Containment, second installment

Containment, second installment

Many people have seen drawings of the containments at Fukushima Daiichi, and some terms are starting to get tossed around in the press. Further, some sharp eyed readers have noticed that the cross sectional views for Fukushima Daiichi No. 6 are different from all the others... and that's right! No. 6 has a Mk II containment, while all of the rest have the Mk I containment.

What? Well, the earliest reactor plants of all kinds had really no standardized containment design. For GE boiling water reactors, the earliest application of the style of containment we're seeing was used at Humboldt Bay and from there the style with the toroidal suppression chamber was developed. We've detailed that in a previous post...

CONTAINMENT DETAILS, PART I