Criticality

Radio Iodine has a "relatively" short half life, and a "bio half life" of about 8 days. (That is, between biological processes for Iodine, and radio-iodine's half life, you'll have 1/2 the amount remaining after a week. The joys of living with a nerd who got the radioactive iodine treatment for thyroid.)

"Pete C." on Tue, 15 Mar 2011 11:56:10 -0600 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

There is a big difference between the fallout from an atomic bomb which did not touch the ground, and a "surface" burst where the fireball is in contact with the surface.

Both of which are a complete different situation from a nuclear power plant suffering a reactor fire (where the fuel roads are burning), as well as a complete loss of containment at all levels. It may not be a "wasteland for 10,000 years" but it will be some place you won't want to stay long.

tschus pyotr

This surface burst site is a tourist attraction:

jsw

"John R. Carroll" on Tue, 15 Mar 2011 11:48:27

-0700 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

Why do you say that?

Even if they have a complete melt down, it still would seem to be a good place to site a power plant.

Not to mention a government which is also borrowed to the hilt.

We'll see about that. #4 is on fire again and putting spent fuel into the air. Radiation levels have risen locally to the point where you can recieve a fatal dose in five hours. Your "easy" cleanup just became a glow in the dark operation.

The people upset on the Gulf Coast were the residents. Those eleven people died working o feed their families doing some of the best paying work in the area. Putting gas in people's cars wasn't on their minds at all. They would have been doing whatever the job was to put food on their tables.

You might fully expect that and even be correct. It's not looking that way as time goes on though.

I just read that this site was to have begun decomissioning soon. don't know if it's true or not but if it is, the land is spoken for. Given the latest reports, I believe it's a closed issue at this point.

You might want to reconsider that but I'm not going to argue the costs of recovering from the natural disaster. They will be big. Very preliminary estimates from Japan are in the $200bn range. I'll bet the true costs - all of them - will be five times that.

Thats good, irrelevant but good.

Siemens, Areva and Mitsubishi.

You might think that but they do, and strenuously. It isn't exactly a secret these days but it was in the late sixties.

Cleanup and the way they will decomission the existing plant and equipment. This site is going to end up as a series of giant steel and concrete sarcophagus's. The entire area is apparently now suffering real contamination.

What's going into the air right now is spent fuel rods. MOX, and the casings which are themselves pretty nasty stuff at this point.

Beyond which, it's already proven (and should have been obvious in the planning stages) to be an unsuitable site due to susceptibility to tsunami, which are a fact of life very much in the "when not if" category for the area that should have been planned around, but evidently were not. It's not like there's not going to be another earthquake - there have been hundreds in the week, several of which would rate more mention (6's and 7's) if there had not just been a much bigger one. When you sit on a plate boundary, earthquakes are not optional.

Mind you, the sedimentation folks have gathered plenty of evidence that much of the US West coast is also built on an optimistic assumption that the big waves that have come there before won't come again.

Having a big one does not mean there will never be another big one.

When (not if) the New Madrid fault decides to crank again like it did in

1811-12 there will be a big mess to clean up in the heartland. Whole lot of not-seismically-aware construction in range of that sucker.

Pete, you cannot really compare.

Comparing nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with this accident, is not right.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki had several hundred pounds of nuclear material, and they exploded in the air, so the fireball carried away most of radionuclides.

Here we have several reactor buildings, with just waste fuel rods weighing 180 tons in each building.

I think that your posture is not laughable, but the details of this accident are worth paying attention to and they are not encouraging.

Absolutely.

i

Time will tell. The main thing is to ignore the hype from clueless sources and propagandists and focus on what solid information is coming out. I just heard a piece on NPR that included an interview with a Japanese guy somewhat critical of their nuclear industry who indicated that the Tokyo Electric company never lied, but was very bureaucratic so information was somewhat delayed in getting out. At least this would seem to indicate that the information from them should be reliable.

Yep. And the people not on the gulf coast who were upset were the environmentalists, both with the initial spill, and then when the results of the spill didn't match their predictions.

Either way, they are still dead, and they are the greatest tragedy from the event, not the gulf which seems to be recovering quite rapidly.

Time will tell. They certainly are having difficulties, but it seems pretty local to the plant so far.

What I read indicated that the complex has six reactors that are of different ages, and the oldest two were due to be decommissioned very soon. I believe those two are among the units with the problems at the moment and that likely factored into the decision to cool with sea water since the units were EOL anyway.

I don't doubt the total will be huge, $1T may well be correct, but I expect the nuke contribution will be a small portion, the damage inland is extensive and the ~2 mi in where the tsunami hit is pretty much entirely gone.

Yes, pathetic, but true. If we didn't have failing schools, perhaps people would have the knowledge to understand that "nuclear" in the NMRI / MRI context has nothing whatsoever to do with nuclear radiation.

I don't see much of any scenario that would put more than a tiny fraction of a percent of that material into the environment. Yep, there is a lot of material at the site, and it will almost certainly remain at the site.

The problem is certainly continuing, how encouraging or not is somewhat unclear. The report I heard indicates that Tokyo Electric is honest / reputable, so the information from them is reliable, but they are very bureaucratic so the information is a bit slow in getting out.

There are three? reactors at the site that I believe were shutdown for maintenance prior to the quake and are doing just fine. Certainly these will receive extensive inspections before they are brought back online, but I don't see any reason they couldn't come back online. I believe those units are also newer, and two of the units having problems were scheduled for decommissioning this year anyway.

The costs of rebuilding everything that is just plain gone due to the tsunami, and repairing all the damage further inland is what will be the bulk of the cost, and it will indeed be staggering since that was a very densely built area for the most part.

Recall that this site has six units and only three are in trouble. I see no reason why they would scrap three entirely useable units, which I believe are also much newer. Two of the three units in trouble were apparently scheduled to be decommissioned this year anyway. Certainly the backup generators need to be relocated inland a couple miles and feed the plant via a well hardened service tunnel, but that's not a big deal. The rest of the plant doesn't seem to have had much issue from the tsunami.

It's now four of them. Pete and the winds are due to change over the weekend.0

In one unit, the torus at the bottom of the reactor vessel is kaput and the reactor vessel is cracked and leaking. The hard gamma is pretty fierce and will irradiate the entire site. It's also on fire.

"John R. Carroll" on Tue, 15 Mar 2011 17:23:29

-0700 typed >> "John R. Carroll" on Tue, 15 Mar 2011 11:48:27

Ah. I see. Okay, well all I'll say is that I'll schedule a reminder to check again in a couple years to see how it turns out.

"Pete C." on Tue, 15 Mar 2011 23:11:09 -0600 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

That's "infrastructure cost" - roads, bridges and the like - which is normally paid for by a Government project. Usually bonds, or other borrowing. But as I understand it, Japan has "maxed out" their credit, so, where they are going to get all the billions of Yen to pay for the rebuilding, is a good question.

tschus pyotr

Which, if memory serves, is also filled in.

Japan's public debt as a percentage of GDP is pretty high but they are a long way from "maxing out" anything. They have tremendous wealth and a lot of savings in addition to large amounts of foriegn investment that can be repatriated. A big bunch of infrastructure would actually be good for their economy.

It will be ironic, in a good way, if forced spending and investment force the Japanese economy out of its liquidity trap, and the doldrums. It could be something like WWII was for the US.

I'm not placing any bets, but it could wind up energizing their economy.