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Merged nuclear power safe?

So, the antipodal point is in the south atlantic off the coast of Uraguay.

"The Uraguay Syndrome?"
 
Skwinty said:
Containment 1 is the Zircalloy cladding and you cannot flood inside that.

Containment 2 is the pressure vessel which you can flood.

Containment 3 is the concrete containment structure which can be directly flooded.

Look at the cutaway drawing in the pdf file page 16.

As far as I understand, fire trucks are pumping the sea water into containment and not recirculating this water.
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thanks
 
Thunder said:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110314/ts_nm/us_japan_quake

so, if one or more of the cores does melt down due to lack of cooling..what is the probable result?
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A mess, contained inside the primary containment vessel at Fukushima. That and a really expensive cleanup effort. That's all.

are there any dangers to folks in the rest of Asia and the west coast of North & South America?
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From the information I've been reading (from reputable sources - i.e. not the media), no.

every morning I wake up, and the news gets worse. :(
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I suggest you stop watching the news, because they are making a mountain out of a molehill regarding the nuclear plant issue.

If it puts your mind a bit more at ease, take a few minutes to read my blog post on the matter.
 
Java Man said:
Obviously everyone is happy no more life was lost to radiation. But those reactors will have to be replaced. In the meantime there is a power shortage. Had that money been spent on upgrading them ten years ago with newer technology then those cores could be powered up again. Providing the needed energy. The money now needed to repair things would not need to be subdivided into cleaning and repairing melted cores.

My "crisis" isn't a nuclear blowout. Which would be the most dire, extreme and undesired event. Nevertheless the current situation is quite a nightmare that could have been prevented if the cores were replaced with newer models. The Japanese are looking at quite an expense down the road and that's without a blowout.

Well it would be good to decommission designs that can cause a meltdown in case of a cooling failure. Given we already have designs that work that way.

And by safe I don't only mean a huge radioactive cloud. But safe in the knowledge that it's working ok, that it shutdown ok, that you can now reactivate it to power the grid in this crisis, etc etc etc. It retrospect it begins to look a lot cheaper and better to have gone through the expense of upgrading it.

We can sure talk about that in another thread if you want to.
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The reactors were going to be replaced anyway as they were due to be decommisioned shortly. The additional costs of the cleanup might be economically disasterous for the power company but weren't you arguing that economic decisions are being made that affect safety?

If the argument is that the company might have cost themselves more in the long run then you'd have to weigh up the cost of this one clean up vs the cost of upgrading/replacing and decommissioning the entire population of power plants every few years.

This wasn't a nuclear blowout and several people have noted that wasn't through luck but through design. This 'disaster' hasn't been a disaster at all except for the fact that they are going to have to spend shedloads cleaning up the mess.

I really doubt it would be cheaper to upgrade every power plant on a regular basis than to clean up the one problem that occurs once in a lifetime but I haven't seen the numbers, you might be right.

In any case, if the worst we can say is that this is going to be a costly cleanup operation then the power plant design has done bloody well and is certainly 'safe'
 
bobdroege7 said:
In my understanding the containments are in order the fuel pellets, the zircaloy cladding, the reactor coolant, the pressure vessel, the drywell, the containment dome and the vapor shield.
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It is my guess that the fuel pellets have swelled and the cladding on the pins may have burst.

In any case, the fuel system itself may be damaged from the swelling.

about 10 years ago, I spent some time at a facility that did research on fuel pin swelling. I was there for another purpose, but it was interesting to see how they studdied this phemonmina.
 
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Belz... said:
That's weird logic.
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It is entirely illogical - just as pointing out that western plants have not malefunctioned so far -since my point was rather that thus far things went wrong because they were unforeseen rather than just unlikely.

It seems as if German power plants would not be able to withstand a direct attack with a large passenger airplane: Not only did nobody think that this might happen, the idea alone was never conceived off, even though (!) they did think that somebody might run a fighter jet into a plant.

Now the situation has changed and people are aware of the problem. New plants will be build even stronger and there is discussion about how one could protect existing power plants against such attacks.

But the problem existed before someone was aware of it, the reactors were deemed "safe" and it simply turned out that they never were.

I don't want to actually argue over what people knew and said before Chernobyl - this might just be my memory fooling me after all these years. I would simply like to see a more open discussion about the fact that we do not know every last risk.

And just to make this very clear: I am still all for nuclear power.
 
The pellets will not dissolve in water, salt or clean.

The reaction would probably be just cooling although the net effect of salt water will be accelerated corrosion of metal components.

These plants will never be used again.
 
another interesting question is this: Did the tsunami and the loss of auxilery power (and the subsequent explosions) impact the spent fuel pools also?

Is there any risk for the fuel in these pools to overheat as well?
 
Skwinty said:
The pellets will not dissolve in water, salt or clean.

The reaction would probably be just cooling although the net effect of salt water will be accelerated corrosion of metal components.

These plants will never be used again.
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I was thinking along the lines of hot corrosion effects. Sea water contains a lot of iodine which can react with certain types of fuel cladding.
 
Rasmus said:
It is entirely illogical - just as pointing out that western plants have not malefunctioned so far -since my point was rather that thus far things went wrong because they were unforeseen rather than just unlikely.
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I don't think anyone is saying that "it never broke, therefore won't." so it sounds pretty strawmanlike to me.
 
Belz... said:
I don't think anyone is saying that "it never broke, therefore won't." so it sounds pretty strawmanlike to me.
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Post #219.

My issue is this


1. "Nuclear power is reasonable safe because of all the redundancy built into the system."

2. Chernobyl goes BOOM.

3. "Nuclear power in the west is reasonably safe, because unlike those plants you cannot induce a core melt either willfully or accidentally pressing any of the buttons in the contropl room."

4. Terrorists hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings.

5. "Oops, we didn't see that coming, either ...."

6. Major earthquake and tsunami hit plant in Japan that then fails until the last line of defense.

7. "Oh, wait, hang on, we're still busy with the airplanes and terrorists here..."

8. "But anyway, it did not blow up and we didn't see all of that coming all at once and the last line of defense held like it should have, right? Also, we don't get tsunamis and earthquakes here."

9. - any bets on what will happen next ? -

10. "Oops, we totally didn't see that coming. We'll take care of it with the next design, though! Then we'll be safe!"
 
My thoughts are:

The cladding is already reacting and producing hydrogen, heat and other products, so would the salt water have any extra effect, probably.

If the fuel pools run dry then there is a possibility of meltdown if the storage racks are high density and there is enough residual heat left in the fuel.

I would imagine that this possibility is being closely monitored.
 
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