Quote Originally Posted by Glow9 View Post
How are they getting water in now still air dropping? I wonder why they don't make a wicked long eavestroughs or plumbing a direct way in. I just say that since that pic above was showing the core exposed.
Last I checked there were military firetrucks on site with water cannons that could be operated from within the cabin. Civilian firetrucks were first used but having the operators fully exposed to the radiation was deemed unsafe.

Quote Originally Posted by Glow9 View Post
Is it just me or does it seem like we need to cut down on rods per unit in the future..
I think the problem is that these systems are outright expensive on a per unit basis and there are economies of scale within some parts of the design(core?). I'm not intimately familiar with what parts cost more than others but you can see with a lot of powerstations(listing of powerstations around the globe, pretty neat stuff here -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...power_stations) they originally started with smaller reactors and each reactor added was larger. Here are the reactor outputs at Fukushima.

1 × 460 MW (Unit 1 damaged)
4 × 784 MW (Units 2, 3, and 4 damaged; Unit 5 experiencing cooling problems)
1 × 1,100 MW (Unit 6 experiencing cooling problems)
Reactors planned 2 × 1,380 MW

Notice the planned reactors. 1.3GW each. That is gigantic in my book and I'm pretty certain there is a financial reason behind it unless they are after the epeen record

It would be nice to see modern Gen IV reactors put into place. In an ideal world I imagine it would be best to have more little reactors that can be scaled up and down with demand(molten salt reactors can easily do this ). Sadly we don't live in an ideal world.