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Merged nuclear power safe?

r-j said:
Just using a point source for calcualtion shows the radiation near the source would be enough to kill you in minutes, but you would go blind right away. If the source is larger than a point, the effects would be far worse.
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Yes, that explains all of those plant workers & fire fighters who are stumbling around because they've been blinded by radiation. Oh, and it also explains all the dead people... wait, those were the ones killed by the earthquake & tsunami :rolleyes:
 
Hindmost said:
It is from the damaged fuel...
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Gosh darn it, I didn't see that before I posted. OK damaged fuel from where? And what does that mean? And how does damaged fuel go from being a metal rod, to dust in the air over the United States?
 
r-j said:
No, it explains why they got the hell out when the radiation went up!! ;)
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You said that they would go blind immediately, and they haven't. You also said that the doses would be fatal, yet there aren't huge numbers of workers suffering from radiation poisoning. Face it, you suck at physics/math/fact-checking/coherent argumentation.

You fail... badly.
 
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r-j said:
Well, didn't they keep running the other power plant at Chernobyl? I mean, it blew up, sprayed radiation around, fall out and radioactive material, and they still kept operating the plant right next door. So what's the big deal?
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Obvious troll is obvious :rolleyes:
 
Belz... said:
He seems to miss the fact that sometimes there are monetary concerns involved.
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I'm not missing the fact that there are monetary concerns. I'm just suggesting there should be a cap on the monetary priority. Just like others here claim that you can't make everything 100% and that there's a cost limit to security after which each increment costs way too much. I support the notion that there is also a profit limit. Beyond which the increment in profit compromises security too much.

I have suggested a few changes/improvements that would have cost from little to a whole new plant:
- putting a containment structure on the generators so they can be flooded over by a tsunami and still restore operations a few hours later
- putting a containment structure around the fuel pond (no brainer there, expensive, but worth it)
- putting external jacks to plug in mobile generator units brought into site
- putting external water pipes (pressurizable, that don't require in building pumping) to pour water into critical parts of the buildings in case of catastrophic failure
- replace or begin replacement of Gen II reactors with the much more meltdown resistant Gen III - at least in the more risky environments (fault zones/shorelines)

Any of these cost many times less than the cleanup involved. Any of these cost many times less than the public image impact involved.
 
Radioactive Milk Only A Danger After 58,000 Glasses

Seems like someone in the mainstream media is getting something right. At least the folks at NPR have finally figured out how to do some math...

Radioactive Milk Only A Danger After 58,000 Glasses :jaw-dropp
The World Health Organization weighed in Monday on the risk of eating food contaminated by radiation emitted by the still-troubled Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant.

Peter Cordingley, a Manila-based WHO spokesman, told Reuters that the radioactive-food situation is "a lot more serious than anybody thought in the early days, when we thought that this kind of problem can be limited to 20 to 30 kilometers."

At Geneva headquarters, WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl told the Associated Press that Japan must act quickly to keep radioactive food out of the marketplace.

This calls for a reality check.

So I had an hour-long chat with Peter Caracappa, a health physicist at Renssealaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. He's been running some calculations on the radioactive iodine-131 and cesium-137 levels being reported in Japanese milk, spinach and drinking water.

Before we get into the details, Caracappa's bottom line is that the risk of ingesting even the most highly contaminated Japanese foodstuffs reported so far is very, very small.

"The long and the short of it is that we're not going to be able to detect any statistically significant change in the cancer rate for anyone as a result of the events in Japan," he told Shots. ...

... But many people drink milk every day. And one lot of milk sampled from the town of Kawamata, 29 miles from the power plant, reportedly contained 1,510 becquerels of radiation per kilogram.

To reach the radiation dose limit for a power plant worker, you'd need to drink 2,922 eight-ounce glasses of milk. To raise your lifetime cancer risk by 4 percent, you'd have to drain more than 58,000 glasses of milk. That would take you 160 years, if you drank one 8-ounce glass a day.
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r-j said:
How much lead does it take to stop gamma rays?
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When I worked in the counting room at Teledyne Isotopes in the early 80's the GeLi chambers were built out of battleship steel.

there were about 6" worth of 3/16" thick steel plates built up to make a box.

You had to use pre-WWII battleship steel, steel made or recycled later was contaminated.

(I was told that it was contaminated because after WWII they used to dope the foundry refractory bricks with cobalt 60 so they could measure how much the bricks had ablated without opening up the furnace. Don't know it this is true or not)
 
MattusMaximus said:
Seems like someone in the mainstream media is getting something right. At least the folks at NPR have finally figured out how to do some math...

Radioactive Milk Only A Danger After 58,000 Glasses :jaw-dropp
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But if 58,000 people drink one glass doesn't one of them gets the short straw (no pun intended). Two glasses then one in 29,000? What if 580,000 drink a glass of milk? Will it affect children or lactating women the same as grown men?
 
Java Man said:
But if 58,000 people drink one glass doesn't one of them gets the short straw (no pun intended). Two glasses then one in 29,000? What if 580,000 drink a glass of milk? Will it affect children or lactating women the same as grown men?
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Wow, you suck at math worse than r-j :rolleyes:

For those who are not intentionally trolling, the 58,000 glasses of milk is 58,000 cumulative glasses per person.
 
r-j said:
I meant, how is radioactive material from either the reactors, or the spent fuel rods, how is it ending up in California?

When they are "venting" radioactive steam, that isn't putting matter into the air, is it? Where is the metallic radioactive elements coming from? And how are they leaving the plant?
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Cs-137 and Sr-90 are a decay product of Xe-137 and Kr-90. Venting the pressure vessel (as has happened repeatedly) releases the gaseous Xe and Kr, they decay, and form Cs and Sr.

I-131 is water soluble. It's presence means that fuel is damaged (zircalloy tube has holes), and that (liquid) water has left containment. This can happen (in Fukushima) in the spent fuel pools. As you may have noticed, there was a hydrogen explosion in the part of the building where the pool is located. The explosion surely displaced water out of the pool, and may have damaged some of the fuel there. But I-131 could also be released during venting; I has a low melting/boiling point, and a bit of it may have ben gaseous, plus, the venting system is not perfectly operational. The venting into the building (secondary containment) that led to the hydrogen explosions is not a standard procedure, and there's no escape route established (some mark-I reactors in the US have been retrofitted with an escape route to prevent exactly what has happened). That also mean that the steam and a bit of liquid water that's released with it bypasses the filter to keep the water clean (the filters also may need power to operate, which wasn't there, but I would need to check that).

Also, there's suspicion that the containment of reactor 2 has been breached in the suppression pool -- the torus at the bottom of the structure. In the time after the emergency power was lost, and before seawater was injected, they cooled the core by opening the core to this suppression pool. Steam expands and condenses and thereby removes heat, but also cooling water escapes (and with it, I-131). This emergency cooling procedure only works a short time, since the amount of water is limited.

The third thing: I'm not entirely sure what happens with the seawater they pump in there. It's possible that they have to remove it, and dump it into the environment, again bypassing any cleaners or filters due to damage. But I'm not sure about that.
 
MattusMaximus said:
Wow, you suck at math worse than r-j :rolleyes:

For those who are not intentionally trolling, the 58,000 glasses of milk is 58,000 cumulative glasses per person.
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I might suck at math, but you fail to point out in your statement that the limit isn't a clear cut value. But one arrived at by statistics. On the average that will happen, but some will me more resistant and some less fortunate.

You're also comparing it to a plant worker. So you're comparing a child's susceptibility to the max rating of one who's meant to work in the middle of it all.
 
elgarak said:
Cs-137 and Sr-90 are a decay product of Xe-137 and Kr-90. Venting the pressure vessel (as has happened repeatedly) releases the gaseous Xe and Kr, they decay, and form Cs and Sr.

I-131 is water soluble. It's presence means that fuel is damaged (zircalloy tube has holes), and that (liquid) water has left containment. This can happen (in Fukushima) in the spent fuel pools. As you may have noticed, there was a hydrogen explosion in the part of the building where the pool is located. The explosion surely displaced water out of the pool, and may have damaged some of the fuel there. But I-131 could also be released during venting; I has a low melting/boiling point, and a bit of it may have ben gaseous, plus, the venting system is not perfectly operational. The venting into the building (secondary containment) that led to the hydrogen explosions is not a standard procedure, and there's no escape route established (some mark-I reactors in the US have been retrofitted with an escape route to prevent exactly what has happened). That also mean that the steam and a bit of liquid water that's released with it bypasses the filter to keep the water clean (the filters also may need power to operate, which wasn't there, but I would need to check that).

Also, there's suspicion that the containment of reactor 2 has been breached in the suppression pool -- the torus at the bottom of the structure. In the time after the emergency power was lost, and before seawater was injected, they cooled the core by opening the core to this suppression pool. Steam expands and condenses and thereby removes heat, but also cooling water escapes (and with it, I-131). This emergency cooling procedure only works a short time, since the amount of water is limited.

The third thing: I'm not entirely sure what happens with the seawater they pump in there. It's possible that they have to remove it, and dump it into the environment, again bypassing any cleaners or filters due to damage. But I'm not sure about that.
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Nice post elgarak, but I am afraid that r-j will just ignore it like he has every other time this information has been posted in this thread. He doesn't seem to get the idea that radioactive gas from the fission reaction can eascape the rods and mix with steam and then after the nucleus decays, become a metal like Strongtium, Caesium, or Rubidium.

From what I have read, there is a lot of wastewater loss from the plant from the spraying and water bombing attempts, and that likely has carried a lot of the I-131 into the surrounding water too.
 
Java Man said:
I might suck at math, but you fail to point out in your statement that the limit isn't a clear cut value. But one arrived at by statistics. On the average that will happen, but some will me more resistant and some less fortunate.

You're also comparing it to a plant worker. So you're comparing a child's susceptibility to the max rating of one who's meant to work in the middle of it all.
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Ladies and gentlemen, this admission renders the rest of JM's comment moot. I rest my case.
 
MattusMaximus said:
Wow, you suck at math worse than r-j :rolleyes:

For those who are not intentionally trolling, the 58,000 glasses of milk is 58,000 cumulative glasses per person.
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Now let's bring it down to non-radiation workers.

Limit is 1uS not 50uS. All of a sudden your 58,000 glasses of milk become 1,000. Your 160 years become 3 years.

And then there's the little itsy bitsy detail of the difference between radioactive iodine on the skin and in the thyroid.
 
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