On a pas finis d'en apprendre!
Mais ça peut pas arriver en France
Tepco, Japan's largest electricity supplier, disclosed internal documents and data Monday indicating the isolation condenser may have been manually shut down around 3 p.m. March 11 shortly after kicking in following the massive quake at 2:46 p.m. The plant was hit by tsunami around 3:30 p.m
The isolation condenser is designed to inject water into the reactor for at least eight hours after the main coolant system loses power, as happened March 11.
"It is possible that a worker may have manually closed the valve (of the isolation condenser) to prevent a rapid decrease in temperature, as is stipulated by a reactor operating guideline," Tepco spokesman Hajime Motojuku told The Japan Times.
A worker may have stopped the condenser to keep cold water from coming into contact with the hot steel of the reactor to prevent it from being damaged.
Nuclear plant cooling system manually shut down
The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant says workers may have manually shut down the No.1 reactor's emergency cooling system in order to prevent damage to the reactor. It says pressure inside the reactor had dropped sharply after the earthquake struck the plant on March 11th.
Tokyo Electric Power Company on Monday disclosed records of its operations at the plant.
They show that the reactor automatically halted operations after the earthquake.
The emergency cooling system was automatically activated but stopped about 10 minutes later and remained off for about 3 hours until after the tsunami arrived.
TEPCO says plant workers may have manually shut down the cooling system because pressure inside the reactor had dropped sharply from 70 to 45 atmospheres.
The system is designed to cool the reactor even if all external sources of power are lost, but the move to shut it down temporarily means that it did not fully function.
TEPCO says the decision may have been made based on a manual to prevent damage to the reactor.
It says if the system had worked, it may have had more time until the meltdown, so it will investigate developments leading up to the decision to turn it off and whether the move was correct.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011 13:18 +0900 (JST)
How one village defied the tsunami
Decades ago, a mayor never forgot how fast sea could turn
n the rubble of the northeast, one small village stands as tall as ever after the tsunami. No homes were swept away. In fact, they barely got wet.
Fudai survived thanks to a huge wall once deemed a mayor's expensive folly and now vindicated as the community's salvation.
The 3,000 residents living between mountains behind a cove owe their lives to a late leader who saw the devastation of an earlier tsunami and made it the priority of his four-decade tenure to defend his people from the next one.
His 15.5-meter floodgate between mountainsides took a dozen years to build and meant spending more than ¥2.4 billion in today's yen.
"It cost a lot of money. But without it, Fudai would have disappeared," said fisherman Satoshi Kaneko, 55, whose business was ruined but is happy his family and home are intact.
The gate project was criticized as wasteful in the 1970s. But the gate and an equally high seawall behind the community's adjacent fishing port protected Fudai from the waves that obliterated so many other towns. Two months after the disaster, more than 25,000 are missing or dead in the Tohoku region.
"However you look at it, the effectiveness of the floodgate and seawall was truly impressive," current Fudai Mayor Hiroshi Fukawatari said.
Towns to the north and south also braced against tsunami with seawalls, breakwaters and other protective structures. But none were as tall as Fudai's.
The town of Taro believed it had the ultimate fort—a double-layered 10-meter-tall seawall spanning 2.5 km across a bay. It proved no match for the March 11 tsunami.
In Fudai, the waves rose as high as 20 meters, as water marks show on the floodgate's towers. So some ocean water did flow over but caused minimal damage. The gate broke the tsunami's main thrust. The two mountainsides flanking the gate also offered a natural barrier.
But Wamura never forgot how quickly the sea could turn. Massive earthquake-triggered tsunami flattened the northeast coast in 1933 and 1896. In Fudai, the two disasters destroyed hundreds of homes and killed 439 people.
"When I saw bodies being dug up from the piles of earth, I did not know what to say. I had no words," Wamura wrote of the 1933 tsunami in his book about Fudai, "A 40-Year Fight Against Poverty."
In 1967, the town erected a 15.5-meter seawall to shield homes behind the fishing port
The tsunami battered the white beach in the cove, leaving behind debris and fallen trees. But behind the floodgate, the village is virtually untouched.
Fudai Elementary School sits no more than a few minutes' walk inland. It looks the same as it did on March 10. A group of boys recently ran laps around a baseball field that was clear of the junk piled up in other coastal neighborhoods.
Fudai's biggest casualty was its exposed port, where the tsunami destroyed boats, equipment and warehouses.
One resident remains missing. He made the unlucky decision to check on his boat after the earthquake.

Malgrès tout, Tepco maintient son calendrier et envisage toujours une stabilisation des installations en janvier 2012. La raison de cet "optimisme" tient dans le fait que la fuite n'a pour l'instant pas empéché l'opérateur de maintenir la température du réacteur 1 entre 100 et 120°C.

40 % de l'Europe est contaminée par la radioactivité | Vu: 7227 fois © epa
La nouvelle ne réjouira personne, mais elle émane d'une source qui sait de quoi elle parle. Médecin et physicienne australienne, Helen Caldicott étudie depuis plus de 30 ans les dangers de l'énergie nucléaire. Et elle n'a pas peur d'appeler un chat un chat : "Ce qui est arrivé au Japon est bien pire qu'à Tchernobyl. D'après de nouvelles données, près d'un million de personnes sont décédées à cause de la catastrophe en Russie en 1986, suite à laquelle 40 % de l'Europe est encore contaminée par la radioactivité".
The utility says the workers measured levels of radiation in the air as they walked around the containment vessel, and came up with readings ranging from 50 millisieverts per hour to less than 10.
The workers found three pools of water on the floor, and saw water dropping down from above in some places.
The presence of so much water is apparently due to the condensation of steam rising from the spent fuel storage pool on the upper floor.

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