Too bad I kinda liked the minions.
Posted on 03/16/2011 8:39:36 AM PDT by tcrlaf
“I know what it means when the utility company pulls all its employees out of the power plant because the radiation levels are so high. That means they’re losing this battle, and badly.”
You sound like a braindead, fearmongering journalist. Employees are pulled out, so something must be wrong. The PM’s press releases are getting more ominous, so something must be wrong. People are being warned to stay inside, so something must be wrong. Iodine pills are being circulated, so something must be wrong.
Well, DUH! Pulling employees out may have tipped you off, but I, and the rest of the world, already knew things were “effectively out of control” after the huge freakin’ earthquake, the huge freakin’ tsunami, and the huge freakin’ explosions. If you know anything more than what those tell you, I’m all ears. If that’s all there is too it, shut up. Things have been “out of control” since the beginning. Stop implying it’s now or soon to be more out of control than it is.
The rods burn their way through the core of the earth and come up through the floor of the WH.
It’s 3AM and guess who is calling?
HILLARY CLINTON - this is a foreign issue, so our secretary of state is on duty...
roflol
“Just what does happen once folks cannot get close enough to cool down the core?”
It sits in the container designed to contain it. Which, presumably, is exactly what’s happening. At least, there’s no evidence to suggest it isn’t. And absent that, I have to seriously question what it is we’re panicking about.
There’re always “What if?” scenarios. But I’d say the worst possible what if (earthquake, tsunami) has already happened, and not everything went according to plan, but the important part did.
“It’s 3 AM.”
And Barry Soetoro is working on his March Madness NCAA picks. No time to answer the phone.
Honestly, that would be anyone’s guess. You, me, some “expert”...wouldn’t matter we’d all be equals in making the educated guess...
“Apocalypse may take some time. You want Apocalypse now?”
You want Apocalypse now? YOU CAN’T HANDLE APOCALYPSE NOW!
“To my knowledge, the world has never experienced a complete run away meltdown”
Your phraseology suggests a meltdown could somehow turn into an uncontrolled chain reaction, implying the core could be a nuclear bomb. Which is impossible. The worst it could be is something like a dirty bomb, what with the conventional explosions. But, really, people are worried about the fact that after whatever happens, there will be a hunk of radioactivity sitting in there, and if it gets out, it will be bad.
All I have to say is that we have no reason to believe it will get out. That is, in anything like deadly doses. If it does get out, we need to join the anti-nuke crowd, chant kumbaya, and pray to the Sun and Wind gods to supplement our energy needs. I doubt it will.
It sits in the container designed to contain it. Which, presumably, is exactly what’s happening. At least, there’s no evidence to suggest it isn’t. And absent that, I have to seriously question what it is we’re panicking about.
“Neal Boortz said yesterday that those reactors were hit by a quake 7 times greater than they were designed to stand.”
And yet they stood. Such a shame that all anybody can say about them is that the might possibly, maybe, kinda, sorta, eventually fail in some unmentionable way.
All that is the responsibility of the (now gone) Japanese government.
All they had to do was avoid attacking us. Their attack was unprovoked, and hundreds of thousands of people died as a result.
I have nothing but sympathy for the Japanese at this moment in time, but now is not the time to assign moral equivalency to the U.S. in WW2. We stayed out of it for a LONG time, and only got in when we were ambushed and had mass murder committed against our servicemen while at peace.
And this would do what, exactly, about the nuclear problem
I know you can use liquid iodide. Many of us have that in our medicine cabinets.
You don’t drink it! You paint some on your skin. It gets absorbed.
You can google appropriate amounts for people - babies use less than adults, obviously.
Either nothing at all or something terrible. It all depends on one thing: Are the containment vessels still sealed?
Before we go on, I am not a nuclear engineer, nor am I going to declare myself an expert on nuclear design. Take this with a grain of salt and do your own research if you doubt me.
Every modern western-designed (read: Non-Soviet) reactor has three main components: the core, the reactor vessel or pressure vessel surrounding the core and the containment vessel.
These plants are designed according to a defense in depth philosophy. The idea is that you have a way to keep things relatively benign up until everything has gone wrong at a certain stage, then you have a chance to keep them relatively benign at another stage, even though it's pretty bad for the reactor's owners to have to move to the next "ring" of defense. The rings are cooling, containment in the reactor vessel (and probably more cooling) and containment within the containment vessel.
If cooling fails for a short time, you may have some melting of the rods and damage to the core equipment. No danger to the public, but costly for the folks that own the reactor.
If there's a long-term cooling failure, you may get much or all of the core turning to superheated slag, but it stays in the reactor vessel. What happened at Three Mile Island was in this stage, with half the fuel melted by four hours after the first alarms went off. Here's a graphic of what was inside the pressure vessel:
However, the vessel contained the core.
If everything goes completely wrong you can have a total meltdown. All the fuel is reacting and the core is a glop of superheated molten uranium with some melted metals from the core's structure in it. This will melt through the bottom of the pressure vessel in short order.
This is where the containment vessel comes in. It's designed to contain a total meltdown. The glop settles to the bottom of the vessel, spreads out and cools by simple convection. It will be years before the power company can even get inside to clean it up, but there is no China Syndrome (at Chernobyl the molten core didn't even melt a steampipe it poured through on its way to the basement), and all the radiation is kept away from the public and the environment. In a partial or complete meltdown there will be some releases of radiation (sometimes you need to release pressure or get rid of hydrogen and venting it is the only way) but the real problem is contained.
So, here's where we come to the answer to your question: If the reactor vessels at Fukushima are intact, the worst case is that these reactors will melt to slag and sit in a pool at the bottom of the containment vessel for about ten years or more. If they aren't intact, there will be environmental contamination. Lots of it. Chernobyl? Unlikely, but it would be bad. How bad depends on how compromised the vessels are and where. And the problem is, the earthquake that occurred was about 16 times worse than the worst case the plant was designed to withstand. So we may have a cracked containment vessel or two.
One of the problems is that we've never been here before. Chernobyl was so much worse, and Three Mile Island is overblown, with people in the area getting less radiation than a chest x-ray after the crew screwed up in almost every way possible due to poor training and bad control systems design.
I dunno. How hot do these fuel rods become once the coolant has been boiled away?
800C, 500C, any idea?
Hypothetically, if temperatures rise above 800C / 1470-ish degrees F, wouldn't a metal containment vessel begin to melt?
If this happens, wouldn't isotopes be released into the atmosphere? I mean with steam and smoke.
Are these not in particulate form, some of which may be nano and or mirco particles?
I dunno, just thinkin if these particles are flyin around through the air and some poor fella just happens to breath in this particle of radioactive isotope, would it not lay in the lung and emit elevated doses of gamma, beta and or alpha rays?
So if this particulate floats throughout an area, a populated area for instance...oh let's say anywhere. How bout Tokyo?
Wouldn't this particulate expose hundreds, maybe thousands, perhaps millions of people to dangerous levels of radioactive material?
Let's say it finally settles to the earth. Folks walking around would shuffle along potentially stirring these tiny nano / micro particles up yet again.
What if these particles landed in a body of water? Just pretend the body of water were to be a source of drinking water for the city of whatever?
Drinking radioactive isotope particles would expose the bowels to elevated doses of radioactive gamma, beta and or alpha rays?
I dunno, just makes sense to me that this has the potential to become catastrophic just working it through my simple mind.
Chernobyl. After the explosion, the core melted and poured into the basement through a pipe that was part of the cooling system. The good news is that it didn't even melt the pipe, much less the concrete in the basement.
I read an article that says it's still a few degrees warmer than the surrounding environment...a quarter of a century later.
Half-a-teaspoon of smokeless power versus steel.
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