LOL
Posted on 03/16/2011 1:12:42 PM PDT by AnAmericanAbroad
The Shit has hit the fan, they just haven’t admitted it yet. The winds are blowing east to the ocean which is going to limit the damage until Saturday, when winds may spew the radiation toward population centers.
They should have asked for help from other nuke countries, immediately: Us,Germany, France.
I agree...unfortunately there are many who just can’t let go of the hype of the media..it is addicting. You can’t even have a resonable imput on chat TV sites...almost as if people are high on this stuff.
You're right - there's no panic - just people running around saying 'don't panic'. It's weird.
“Nuclear power is dead”... only if you allow the talking heads to control the conversation.
Think of it this way, you will save more lives by banning and outlawing cars. Hundreds of thousands of people have died in car wrecks. They are FAR FAR more dangerous then Nuclear power. Are we going to tackle a thing wihch kills few? Or one that kills many? Because if you are going to do the logical thing, outlaw cars, they kill more people.
Now doesn’t that seem just a TAD bit absurd?
Exactly.
US & Germany maybe, France, not so much, I think they are busy waving the white flag & hiding in their wine cellars!
The internet is a powerful took. Everywhere you see the hype being amped online, refute it.
Thats what I have been doing. nuclear power has cost far fewer lives than ANY form of power generation in all of Human history. Attacking IT is ignorant at best. Keep on soldier of truth!
France gets 75% of their electricity from nuclear power.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country
They may know a little bit about the safety issues surrounding this situation.
I don’t listen to any talking heads, don’t even have cable. And I don’t necessarily think it should be dead. I just know public perception is what has limited expanded nuclear power for the last 40 years, and radioactivity is more unknown and terrifying for 99.9% of people than driving to grandma’s house.
And there’s a lot more miles driven by cars than...let’s not get into statistics and just admit that the safety of nuclear power has taken a hit this week.
I should have addressed this, we DO know what health effects there have been on populations which have been exposed in previous nuclear accidents. There were NO deaths from 3 mile island. Chernobyl were less than 50 up to 2005. Cancer rates do go up, but we can and DO treat those forms of cancer successfully.
Now, how many people died in car crashes in 2005?
“Car Crash Stats: There were nearly 6,420,000 auto accidents in the United States in 2005. The financial cost of these crashes is more than 230 Billion dollars. 2.9 million people were injured and 42,636 people killed. About 115 people die every day in vehicle crashes in the United States — one death every 13 minutes.” http://www.car-accidents.com/pages/stats.html
Thats jsut 2005, a completely unremarkable year with regard to statistics.
Now, it is clear that car crashes FAR FAR FAR outnumber deaths fron nuclear accidents. Yet you are willing to accept that. Why? Because you know more about the hazard and consider it more acceptable. Really, please, do put it into perspective, realistic perspective.
He may be right, but if so it is probably speculation, same as everyone else. At the risk of engaging in a logical fallacy, I am also a little skeptical of what Gregory Jaczko says, because he is a long time nuclear critic (he admits it on his web page) and was Harry Reid's science advisor. Harry Reid killed the Yucca Mountain fuel repository project, which in the future will be the reason why used fuel is stored in pools at plant sites, which opens up the same questions about fuel storage pools here.
In that case the best approach may very well be to bulldoze the whole site into the sea, rods reactors and all....
Chernobyl will be a wasteland for many years.
Again, I'm not arguing against nuclear power. But I don't want my children exposed to the small amounts of radiation you might find inconsequential.
Stop posting this common sense drivel. PANIC!!
/s
Well if true, this might be what to expect?
The spent fuel rod pool at reactor 4 is one of seven pools for spent fuel rods at Fukushima Daichii. These pools are designed to store the intensively radioactive fuel rods that were already used in nuclear reactors. These “used” fuel rods still contain uranium (or in the case of fuel rods from reactor 3, they contain both uranium and plutonium from the MOX fuel used in that reactor). In addition to the uranium and plutonium, the rods also contain other radioactive elements. These radioactive elements are created in the rods by the intense radiation around the rods when they are in the reactor core (before they are moved to the spent fuel pools).
Six of the spent fuel rod pools are (or were) located at the top of six reactor buildings. One “common pool” is at ground level in a separate building. Each “reactor top” pool holds up to 3450 fuel rod assemblies. The common pool holds up to 6291 fuel rod assemblies. [The common pool has windows on one wall which were almost certainly destroyed by the tsunami.] Each assembly holds sixty-three fuel rods. This means the Fukushima Daiichi plant may contain over 600,000 spent fuel rods. The fuel rods once stored atop reactor 3 may no longer be there: one of the several explosions at the Fukushima reactors may have damaged that pool.
Now that we have partial meltdown in the reactor vessels – the part of the reactor where nuclear reactions are supposed to happen – in at least three of the Daiichi palnt’s six reactors, why bother with swimming pools for fuel rods? Simple. Even after they are no longer usable to drive nuclear fission in the reactor vessels, the “spent” fuel rods are still highly radioactive. Part of that radioactive energy is emitted as heat. That’s no surprise: heat from radioactivity is the how the reactor core vessels generate the heat that drives the nuclear plant’s turbines to generate electricity. The fuel rods don’t know whether they are in the core or in the pools: they keep emitting heat and radioactivity until the radioactive material decays into non-radioactive elements. That process can take years, which is why spent fuel rods are still dangerous years after they leave the reactor core.
How can we prevent the spent fuel rods from bursting into flame once they’re out of the reactor core? The Fukushima plant – like many other reactors – keeps the rods in water, which absorbs the heat energy. But the pools – like the water in a teakettle – will boil away unless new water is added. After the Fukushima plant lost power in Friday’s 9.0 earthquake and got hit by the tsunami, the plant was no longer able to keep the pools topped up.
How long does it take the water in spent fuel rod pools to boil down to dangerously low levels? Yesterday FDL reader MtnWoman – who worked at TMI for twelve years – told us about the 2000 Nuclear Regulatory Commission study that looked at this very question. For boiling water reactors (BWR) such as the Fukushima reactors, the time required for spent fuel rod pool water levels to drop to dangerouslyy low levels is about 140 hours. The NRC study only looked at rods that had been out of reactors for six months or more: I don’t have data about how long the rods at the seven Fukushima pools have been out of reactors. Fortunately for the NRC, they weren’t studying fuel rod poos on the upper floors of reactor buildings housing reactor core vessels that had lost adequate cooling and were in partial meltdown. This may explain why the spent fuel rod pool at reactor 4 ignited on Monday, roughly 100 hours after the quake and power loss, but before the 140 hours the NRC calculated.
Why did the spent fuel rod pool at reactor 4 catch fire again today? Yesterday the Institute for Energy and Enviromental Research‘s Arjun Makhijani wrote a very detailed report that answers this question. In his report he quoted extensively from the 2006 study perfomed by the National Research Council of the National Academies. Their report tells us:
“The ability to remove decay heat from the spent fuel also would be reduced as the water level drops, especially when it drops below the tops of the fuel assemblies. This would cause temperatures in the fuel assemblies to rise, accelerating the oxidation of the zirconium alloy (zircaloy) cladding that encases the uranium oxide pellets. This oxidation reaction can occur in the presence of both air and steam and is strongly exothermic—that is, the reaction releases large quantities of heat, which can further raise cladding temperatures. The steam reaction also generates large quantities of hydrogen….
These oxidation reactions [with a loss of coolant] can become locally self-sustaining … at high temperatures (i.e., about a factor of 10 higher than the boiling point of water) if a supply of oxygen and/or steam is available to sustain the reactions…. The result could be a runaway oxidation reaction — referred to in this report as a zirconium cladding fire — that proceeds as a burn front (e.g., as seen in a forest fire or a fireworks sparkler) along the axis of the fuel rod toward the source of oxidant (i.e., air or steam)….
As fuel rod temperatures increase, the gas pressure inside the fuel rod increases and eventually can cause the cladding to balloon out and rupture. At higher temperatures (around 1800°C [approximately 3300°F]), zirconium cladding reacts with the uranium oxide fuel to form a complex molten phase containing zirconium-uranium oxide.
Beginning with the cladding rupture, these events would result in the release of radioactive fission gases and some of the fuel’s radioactive material in the form of aerosols into the building that houses the spent fuel pool and possibly into the environment. If the heat from one burning assembly is not dissipated, the fire could spread to other spent fuel assemblies in the pool, producing a propagating zirconium cladding fire.
The high-temperature reaction of zirconium and steam has been described quantitatively since at least the early 1960s….”
Translation for laypeople: Without enough water to cover the, the fuel rods will keep on igniting, just like trick birthday candles keep re-igniting after we blow them out. Just like trick birthday candles, the only way to put out the fuel rods is to put them under water. That’s why even after Monday’s reactor 4 spent fuel rod fire was quenched, the spent fuel rod pool caught fire again this afternoon.
Unlike trick birthday candles, the spent fuel rods burn hot (3300 degrees F) enough so that the radioactive material in the rods is aerosolized: carried into the atmosphere in clouds of hot smoke. And unlike our trick birthday candles, the spent fuel rods in reactor building 4 are four stories off the ground – just like the other five reactor spent fuel pools at Fukushima. And unlike our trick birthday candles, right now the radioactivity around the spent fuel rods is so high that no one can approach them to put out the fire.
Trick birthday candles merely drip more wax on the cake. Uncontrolled spent fuel rod fires could pour enough radioactive waste into the atmosphere to cause what a nuclear engineer (at a Vermont plant identical to Fukushima reactors) calls “Chernobyl on steroids”
Well, you better stay out of the sun, refuse dental/medical xrays, and for goodness sake NEVER fly, because all of those are far more likely sources of radiation that your children will be exposed to.
It likely evaporated.
They are. It is the adrenalin rush it causes. Same as an addict.
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