| [Golbez-RG-] |
03-13-2011 17:40 |
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gow
(Post 16270909)
No this won't happen at all, dude.
If there is a loss of containment there won't be a huge ejection of radiation into the atmosphere like there was in Chernobyl. That plant exploded when the core melted through the RCV down to a cooling tank underneath the reactor. The Fukushima plant doesn't have anything like that, it's several feet of concrete and steel designed to contain the slagged core.
What caused the massive fallout was not the explosion at Chernobyl anyways. When the core was exposed to air the graphite moderator caught fire and started spreading radioactive debris into the surrounding area and the atmosphere. Fukushima doesn't use have graphite. It's a light water reactors which means water serves as both a coolant and as a neutron moderator; if the water goes away, the nuclear reaction stops. An runaway reaction like Chernobyl is not possible with a light water reactors; thanks to their negative void coefficient. There will not be any sort of self-sustaining feedback loop like what happened at Chernobyl.
They have shut down the reactor cores and they have the control rods in place. what this means is the temperature levels are nowhere near those the ones found in normal operation. Right now it's generating decay heat and this is causing the pressure problems. Decay heat has to be managed by cooling systems, and since those systems were messed up in the Earthquake/Tsunami it's not being managed properly.
So when this began they were looking at the posibility that the water would boil off completely, stopping the reaction but allowing the decay heat to cause the fuel core to melt. This could have meant the slagged core would melt through the bottom of the RCV into the concrete below. The end result would have been a huge cleanup inside the outer contanment building but little to no release of radiation anywhere else.
Right now they have decided to focus on scrapping the entire reactor and filling the whole thing with sea water. This will destroy the reactor permanently yes but it will also keep the cores from melting further and shut down the reaction. The financial toll is gonna be huge ($500M-$1B) but this is one of the worst case scenarios and it's resulted in no major loss of life or danger to the country.
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LOL, do you REALLY think that if the reaction stops the radiation stops? You know Chernobyl had NO containment building, right? If the containment building fails on top, as the other troll was saying would happen, you're dead wrong about no radiation getting in the atmosphere. I personally don't think the containment building will fail, but if it does... there will still be pretty bad fallout. That's the whole point of a containment building. There doesn't have to be a reaction occurring for radiation to stay around or get into the atmosphere. Why do you think Chernobyl is still radioactive? The control rods are probably melted at this point, nobody really knows what the current status is because nobody can get close to the plant to see what's going on inside the reactor, from you guessed it, RADIATION.
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