Did panels get wrecked? I am sure. Maybe we need to hurricane-proof these solar panel installs? BTW, I like Westinghouse's micro nuclear plants. This sounds really promising.

...in addition to Westinghouse, I've been reading about a company called Nano Nuclear Energy and another called NuScale Power who are both in the small nuke field.

This sounds like an excellent immediate solution to the database and AI sites that need sooo much energy, if Small Reactors could be dedicated to those facilities which would also allow for those facilities to be located away from populated areas.

Of course we will still have the question of what to do with the radioactive waste, but that is a much less immediate danger than the CO2 waste that is causing so much harm right now.

Need energy and need to reduce CO2

Extreme weather is a function of extreme global heating. Compared to extreme global heating, the big bogeyman at Fukushima is a triviality. To my mind, the extreme overreaction to things like the big bogeyman at Fukushima is largely responsible for extreme global heating.

I wonder if the Western North Carolina, Georgia, East Tennessee, and the Pan Handle of Florida will be cleaned up to the same standard we seem to require for the reactors at Fukushima, that being, that no one, no matter how low their level of education, no matter how indifferent they are to extreme global heating, can even imagine that someone somewhere at sometime may be injured or killed by exposure to the debris from Hurricane Helene.

if they had put their emergency generators, maybe on top of the reactor plants? I know, more costs.

From my perspective, it would be better to not have diesel back up generators at all.

Thermoelectric systems, possibly driven by the heat output of fresh used nuclear fuel would not have failed at all. In fact the flow seawater may have increased their output.

Of course, at the time the reactors were built there wasn't quite the valuable inventory we have today of used nuclear fuel.

The best case for this sort of thing would be ternary uranium-plutonium-thorium fuels, because of the month long half-life of ²³³Pa, which would generate significant residual heat in the fuels. Once through used uranium, restored to the reactors in a closed fuel cycle would also produce ²³⁸Pu for this purpose.

Of course, the city of Fukushima was poorly designed for a Tsunami. It was the collapse of buildings, drownings in the streets, etc., that actually killed people in the Sendai Earthquake. The death toll from radiation releases, if it existed at all, was trivial by comparison to the death toll associated with the city itself. There doesn't seem to be a movement to ban coastal cities however, and nobody ever whines about their existence because of the Sendai Earthquake.

Go figure.

I don't know, maybe you do.

The author is Ryo Morimoto, who spoke quite eloquently about the effects of the evacuation and the disruption to the lives it caused. People want to return, and in my opinion should be allowed to do so.

Nuclear Ghosts

The death toll associated with radiation is basically very hard to differentiate from the background, if it exists at all.

It turns out that the death toll associated with the evacuation of nursing homes out of fear of radiation, was far higher than the death toll associated with radiation itself.

I link this paper and text on that topic fairly regularly.

Local paper reporting

The world’s main producer of high-purity quartz, a mineral crucial to the global supply of semiconductor chips, announced its shuttered Spruce Pine, North Carolina, mines have endured “minor damage,” according to an initial assessment conducted after Tropical Storm Helene upended the town. “Our dedicated teams are on-site, conducting cleanup and repair activities to restart operations as soon as we can,” the mine owner, Sibelco, wrote in an update Friday. The private Belgian company added the power remains out at its Western North Carolina mines but that repairs have “progressed significantly.”

With around 500 employees, Sibelco is the largest employer in Mitchell County, a rural mountainous area northeast of Asheville. The company said all its employees and contractors had been accounted for following last week’s storm, which dumped more than two feet of rain on Spruce Pine and flooded the local North Toe River. Its facilities have been closed since Sept. 26. Sibelco’s mines sit north of downtown in an area called the Spruce Pine Mining District. Like much of the region, Mitchell County has sustained extensive road and rail line damage, which could hinder employees’ ability to get to the mines and Sibelco’s ability to move its valuable quartz.

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/article293471279.html

We're saved.