Nuclear Power

We all live our lives thinking something bad could never happen to us or our families. We hope and pray that there will never be the day that we would have to mourn one of our loved ones because of something so terrible surprising us and coming when we least expected it to. This is what happened on March 11, 2011. Many say that this could possibly be the worst disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown in the Ukraine. The Fukushima nuclear disaster happened because of a earthquake and tsunami that took place in Japan.

According to Yoichi Shimatsu (2011), reactor number 3, which is run on plutonium-uranium MOX fuel, was built by Toshiba. (no. 5 is also a Toshiba) Toshiba has an international partnership with Westinghouse to build nuclear plants. The leak from No.3 accounted then for the reports of leaked plutonium. Then reactor 4 building catches on fire, due to a dry cooling pool for spent rods. No..4 is built by Hitachi, which has a partnership with GE to build nuclear plants and also currently develop a laser (plasma) separation process for plutonium extraction. The fire is so extreme (for depleted uranium) that the reactor is damaged. This suggests that reactor 4 was also internally damaged, meaning that it was operating at time of the tsunami, in an unscheduled run for either of two purposes: offline electrical generation for some reason inside Fukushima 1; or for a controlled reaction aimed at reprocessing (neutron enrichment) of spent fuel rods to increase their fissile uranium content (prior to extraction). Next, reactors 4 and 5 are found to be generating hydrogen gas.

At this moment, no one is totally sure with what happened. Some say it was the earthquake and tsunami that knocked out the electric power and some say that the power was knocked out by something. I would say that with hearing and reading what happened during this disaster; this was definitely a risk and not a reward.

What happened with the Chernobyl disaster is they had a routine maintenance test on April 25, 1986 with reactor four. This test was suppose to determine if in case of a power outage, the turbines could produce enough energy to keep the cooling system running until the backup generators came online. This test began at 1 a.m. on April 25th. The safety systems were turned off in order to receive more accurate results from the test. the operators turned off several of the safety systems, which turned out to be a disastrous decision. In the middle of the test, the shutdown had to be delayed nine hours because of a high demand for power in Kiev. The shutdown and test continued again at 11:10 p.m. on the night of April 25th. It was after 1 a.m. on the 26th of April that the reactor's power dropped suddenly causing a dangerous situation. The operators tried to compensate for the low power but the reactor went out of control. If the safety systems had remained on, they would have fixed the problem; however, they were not. The reactor