Evil Incarnate: USA Using the Fruits of Fukushima to Reduce Safety in USA

This is not a surprise. The terry turbine was almost designed to handle water, concrete and pieces of metal. It is a extremely sturdy design, that why it was chosen.

Basically the theme here with research, is it serving the public good or unethically bolstering corporate profits? 

If we got into the hole like Fukushima...think adaptive intelligence. If the procedure no longer worked for us, we would just wing it. These guys want to extend RICI beyond their initial component design. You would need no written rules or guidance to conservatively operate equipment beyond its design limitation based on the control rooms collective knowledge in a grave emergency. 

The way this plays out is if they can "take credit" for pump operation way beyond the design of the component and current licensing. The RCIC research does no good for the control room operator. We'd piss on the core if there was nothing else available. They are going to flip the extended pump operation into risk calculations. It will turn into the meltdown accident is less frequent across the board. What comes out of risk calculations with be any violation level would be the violation level would smaller and it will justify the plant to operate with more degraded equipment and longer at operation.

Bottom line, with high academic research funded by the US government for nuclear safety, do you want to put your money into making better components for the licensed operators or do you want your money creating the justification for poorer quality equipment and reduced regulations.

I want the RCIC to generate its own control power and make the machine as autonomous as possible from the plant. Basically start and forget it. Place all the control functions in the RCIC room and make the control a remote station. Ditch all the electrical cables except for normal non emergency operation. We could do this with a very small computer circuit or cpu. Maybe bullet proof wifi for the connection to the control room with controlling the machine.

Research based on making a better component for the control room operator or research solely based on extending corporate profits and interest? 

Where do I got this wrong? 

Didn't unit 3 still meltdown with a so called very good operating RCIC? This is crazy talk by the Academics. What does "take credit" for mean?    

Dr. Karen Vierow,

If there is one system that worked very well in Fukushima, it was the RCIC system. We'd like to take credit for the system.

Team conducts ongoing research to evaluate performance of reactor cooling system

Texas A&M

Randy Gauntt, manager of Severe Accident Analysis Dept. 6232

July 21, 2016 by Robert (Chris) Scoggins

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-07-team-ongoing-reactor-cooling.html#jCp

On March 11, 2011, Japan was rocked by an earthquake and tsunami that caused the shutdown of the Fukushima Daiichi plant's active nuclear reactors, disabled all sources powering core cooling systems and caused three of the reactor cores to overheat. The resulting meltdowns caused the release of radioactive material into the surrounding area, a disaster that has spurred investigations and research into the performance of the safety systems installed in these reactors.

Despite the effects of the disaster, the Reactor Core Isolation Cooling (RCIC) system performed much better than expected within reactor units two and three, operating in unit three up to eight times longer than intended in those conditions. Understanding the cause behind the RCIC system's performance and applying it to U.S. reactors is where Sandia National Laboratories and the Department of Nuclear Engineering's Dr. Karen Vierow come in.

"I'm looking at the system from a couple of viewpoints," Vierow said. "One being, how did it run for so long without power and two, can we take credit for the system in our U.S. reactors to operate for extended times without power? The two times the safety system was called upon, it operated far beyond what we currently take credit for."

Vierow is collaborating with researchers at Sandia National Laboratories on this project, which was initially funded by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission until Vierow later received a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Vierow's particular research application to discovering the secret of the RCIC System's performance lies in studying the cooling of the system in relation to thermal mixing in the containment. Vierow began to look at the thermal mixing and the condensation of steam in the reactor's suppression chamber to see where the thermal energy is distributed and how it effects the RCIC System.