've prevented the disaster completely. Unlike other power plants, a nuclear plant must be able to maintain it's own power supply at any cost, and for a long duration.
In most situations, that was indeed the case. Unfortunately, they didn't seem to consider a tsunami that could breach the sea wall, and caused a common mode failure when it disabled all 13 diesel backup generators. True though - in hindsight, said generators should have probably been situated on higher ground.
@WaterCrane First construction plans actually focused on that security issue..
It was cheaper installing the backup diesel generators closer to the plant, but at lower level making flooding a risk..
A Japanese engineer describes this failure on a documentary available on YouTube.. He was ignored/silenced!
On 30 October 1991, Seawater leaked in the reactor's basement and one of two backup generators failed. An engineer informed his superiors of the possibility that a tsunami could damage the generators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#1991:_Backup_generator_of_Reactor_1_flooded
TOSHIO KIMURA (translated): I asked my boss back in the late '90s what would happen if a tsunami hit the Fukushima reactors. I said surely a meltdown will happen. He said 'Kimura, you are right'. But it was made clear that the issue of a big tsunami was taboo. A few years later I quit the company because of its culture of cover-ups.
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2011/s3240171.htm
@WaterCrane kind of funny since Japan has a lot of earthquakes. I also heard recently they caught a company that built and installed those springs or something for buildings to make them stable during earthquakes was found to have lied about their usefulness and ordered to change them. So much corruption. Read about the Kobe steel scandal and the airbag scandal also.
@Joe Al our large corporations are getting just as bad, especially with the trump culture of deregulation and bought/legally enforced silence.
So basically the reactors location was terrible. And the backup systems were also terrible. The diesel generators should have been totally sealed so they couldn't go off-line. And the heat exchanger should never have been taken out of action in such a crucial time. The sea wall was no high enough. And there should have been a protocol to immediately begin pumping sea water into the reactor at the first sign of evaporation.
@Wavvy yeah but they built a seawall to make it safe from tsunami
@Titanium Rain You can seal them but run air intakes and exhaust lines way high so tsunamis don't cover them. Just like a snorkel on some off road vehicles that can run under water but the snorkel is above the water line.
@silvergreylion yes the people did they didn't listen
@Michael WS6 I heard something happened lile that close to afirca killed a lot
a fucking diesel generators. because internal combustion engines are famous for their reliability!
If I had YouTube in my high school, i would’ve aced all my physics exams
and this is how Godzilla was made
They just started removing nuclear fuels 04-15-2019 and it is expected to take 2 years. The one from reactor 3 will be the hardest and they won’t start that until 2021 reports say
Massive respect to the guys at Fukushima for their work. Not so much for the upper management though.
there doesn't seem to be much redundancy
Perry Anderson IKR.
Their only backup systems for a massive unforeseen disaster would only last a day or so before catastrophic meltdown. What the fuck lol
Some of these reactors didn't even have backup generators or pumps? Not that they seemed to do much good. What the hell are engineers doing?
8:19 -- ...Radioactive elements, not yet trapped in the wet well suppression pool, were ReLEaSSSSSSed into the environment
The world's most dangerous giant kettle
If you ask me, it's pretty ironic than a power plant meltsdown cuz it doesn't have energy
The test that popped Chernobyl was to guard against what happened at Fukushima. It takes 90 seconds for a diesel generator to get up to speed and they were testing to see if the Reactor could generate enough power to run it's own pumps in the 90 seconds between the loss of grid power and the beginning of diesel power. As we all know the test went catastrophically wrong. Or 'tits up' as we say in the UK.
@Adam W. I thought the problem was mechanical failure in the steam turbines; as they're powered by steam being constantly generated from the heat from the radioactive material and the cooling water, they shouldn't need external electricity.
@ScottCantDance the steam turbines hooked up with the generator are "outside" the reactor buildings so the electricity is kind of "external". The issue was that both generators and switching stations were flooded so it was impossible to get the pumps back online with "external" power. They tried connecting external generators brought after the disaster but the flooding prevented the energy from reaching the pumps and getting them to run.
Not only should have the backup systems been installed on flood-proof locations, maybe there could be a way to have the batteries use their juice to operate some valves that recirculate the steam into a turbine connected to both an alternator and a turbopump. That way you could generate electricity to run the plant without depending on the diesel generators and even if electricity failed due to flooding the mechanical connection of a driveshaft between turbine and pump would guarantee mechanical pumping even if power generation was not possible.
@Rob Fraser no the problem in chernobyl reactor was somewhere else, you can't have a nuclear accident cause the cooling of the reactor stop (or more precisely, slow down) for 90 sec.... the accident was mainly cause by the fact the control team completely fuck up the gestion of the reaction (combined with some defects of construction of RBMK). first for the test they needed to slow down the reaction, but they fucked it up and slowed the reaction to much. at really low power the reactor get intoxicated with xenon, it is a fission product that have the bad consequence of slowing/stoping the nuclear reaction. in order to avoid this intoxication to stop the reaction (which means, need to remplace all the combustible inside the reactor if its happen, so cost a lot of money and probably the job of the guy that fucked up) they decide to remove almost all control rod, which is more that it is authorized by the constructor (the constructor say that should always remain at least 30 rod, when they only let 3 left). this absurdity, combined with the fact RBMK have a defects of construction that make the reaction a little instable at low power, producing peak of power. This peak make the reactor regain power really fast and as he don't have enough rod in to slow it down the reaction start to be wait to active, and produce to way much heat. When the control team saw that they decide to activate the emergency shutdown, inserting all the rod inside the reactor, but as the heat was already to high, the tube where the rod have to be inserted were deformed by the heat blocking the insertion after 2 meter instead of 17. Then a second defect of construction make it even worst. the botton part of the road (the only portion inserted due to the deformation) is in graphite, a element that moderate the speed of the neutron and increase the power of the reactor making the reaction even stronger!!! at this moment even with a perfectly working cooling system the heat produce by the combustible is just to much, and when its so hot it create a steam explosion (and also probably a hydrogen explosion due to the separation of the oxygen and hydrogen of the water, we are sure for the steam explosion but not for the hydrogen one). This steam explosion destroy the top part of the reactor, letting it reject all radioactive product to the air let the air flowing it, allowing the ignition of graphite due to the temperature, producing a huge fire.
This accident was the only time we loose the control of a reaction, and was mainly due to manipulation error, not cooling problem.
@Rob Fraser It was not as simple as that, the test was supervised by less experienced scientists as there was shortage of energy in power grid and because of that they not allowed to switch off the reactor in time when it was oryginaly planed, so they did the test later when the experienced guy was not present. And the catastrophy was not during the test but later, during the test they made some fck ups and reactor became unstable but it was not 'tits up' situation yet, they could switch it off and reactor would be ok after day or two, but the guy in charge did not understand what was going on, so he started the reactor and did some stupid moves that he was able to do only because some safety mechanisms was disabled for the test. So yea the test part was very important but the incompetence of the guy that was operating the reactor was the critical part of Charnobyl catastrophy.
Excellent, accurate and technically reliable documentary. Thank you.
Yes it is. The best way of a 'passive' cooling was the heat exchanger that relied on gravity and steam convection. But because the heat exchanger is a closed cycle, it can't maintain continuous operation which is why i was shut down temporarily for it to cool. But the workers were unable to restart it.
A heat exchanger that can be actively cooled requires power, or some sort of free running water similar to a river going through the heat exchanger so it can cool.
@Neurofied Yamato why would it not be able to run continuous operation? Water boils, spins a turbine that sucks in cold seawater to cool the boiling water in the reactor thru a heat exchanger. As long as the reactor has boiling water, the turbine will spin causing the cooling. The boiling water goes away, the turbine stops spinning. Even if it were to start back up, the cooling would begin again.
8:03 Provided there is enough energy to start the reaction as well.
Ok YouTube, I have finally seen this suggested video after weeks.
Going to be more careful typing in "Cat vs. Skunk fight"
That was the best vid in this disaster I've seen, great job, now a follow up on the effects and severity to land and sea, please
This was a very good overview of the disaster. There were a few places where I wish the narrator went into a bit more detail, but overall it was a very interesting and informative watch.
"Let's build a nuclear reactor on an active fault line." Yeah, wtf could ever go wrong with that. Geniuses.
All constructions like bridges have to be designed with 300% reserve. Tsunami durability of a nuclear plant can be designed with 30% reserve.
Seems to me this was a poorly designed reactor type. Single redundant backups of each system etc. Confidence in the ability to construct and design these reactors seems akin to the confidence of the builders of the Titanic.
More costs less profit, money drives this world.
Things built by flawed creatures always will have flaws in their design, it just takes a bit of courage to admit it ...
Well, what do you expect from 1970s nuclear reactors. They should have been long replaced by more modern reactors
And we lived happily ever after.
They are still telling lies about the extent of damage and lack of control on the site.
lies and more lies as per normal procedure
This vidéo was made in 2012.
Not gonna lie this isnt the smartest location to put a nuclear reactor.
Reactor 3 has a different type of explosion than the other ones.
What have we learned today......
Do not build a nuclear reactor on the coast facing one of the most active fault lines in the world.
This was a disaster waiting to happen.
All this can be prevented if the engineers place the back up desiel generator higher than the tsunami wave or a back up generator battery that can handle the load at least 48 hrs. In airplanes engineering we always have redundancy but nuclear reactor they neglecting to do that now the whole Japan have to live with the radioactive fall out for a long time..somebody going to pay for this this is a simple engineer math water and electric don't mix.. How can you place a back up generator below grade in a earthquake and tsunami zone... bad..bad..and bad engineering
You guys dont seem to understand anything about electrical engineering. A battery replacing a diesel generator? If that was an actual invention, we would've solved energy problems and energy delivery in the whole world. You guys dont even understand the very basics of physics. If such battery existed they probably could've flew them in, right? But it doesnt, hence emergency power is covered with generators. Yes it's a stupid idea to put generators into the basement, but you also have to realise infrastructure was a mess in Fukushima bc of the strongest earthquake in human history.
You just say a nuclear reactor didnt have redundency? You clearly dont know what youre talking about. Do you realize how many things had to go wrong for this to even happen?'
+hellatze; he just did. This was no test reactor. All the concepts put in place there were state of the art. Unfortunately not enough state of art concepts were used, such as higher sea wall and higher (maybe watertight sealed) generators and longer battery backup.
Not only Japan suffering from the radioactive wind ... it spread all over world. And the answer is because of corruption.
They should have a triple redundant system. When you are dealing with stuff this dangerous, why not?
It would cost a negligible amount to add extra protection compared to the clean up and lawsuits from this.
In German you can read IRSN as a short form of "Irrsinn" meaning "complete madness"... ;-)
Who else is watching this in 2019?
Blows my mind that there wasn't some sort of passive mechanism to cool the reactor continuously. What a terrible design.
The heat exchanger IS a passiv component that doesn't need any power.
there is a emergency condencer but the valve was shut, then they opened it, and shut it again, because they thought it will break without water...
@Shovex for 10 hours only... and did u warch the video with understandig?
Like was said, there was one.
Great video. you explained everything well and the animations were great.
Hi great video if my teacher is watching this HI TEACHER DARYL
I didn't understand shit but I watched till the end so congrats!
Titanic levels of failure.
I cannot understand why these facilities are being constructed without more redundancies. Price should be no object when it comes to the reactor cooling systems. Really a single diesel generator?
I'm all for the privatization of utilities, competition lowers price to consumers. However some things especially nuclear power should be left to governments where you can throw massive amounts of money at projects to avoid situations like this. There should have been at least three different methods for alternate cooling of the the reactors.
I say this as a supporter of nuclear energy.
Modern reactors have so many redundancies that they are absolutely extortionate to build and have so many fail safes that they are actually as difficult to run as these old ones are easy to break. You could win a lottery 10 times in the row before you could cause one to melt down but the image damage is done and few people want to build them anymore.
Generation 3 reactors (built since 1996 and in response to Chernobyl) routinely go offline and scram and are a bit of a pain for their operators because of failsafes that lower output at the slightest discrepancy.
Generation 3+ reactors (being built in the past 8 years with recommendations from Fukushima, none are finished yet) are even more sturdy still with redundancies for redundancies. They have even been accused of being so complex that they might never run as intended.
By the time Generation 4 reactors start being built in the 2030's they will be ultrasafe, but the stigma is there and stigma doesn't go away. Today HIV is no longer a death sentence, and it doesn't even impact most carrier's lives, but that will never change how most people see the virus and anyone who has it...
What will really blow your mind is that in 1986 Argonne National Laboratory tested the EBR II reactor as a proof of concept. The test almost exactly mirrored what happened at Fukushima, but instead of melting down it simply shut itself down without any help from humans.
Sadly Clinton killed this research in 95 despite the fact that they solved every problem with current nuclear power, including cutting the cost to build them by 75%.
Amen
Built by the lowest bidder isn't always a good thing. Spend the extra money and help save the world.
@Michael Robb They seem pretty safe but failed due to bureaucratic decision to put diesel generator on the ground floor. They were tripple chamber, had control rod stop after power failure. passive cooling worked too well, so they had to stop it be fore reactor became brittle. Nitrogen stoped explosion but when they couldn't get passive started, they used seawater which worked, but oxygen was created and leakes from pipes Hydrogen exploded. Any one of these things worked, and reactor would be ok. Just a sequence of unforseen events.
@Scott Johnson this whole too brittle thing seems like complete ignorance to me. Too brittle? What? Water boils at 212F correct? Even if the system was pressurized immensely we're talking what, 600F? Materials are not prone to thermal fatigue at those temperature deltas. They could have cooled it to ocean temperatures and worst case, if there was damage to the reactor, to shut it down forever.
Very good information. Thank you.
excellent video concise and to the point
bravo for this excellent video 👏
Very informative. The 3D rendering helps a lot. Thank you.
Scott Odonahoe - 2018-05-07
The best part of this story is that all of the older people in Japan stepped up to work on cleanup so the younger people would not have to suffer . Cancer from radiation poisoning takes many years to kill you and they figured they were already old so why not save the young from this fate . Faith in humanity still stands tall !
Is [N0T] 42 - 2019-05-20
@A T If you're worried about pollution, you should ask yourself how much waste would solar & wind produce if they were adopted at any significant scale (or even today). Solar & Wind farms at the scale where they would reliably produce any meaningfull amount of electricity are enormous construction projects spanning thousands of square kilometers; and much-much more if we take into account transmission lines, and literal mountains of energy storage (if we're talking batteries in the future, whenever that happens), or lakes of hydrostorage. And the worst part is that this megastructure isn't self-sustainable until some hypothetical tipping point in the future: you'll have to burn enormous amounts of fossil fuels to even build it; and when you do build it, you still don't have a decent way of producing heat for the general industry.
While nuclear reactors could be used for both electricity production and heat generation. The latter means you could use heat generated by a nuclear power plant for industrial-scale high temperature chemistry, which is chemical energy storage, which is cheap carbon-neutral fuels with higher energy density than oil-produced ones (due to inherent lack of admixtures). And the best part, you need carbon and water to make those fuels, which could be taken from the environment, as in sea water. You take carbon out of sea water, you take carbon out of the atmosphere.
Self Aware - 2019-05-20
Scott Odonahoe it doesn’t matter it’s far from over. It’s just a matter of time there all done for and we will be next as this continues to build radiation levels until everything is radiated.
george mihaita - 2019-05-21
Whereas, in the CCCP, they mirthfully sent their youth to die in waves, mostly needlessly.
Eric Ulric - 2019-05-23
@Eirikatana I'm glad you mentioned this. I can't find confirmation of it but it sounds like a very Japanese thing to do (the honor-bound senior sacrifice and then some kind of warped twist. It's very Shiro Ishii style.
Eric Ulric - 2019-05-23
@utUBEr00001 1000% true no matter what the movies say.