News trickling in from Japan

People are coming to grips with the earthquake. Fortunately, Japan is a quake-prone nation so building standards are a lot higher than other places. About 40% of Japan's nuclear generation is offline and of course, the anti-nuke hand-wringers are having a field day -- from ABC News:

Pressure at Damaged Japanese Nuclear Reactor Rising With Fears
Earthquake damage at a Japanese nuclear power plant northeast of Tokyo has stoked fears of radioactive fallout unless the reactor's core can be cooled and renewed concerns about the security of other nuclear facilities in the tsunami's path.

Officials declared a state of emergency today at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant when its cooling system failed to function properly and pressure rose after the nuclear reactor lost power and automatically shut down.

"automatically shut down" -- so the reactor performed flawlessly. More:

"You have to continue to supply water. If you don't, the fuel will start to overheat and could melt," said Edwin Lyman, a senior staff scientist in the Global Security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C.

A meltdown could lead to a breach of the reactor's steel containment vessel and allow radiation to escape into an outer, concrete containment building, or even into the environment.

"Union of Concerned Scientists" - one of the biggest anti-nuke advocacy groups out there. You do not have to continue to supply water. The reactor was scrammed -- it was shut down. There is no more power being generated so there is minimal need for cooling. The residual heat can be taken care of by the water already in the reactor vessel. As for the containment vessel, that is what it is designed to do. It was designed for use in Japan so it is earthquake-proof and the normal engineering for a containment vessel is to make it be able to withstand the worst possible shit-hits-fan scenario -- a dry core melt-down. More:

"Up to 100 percent of the volatile radioactive Cesium-137 content of the pools could go up in flames and smoke, to blow downwind over large distances," said Kevin Kamps, a nuclear waste specialist at Beyond Nuclear, which is an advocacy group that opposes nuclear weapons and power.

"Given the large quantity of irradiated nuclear fuel in the pool, the radioactivity release could be worse than the Chernobyl nuclear reactor catastrophe of 25 years ago."

Another advocacy group -- there is no comparison to Chernobyl. Chernobyl operated without a containment vessel, it was running an unauthorized "test" designed by someone who had no reactor training and didn't know what they were doing. More:

"We have to take this very seriously," author and physicist Dr. Michio Kaku said. "Every nuclear power plant has two layers of defense, first the brakes; second, you dump cold water on it. And that apparently has malfunctioned. That's what causing concern.

Kaku is a string theorist and popular science author -- there is a big gulf between this and understanding the mechanics of a nuclear reactor. You have several options for shutting down the reactor -- you can scram the control rods, in a worst-case scenario a controlled poison is inserted which stops fission cold. There are even scenarios where you want the water to boil -- the bubbles create non-damaging voids in the reactor core and help to slow down the reactor. Most modern reactors are designed around this and are therefore self-regulating. I could go on and on -- for ABC News to pander to these anti-nuke morons without the ghost of a reply from the pro-nuke people is agenda and bias writ large. Compare and contrast to this article from the Christian Science Monitor