Scientists to create controlled nuclear meltdown in Ibaraki facility

[Katashi_itto]

TOKYO —
A team of nuclear scientists in Japan plan to create a controlled reactor meltdown in a bid to learn how to deal with future disasters like that at Fukushima.

The Japan Atomic Energy Agency said it was working on a project using a scaled-down version of a reactor which they would deliberately cause to malfunction at a research facility in Ibaraki, north of Tokyo.

“We want to study exactly how meltdowns happen and apply what we will learn to help improve ways to deal with severe accidents in the future,” said a spokesman for the government-backed engineering agency.

The meltdown project, which will begin some time in the fiscal year that starts in April, will use a small fuel rod that that will undergo a very rapid fission process, the spokesman said.
http://www.japantoday.com/category/national/view/japanese-scientists-to-create-controlled-nuclear-meltdown

[broiles]

1. What could possibly go wrong?

[Chan790]

6. I share your sentiments...

and I'm a proponent of nuclear energy.

At least they had the good sense to build a scaled-down reactor to perform testing with. The Russians opted to use full-sized reactors to perform testing until their fail-safes failed and Chernobyl occurred. (Really. Chernobyl occurred because of poor safety protocols--during a test of the safety system by intentionally creating a malfunction, the fail-safes they left in place were insufficient...then the meltdown occurred and it was too late to stop. You can read about it minute-by-minute. It's a diary of stupidity and hubris.)
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Safety-and-Security/Safety-of-Plants/Appendices/Chernobyl-Accident---Appendix-1--Sequence-of-Events/

Still...this isn't the kind of thing you do in a suburb of Tokyo, it's the kind of thing you do in the middle of nowhere a mile underground and far away from the water-table so if your fail-safes fail, you can contain the damage.

[NightWatcher]

2. Are these people trying to create Godzilla and Fukushima is taking too long?

scratch "visit Tokyo" from bucket list

[Rex]

3. Good luck! Mighty Jack's got your back!

All I can say at this point is good luck and I hope it works!

[RobertEarl]

4. That's a good idea

Now they are thinking. Too bad they didn't do this years ago. Of course they were pretty much in denial that Fukushima could even happen. Remember how they used to say that Japan was so smart... not like the dumb Russians who let Chernobyl blow up.

[The Magistrate]

5. "Paging Mr. Murphy. Mr. Murphy, Please Pick Up the White Courtesy Phone."

"Anything that can go wrong, will."

[mike_c]

7. I suppose our willingness to model failure might be a useful guage...

...of whether or not a technology should be adopted. We set deliberate fires to study conflagrations, shake building models to study earthquakes, and simulate hurricanes and tornadoes to study their potential for catastrophe. But DAMN. Modeling a fission reactor meltdown scares the shit out of me. But if we're unwilling to do it, we should not be using the technology. Murphy was right.