Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[nenjin]

It was a pretty clear example that operators don't always know what's going on in the core, but have an official line to deliver so as not to cause a panic.

And the combination of "we don't really know what's going on in the core" and "everything is fine" coming from officials isn't reassuring.

[olemars]

What makes the Fukushima situation particularly dangerous is that the techs have to deal with not just one reactor crisis, but three simultaneous ones. That's a lot to cope with, even with top trained crew.

[Thief^]

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/13/world/asia/satellite-photos-japan-before-and-after-tsunami.html?hp

[Nadaka]

Anyone else getting the Three Mile Island feeling from this whole thing? People saying "it's under control" right up until the last minute when it's not?

3 mile island was little more than an over hyped media scare, and it was mostly a media scare because it happened a week or two after the "china syndrome" disaster movie came out.

Are you joking : it was almost a Chernobyl class incident, and we're still not sure why it hasn't been one.

Who is feeding you that BS? There never was anything even remotely like the threat of a chernobyl style event. Like I said, media hype caused by a nuclear accident disaster movie 2 weeks before the leak occurred.

[Tellemurius]

Anyone else getting the Three Mile Island feeling from this whole thing? People saying "it's under control" right up until the last minute when it's not?

3 mile island was little more than an over hyped media scare, and it was mostly a media scare because it happened a week or two after the "china syndrome" disaster movie came out.

Are you joking : it was almost a Chernobyl class incident, and we're still not sure why it hasn't been one.

>_> who the hell told you this? Yes the reactor suffered a partial meltdown but by the time that happened they were able to dump boric acid into the system, yes it released radioactive gas in the air but i told you that gaseous radioisotopes do not last long due to their short half-life.

[Blargityblarg]

Anyone else getting the Three Mile Island feeling from this whole thing? People saying "it's under control" right up until the last minute when it's not?

3 mile island was little more than an over hyped media scare, and it was mostly a media scare because it happened a week or two after the "china syndrome" disaster movie came out.

Are you joking : it was almost a Chernobyl class incident, and we're still not sure why it hasn't been one.

gaseous radioisotopes do not last long due to their short half-life.

Not to contradict you or anything, but this also means that they release their energy more quickly than things with longer half-lives.

[Phmcw]

Who is feeding you that BS? There never was anything even remotely like the threat of a chernobyl style event. Like I said, media hype caused by a nuclear accident disaster movie 2 weeks before the leak occurred.

my entry level course on nuclear energy (first year of bachelor in physics).
50 percent of the core melted. The nuclear fuel can form a critical mass. There is nothing that say that a critical mass couldn't form in the melted mess a the bottom of the cuve, and they injected boric acid without knowing what they were doing.

[Nadaka]

Who is feeding you that BS? There never was anything even remotely like the threat of a chernobyl style event. Like I said, media hype caused by a nuclear accident disaster movie 2 weeks before the leak occurred.

my entry level course on nuclear energy (first year of bachelor in physics).
50 percent of the core melted. The nuclear fuel can form a critical mass. There is nothing that say that a critical mass couldn't form in the melted mess a the bottom of the cuve, and they injected boric acid without knowing what they were doing.

You should seriously reconsider claiming that nothing says that a critical mass couldn't form from reactor fuel in the same paragraph that you also claim a serious education in physics. Critical Mass is the configuration required for a runaway nuclear reaction leading to a nuclear detonation. The configuration required is a ratio of reaction mass with a sufficiently low surface area. Nuclear fuel isn't pure enough to achieve that ratio under any achievable conditions.

Its like saying that nothing says that water won't suddenly detonate with a thermonuclear explosion.

And yes, they knew what they were doing when they resorted to boric acid. Where they didn't know what they were doing is when they didn't take it seriously right from the beginning.

[Phmcw]

And you really should stop being so sure about your affirmation, save if you're actually working in the field.
I can't find any sources saying that reactor fuel can't form a critical mass. If you have some please give them.
No they didn't know what they were doing, because they knew nothing of the state of the reactor when they dumped it, and that they were so far from it's normal operation that unexpected behavior was likely.

Edit : oh and stop being rude and taking it personally.

[Tellemurius]

Anyone else getting the Three Mile Island feeling from this whole thing? People saying "it's under control" right up until the last minute when it's not?

3 mile island was little more than an over hyped media scare, and it was mostly a media scare because it happened a week or two after the "china syndrome" disaster movie came out.

Are you joking : it was almost a Chernobyl class incident, and we're still not sure why it hasn't been one.

gaseous radioisotopes do not last long due to their short half-life.

Not to contradict you or anything, but this also means that they release their energy more quickly than things with longer half-lives.

Yes but most of the isotopes in the gas is noble gas, not really much absorbed in the body. There is iodine but we can block that.

[Thief^]

Can we go back to talking about Japan?

[Tellemurius]

Can we go back to talking about Japan?

Yes i have been berating this many times but considering the predicament of their nuclear reactors this talk will be necessary to clear out the bs.

[Starver]

And you really should stop being so sure about your affirmation, save if you're actually working in the field.
I can't find any sources saying that reactor fuel can't form a critical mass. If you have some please give them.

You may or may not believe my education in the matter (here, I'm just an anonymous avatar...  In fact, I don't even have an avatar...) but I would like to assert that to get nuclear-fuel grade material into nuclear-bomb grade material is a bit of a difficult process (hence the fuss over various nations <cough>Iran</cough> having centrifuges and the like).

Getting enough fission-supporting isotope into a small-enough area, with less than a certain amount of other contaminants (non-fissile isotypes, waste nuclear products, what's left of the coolant, what's there of the stuff they've dumped into the core to try and prevent the event) from a mere melt-down to the extent of getting to enough mass at bomb-grade densities (and, as has been pointed out, various nuclear weapons may also require explosive charges to compress the fissile material even further, as part of the effort to get the required nuclear explosion going on) is not exactly as unlikely as all the atoms of oxygen in the room suddenly deciding they all want to be packed at one side of it but not at the other, but mathematically very much with the same meta-order of magnitude or so.

There are some good authoritative on-line sources, but there's enough places out there with "proof" of that thoroughly disproved cold fusion method, perpetual motion machine building instructions and things such as the Time Cube, so if your Bachelors has given you your current opinion I can't see you taking anything I'd show you any more seriously.


(To address the ninja posts from Thief^ and Tellemurius, I'd be happy if we were talking about Japan, but there's only so much info us armchair newshounds can relay before it gets to "Yup, it still looks bad."  I think a quick diversion down one particularly detailed (albeit heated) discussion about a still-developing occurrence should be relevent, and at least keep us interested until the Next Big Thing.  Or whatever develops from the current situation.  I'd also find it slightly morbid and distracting if someone was giving twice-daily body-counts, given that we can't do anything to have made anybody not die or especially to make sure that people as yet not found to be dead could be found alive, but if there was no other news to speak of I could see that dominating this.  Along with the "OMG! WTF! Before and after pictures here!  Video here!" and suchlike that is going to rumble along as long as there's new stuff to add following this general meme.)

[Duke 2.0]

 I don't think he was implying a bomb-type reaction(Which is absurd in every possible way), but more a runaway nuclear reaction that would melt through the floor. Even Chernobyl was nowhere close to being a nuclear bomb. Every nuclear disaster to date was based on bad design decisions, such as the water tub under the reactor at Chernobyl that caused a steam explosion when the core melted through its containment. Three Mile Island didn't have any design decisions that would cause such an explosion to spread radioactive materials over the landscape, the threat was the core melting through the floor because the reaction could not be stopped and the resulting core release contaminating the water table. It's a very similar threat here, where the control rods could potentially fail and allow melted fuel to collect and start reacting again instead of just decay heat.

 Basically:
 Chernobyl won't happen again because we are not stupid, and was not close to happening again at that scale.
 Three Mile Island is definitely a possible outcome here if they can't get rid of the decay heat fast enough.

[olemars]

Video here!