[justa-hairyape]

Sorry. Miss read your post. Gonna get some rest after this. Basically in Reactor #4 the temperature of the rod storage pool water got to 84 C which was twice normal. Apparently the cooling had been slowed or shut down. A rod got to hot, exploded and had a small fire. Then as you pointed out, they put the fire out within an hour or two. But you do not just put that fire out. And a couple of reports claimed the fire just put its self out. Well, those fires just do not leave that easy. And new reports are that a spent fuel pool in #4 is currently boiling.

[Robert A Cook PE]

Sorry. Miss read your post. Gonna get some rest after this. Basically in Reactor #4 the temperature of the rod storage pool water got to 84 C which was twice normal. Apparently the cooling had been slowed or shut down. A rod got to hot, exploded and had a small fire. Then as you pointed out, they put the fire out within an hour or two. But you do not just put that fire out. And a couple of reports claimed the fire just put its self out. Well, those fires just do not leave that easy. And new reports are that a spent fuel pool in #4 is currently boiling.

No part of this report makes sense: If the water is boiling, then its at 100 C (212 F) and is being cooled by the simple presence of the boiling water. "Twice normal" temperature (at 84 degrees C) means only that the water has heated up -> It's not even boiling yet. Much less has boiled off 14 feet of water to expose any spent rods!

If they are discussing spent rods, then they cannot be talking about the reactor, but the rod storage pool, with is like a 36 ft deep open-air pure water pool. The spent rods create a little, but very little fuel, and cannot “burn” at all. Melting could occur, but only if the top of the entire rods were uncovered for much more time: 8 to 12 hours “might” damage the rod's integrity, but then the sagging rod would fall down into the water and immediately cool off. (The water would be contaminated - but the rod would not “burn”.)

In any case, the cooling water pool (spent rod storage) can be filled up with a fire truck if it ever gets low. Top of the regular spent water pool is about 12 feet above the top of the twenty foot long rods.

In the reactor? In at least two of the reactors rods were exposed and rods were damaged. This definitely released some radioactivity into the containment building, which is underneath the sheetmetal crane building above the concrete containment. The vented hydrogen that blew out the sheetmetal building did even more damage - going to be real hard to lift covers and get into the containment to assess damage.

The reactor rods ARE shut down, they can't react any more or go back to criticality. But they are much hotter (have more internal decay heat being generated from the rod internals than the spent fuel rods. They will need to keep adding more replacement water to the reactor to replace what is being boiled off. But as long as new water is added, and hot water boiled off, the reactor rods cannot get above 212 degrees either.

So they can't melt = get more damaged than what's already occurred. What's occurred is bad enough - those plants will never run again.

Will small amounts of radioactivity continue to get out? Probably.

Better avoid that ski vacation. The higher altitude will give you more radiation than staying near this power plant for a few weeks. 8<)