Nuclear power plant explodes

Thread should read an explosion at a Nuclear Power Plant.

If the plant exploded, not much would be left.

1. It was likely a Hydrogen gas explosion in the outer containment building. It has two domes.

The unit is in serious condition - The rods are dropped, but loss of power and the emergency backup failed the pool let off steam. The outer dome was damaged in the quake. That is one issue.

1. the scary issue is they still don't have coolant water and reverted to pumping sea water. That is a last level response as the salt does nothing good.

My understanding that with the salt water pumping the internal temperature has dropped.

1. There isn't enough fuel to have a nuke explosion or implosion.

I expect detectors will pick up radiation of one sort or another sometime this week on the west coast.

Mart> Holy crap!!!!!!!!

>

The anti-nuke people are celebrating!

I disagree with those who say that "it was just a hydrogen explosion".

1) That explosion made the outer building crash, so, there is little access to the reactor and likely all pipes are damaged too.

The reactor is likely impossible to control and even to access, in fact if the containment vessel is undamaged but access to it is prevented, I am not sure how they can pump seawater into it.

Perhaps they can find a way to just hook up the reactor to a huge steel cable and use an aircraft carrier to drag it to the ocean.

2) The hydrogen could only be produced inside the reactor, by exposure of water to superheated rod cladding. If so, this means that the reactor was, well, superheated even at that time, so I would surmise it has gone worse since then.

For some reason, I find myself very skeptical about what will happen to the reactor in the future.

3) Even if it explodes like the Chernobyl reactor, the damage to mankind will be limited due to prevailing western winds, which will carry most of the fallout into the Pacific.

Myself, I had a benign thyroid tumor in 1993, 7 years after Chernobyl. I was in the Ukraine at the moment when it exploded. I was lucky that the tumor was found during a routine medical check.

i

Chernobyl isn't really a good comparison to a commercial power reactor. Chernobyl was a very old reactor design, with limited safety systems, in a state of pretty poor maintenance, and it still performed safely up until some idiots decided to play with it. Chernobyl is a great example of how safe nuclear power actually is since it took real effort to get it to fail.

I agree with you, but the Japanese plant is also a very old design.

Instead of idiots, they had an earthquake and a tsunami.

i

One more thing.

The building that was blown up IS the containment building.

The reactor is inside a containment vessel -- a steel pressure vessel. The vessel is inside the building, which by now is collapsed.

I hope that I am mistaken about it.

Here's a good read.

http://allth> >>

Which will probably be about as much over background as you get in an airplane at 35,000 feet, or a chest X-ray.

Cheers! Rich

They were already reporting over 1000 times the normal background this morning.

What for, to create an environmental hazard of untold magnitude? It stays where it is, if it -is- truly damaged beyond repair, until it can be safely dismantled and stored underground in glass.

We'll see once the paranoid speculation stops and the truth comes out. Have they even gotten inside yet? News online is sparse.

Are you saying that you got cancer from Chernobyl, Ig?

-- Whomsoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate. --James Garfield

Yeah - about as much as in an airplane at 35,000 feet, or a chest x-ray.

Cheers! Rich

What, exactly, does "made the outer building crash" mean?

Thanks, Rich

I saw lots of speculation there (the Union of Concerned Scientists is anything BUT neutral) but not much meat. Where's the beef?

Check their other headlines. Who's leading whom on? Libby AGWK anti-nuke "environmental campaign group" bastids.

I'll wait for Japan and the Fukishima crew to tell us the real deal there.

-- Whomsoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate. --James Garfield

Both have done so. First, they pumped boric acid into the core to kill neutron production. They were also pumping coolant into the core to keep the rods covered using steam powered pumps. Then they began with sea water, which is the end of the reactor as far as anything useful is concerned. Cooling the core from the temp. it was at - aprox. 1000F takes five to ten hours. As the water enters the core it doesn't just boil, it dissociates and they vent the hyfogen to the containment. It exploded and the containment came down on the core. What they are now hoping is that the floor of the containment isn't degraded to the point where material from the melted portion of the core will enter the water table through the ground. That's what happened at Chernoble.

In the end, this thing isn't going to be turned into a glass anything. It won't be something that can be handled. They will pump properly formulated concrete as a casement and that will be that. Well, that and monitoring the site for the next 10,000 years.

Rich,

1000 times backround (which is being measured at the Japanese plant not on the west coast) is nothing to scoff at, and it is not to same as one chest X-ray or long flight.

We receive about 0.8 to 1 millirem per day of background, so 1000 times this would be 800 to 1000 millirems per day. A chest X-ray is about 8 millirems, so this would be equivalent to 100 to 125 chest X rays every single day! Actuarial tables say that 1000 millirems takes 51 days off your life.

But the radiation you receive from external sources is not even the most worrying thing. If you breathe in a particle of radioactive material and it lodges in your lung, the constant intense bombardment of adjacent cells means a greatly increased risk of cancer in that area.

Yeah, my bad.

It is already an environmental hazard, emitting radioactive materials, so it is breached in one way or another.

They cannot get there de to radiation, the reactor is not accessible, as far as I can tell.

It was not a cancerous tumor, it was a benign one, but since it could turn cancerous any time, it was removed. Along with it went 2/3 of my thyroid.

i

As far as I can tell, no real news came overnight, just more of people repeating each other.

i

But NOT at Three Mile Island where the molten core didn't even damage the finish where it pooled up at the bottom of the pressure vessel.

jsw

Yeah, damnit, it appears that way, but please wait until the truth comes out. All that's happening right now is that the anti-nuke groups are spewing bullshit fears.

I already view them as the anti-environment terrorists. I wouldn't put it past one of the venomous anti-nuke fidiots to blow up a plant, just to prove how bad it could be. Crazy mofos.

-- You create your opportunities by asking for them. -- Patty Hansen