Yesterday's news from the IAEA that TEPCO engineers had managed to
pull a mains power line to Fukushima #1's reactor #2 made a huge
difference in my mood, despite the later correction saying that
they'd started pulling a power line, not completed it. The
lack of major new catastrophes, the apparent effectiveness of the
water spraying from the SDF trucks, and a hefty dose of THE BLUE HEARTS
helped too. It's funny, because yesterday's weather here was quite
gloomy, and the weather of the previous days was bright and sunny, but
in both cases my mood was exactly the opposite.
In other news...there seem to be an increasing number of blogs written
by nuclear scientists, students, etc, stepping in to "fill the gaps",
as it were, and explain the basics of nuclear fission and how nuclear
power plants fit together.
http://plainenglishnuclear.blogspot.com/
is one of them; it answered a lot of the lingering curiosities that were
kicking around in my head ("How are they pumping seawater if they have
no power?" etc.)
As an aside, though I've got a decent general-science-student's
knowledge of how reactors and their safety systems work, I've been reading
up on the details lately, as I'm sure many of us have. I love
(for some value of "love") how the term "excursion" gets used
in the nuclear literature (eg
"power
excursion"
,
"criticality
excursion"
), as if the reactor had, you know, just snuck out to go for a nice
stroll when nobody was looking.