- Fukushima is going to dwarf Chenobyl. The Japanese government
has had a level 7 nuclear disaster going for almost a week but won't admit
it.
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- The disaster is occurring the opposite way than Chernobyl,
which exploded and stopped the reaction. At Fukushima, the reactions are
getting worse. I suspect three nuclear piles are in meltdown and we will
probably get some of it.
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- If reactor 3 is in meltdown, the concrete under the
containment looks like lava. But Fukushima is not far off the water table.
When that molten mass of self-sustaining nuclear material gets to the water
table it won't simply cool down. It will explode not a nuclear explosion,
but probably enough to involve the rest of the reactors and fuel rods at
the facility.
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- Pouring concrete on a critical reactor makes no sense
it will simply explode and release more radioactive particulate matter.
The concrete will melt and the problem will get worse. Chernobyl was different
a critical reactor exploded and stopped the reaction. At Fukushima,
the reactor cores are still melting down. The ONLY way to stop that is
to detonate a ~10 kiloton fission device inside each reactor containment
vessel and hope to vaporize the cores. That's probably a bad solution.
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- A nuclear meltdown is a self-sustaining reaction. Nothing
can stop it except stopping the reaction. And that would require a nuclear
weapon. In fact, it would require one in each containment to merely stop
what is going on now. But it will be messy.
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- Fukushima was waiting to happen because of the placement
of the emergency generators. If they had not all failed at once by being
inundated by a tsunami, Fukushima would not have happened as it did
although it WOULD still have been a nuclear disaster. Every containment
in the world is built to withstand a Magnitude 6.9 earthquake; the Japanese
chose to ignore the fact that a similar earthquake had hit that same general
area in 1896.
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- Anyway, here is the information that the US doesn't seem
to want released. And here is a chart that might help with perspective.
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- Making matters worse is the MOX in reactor 3. MOX is
the street name for 'mixed oxide fuel' which uses ~9% plutonium along with
a uranium compound to fuel reactors. This is why it can be used.
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- The problem is that you don't want to play with this
stuff. A nuclear reactor means bring fissile material to a point at which
it is hot enough to boil water (in a light-water reactor) and not enough
to melt and go supercritical (China syndrome or a Chernobyl incident).
You simply cannot let it get away from you because if it does, you can't
stop it.
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- The Japanese are still talking about days or weeks to
clean this up. That's not true. They cannot clean it up. And no one will
live in that area again for dozens or maybe hundreds of years.
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