There is no leak people, I just pushed the wrong button "thingy"
Posted on 07/17/2007 10:02:21 AM PDT by Milwaukee_Guy
“Is this another Chernbyl...”
Absolutely NOT, Chernobyl was a grphite cored reactor, they were testing it and inadvertantly drained all of the coolant fromt he reactor then restarted it, the reactor melted down and burned through the floor.
In Japan, the reactor shut off automatically, there can be no reactor melt down.
this is the sort of thing the Enviroweenies luv to pounce on, rather then congratulating the Japanese engineers for sucha great design, they will scream about a spill...
Drums like that most likely have only low-level waste in them - stuff like contaminated tools, rags, protective clothing, sludge from the water chemistry system. There isn’t enough activity there to be of much concern outside of a few meters away.
The high-level waste would be in the spent fuel pools. This is probably the most vulnerable part of the plant, and the source of any ‘sloshed’ water. The water from the fuel pool isn’t extremely radioactive, but is is contaminated with some isotopes such as they describe, cobalt, strontium, tritium, radon - all decay daughters or induced radiation products.
I assumed it wasn’t - but figured by phrasing the question that way, I’d get a good science lesson! So it’s good design - something we ought to emulate, actually.
This is pretty standard when a serious earthquake happens. Takes at least 2-3 days for the real news to get out. I remember being in the San Fernando earthquake (1971) and the news reports said that it was just a minor quake. We were without running water for a week. Go figure.
why would they keep 1.2 million gallons of this sitting around in liquid form? (22k x 55gals)
Just a rough guess, but it appears the fire is in a primary transformer just off of the turbine floor (the building immediately to the left of the smoke column).
The reactor building is the one immediately behind the turbine building, running at right angles to it and slightly higher.
‘Boilers’ use a single steam loop from the reactor to the turbine and back. There is some radiation carried forward - that is why there are two containments. Pressurized plants have two steam loops. The primary is entirely within the reactor containment building, and theoretically, no radiation is carried foward to the turbines.
Don’t ask me to opine which is better - GE and Westinghouse have been going around about this for forty years and I’m not getting in the middle of it.
Captain Hyperbole is too busy at the moment fighting man made Global Warming..
We may have to settle for Lt Greenpeace.....LOL
I’ll bet a coalfired plant gives off more radiation in a day than leaked from this plant, just like the Three Mile Island incident.
No, some leaked water does not constitute a Chernobyl-type incident. There is no damage to the core.
It’s probably the content of the spent fuel pool. Spent fuel that is withdrawn from the reactor is screaming hot - both thermally and radiation-wise. It is kept underwater in the reactor containment until the heat and the radioactivity die down and it can be put into dry storage.
The spent fuel pool is like an olympic-sized pool, only deeper.
No no no no NO. :p
Just because it’s in barrels doesn’t mean it’s in a liquid form. They could contain spent fuel rods, dirty rags, grease, old pipes, etc. Anything dangerous would also be inside another containment vessel within the barrel. A barrel alone would not be a very good storage device for radio active material, it just to protect the inner vessel from damage.
And don’t forget the martians sealed in drums since the 30’s.
The Japanese have a vast amount of U.S. dollars already --- some $800 billion the last time I looked in foreign reserves, and I don't imagine that they will come around asking for more.
Japan has had a lot of disasters, and they didn't come around for any cash. I think that the Tokaimura nuclear event in Ibaraki will probably prove to have been worse than what we are hearing about this current one.
By the by, Japan (along with many other countries) did offer disaster relief assistance after Hurricane Katrina.
“rather then congratulating the Japanese American engineers for such a great design”
I stand corrected Sir!
Either way, congratualtions are in order, the plant even survived a stronger earthquake then it had been designed to withstand.
Yeah. Stuff is designed to break. They can’t make anything invincible. I want to puke when i hear dopey people say “Why don’t they just make planes out of the same stuff as th black boxes?”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.