Japan: New emergency standards for nuclear power plants

After the Fukushima nuclear accident, Japan is updating their emergency standards, in their effort to avoid such incidents from ever taking place. The Tokai Daini nuclear plant showed off their new preparedeness measures this week during a training exercise that assumed a complete and total loss of external power in the event that the plant was hit by a 32-foot-high tsunami (a situation much like what occurred at the Fukushima plant).

The Tokai plant has 20-foot-tall walls to prevent a tsunami from knocking out its pump system. To prevent the same situation occurring at the Tokai plant, its owner, Japan Atomic Power Company, has bought a portable truck-mounted electric generator that can be hooked into the system to restore cooling capacity. In the scenario where the plant's pumps are also disabled, the training included workers using pump vehicles to draw water directly from the ocean into the plant's cooling system to cool reactors in an emergency.