There is Joy in Mudville Tonight!

The cooling system for the damaged nuclear generation plant in Fukushima is back. Thank you, thank you, the 160 very brave workers who accomplished this!

It takes an engineer to solve the hard problems. Here's one of the background stories behind this wonderful news.

One of the opposition parties in Japan, Komeito, set up a task force to help deal with the tsunami/earthquake disaster area. They are a small, grassroots party whose support comes from a wide swath of society. Not labor unions, not farmers, not the financial sector--ordinary working people make up the bulk of their support. Why is that good? Because those are the people with practical ideas, and the party leadership is in the habit of listening to them.

Here's what happened:

A big problem was how to get water into the pool that cools the rods that supply the heat to turn water into steam and turn the electric generating turbines. They tried dropping tons of sea water from helicopters. Dropping the water from a safe height made hitting the target with a big enough splash very difficult. They tried high power fire engines with water cannons. The fire engines helped a little, but they quickly ran out of water and had to turn back.

And then...

An engineer type looked at the problem and made a suggestion to the Komeito task force. Deliver a liquid from a great height? Have it run continuously? Not endanger the operator? Hmmm... Got it!

Why not try a contraption operated by remote control that is used to deliver sloppy, wet concrete to high rise buildings under construction?

Voila! A concrete pumping machine with an arm with a 50+ meter reach was located. It was rushed to Yokohama harbor from Mie Prefecture. (where the Ise pearl farms are) It reached Fukushima the next day, and it did the job.

Hurray!