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To: chimera
You'll get some local contamination and maybe limited downwind fallout if a large-scale meltdown occurs, but not the explosive energy release (non-nuclear) of a Chornobil event.

You don't think that a couple of 2000 lb bunker busters in the containment vessel is an explosive event?

70 posted on 10/21/2003 3:07:40 PM PDT by Yo-Yo
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To: Yo-Yo
You don't think that a couple of 2000 lb bunker busters in the containment vessel is an explosive event?

No. Not in the way you are thinking. Externally-driven explosive events do not results in widespread contamination of the type you typically associate with these kinds of releases.

I've posted on the physics of release events before on these threads. I don't want to rehash all of that. Suffice it to say that you only get widespread dispersal of materials, like in the Chornobil accident or nuclear explosions (i.e., "fallout") if you have significant release of internally stored energy from the reacting materials. An external explosive event will spread stuff around locally, but in some ways it's like trying to push a rope. Unless you have large scale vaporization and dispersal of the materials via release of internally stored energy, there will not be the kind of widespread, downwind "fallout" most people instinctively visualize. You'll take out the reactor and cause local contamination (depending on the power history of the irradiated materials, if any), but devastating billions of square miles and ending life in the known Universe, as the media often portrays for these kinds of things, is nonsense.

74 posted on 10/21/2003 6:42:47 PM PDT by chimera
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