The United States needs to take heed of the lessons learned at Fukushima in order to avoid another disaster of similar proportions happening on our own soil. According to the NYT, the failures at Fukushima were not only related to the delayed use of the cooling vents in the nuclear reactor, but to possible design flaws within the cooling vents themselves.
In the aftermath of the Tsunami, the workers at Fukushima attempted to use the GE-built cooling vents, but were unable to do so because of mechanical failures and design flaws associated with the cooling vents. If the workers had been able to use the cooling vents, the reactor would have still been likely to release radiation, but not at the same high levels.
Part of the problem with the cooling vents stems from the fact that the workers could not manually turn on the cooling vents because of the dangerous levels of radiation at the time they were finally directed to do so. At that time, the workers were unable to turn on the cooling vents from a distance.
The failures within the cooling system are likely to have caused the hydrogen blasts and melted the fuel rods at Fukushima, which in turn caused the high level of radiation to be released.
The problem facing the United States is that most nuclear reactors in the United States use the same cooling vents as Japan used in the Fukushima nuclear reactor. While the damage to the cooling vents may have been caused by the earthquake, it’s possible that other natural disasters may cause damage to the cooling vents at US nuclear reactors or that the design flaws themselves were the cause of the failure with the cooling vents. The GE-made cooling vents were designed to be able to withstand more pressure than the previous cooling vents.
A major design flaw of the cooling vents is that some of the special features in the cooling vents require electricity to work; if there isn’t any electricity because of a natural disaster, the cooling vents won’t function without a generator.
Another problem with cooling vents design that nuclear experts question is whether or not to design the cooling vents to provide for containment, which has zero radiation, or to design the cooling vents in a way which provides more emergency scenario precautions. In the latter case, the nuclear generators will still release some radiation, which is why some experts question this type of design.