[News] Japanese Meltdown

People are despicably ignorant over science and economy related matters. The folk are panicking like crazy over here too. The pharmacies ran out of iodine pills, even though the fallout won't even come to this general direction. I guess the lemmings are still a bit jumpy because Černobyl hit us a little, well over 25 years ago.

But, it looks like there's two other reactor cores, and also another nukular plant under announced threat. I guess they'll encase it all in carbonite and start again with better technology.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Usually they give out numbers in another unit than Röntgen, radiation dosage per time unit. Normal everyday background radiation (from the earth itself) is under 0,5 uSv/h (microsieverts in hour). The conversion to Röntgen units is trivial (basically multiply with a constant).

In this event, the baseline for radiation right next to the plant is about 1000 times that, 600 uSv/h, and with sudden peaks up to 400 000 uSv/h. The baseline measured at the power plant requires protection against it.

To give some relativity to this, a lethal dose is a sudden burst of 6 000 000 uSv (not during an hour, much less). A CT scan, one of the biggest medical X-ray radiation dosages, measures up to about 18 000 uSv.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I heard they got the Mr. Reactor-san 2 connected back to the grid yesterday. That would mean they can again start pumping water into the used fuel rod container pools. That's the main concern of anyone involved right now.

The thing is, the used fuel rods are still "active" in the sense that they require intense cooling (at least 5 meters of water on top) so that there won't be any secondary reactions starting from the heat energy released. Even used, they still have a great heat capacity and will warm up again to the melting temperatures if not kept submerged in water. The thing is, if there's not enough water, they will warm up a bit which will start a secondary reaction: the oxidization reaction of the zirconium oxide (the outer layer of the fuel rod). Zirconium oxidizes and reduces the water into oxide ions and hydrogen gas. The gas will fill up the storage room and if there is enough heat from the rods still left after the oxidization, the hydrogen will ignite from the smallest electrical spark, and the whole building will explode.

Now, these storage buildings are usually built from steel-forced concrete, or even half-meter thick plain steel. That's not enough to withstand a hydrogen explosion of this scale, so the building will basically turn into the biggest shrapnel grenade ever, destroying everything within a few miles radius (not really anything would protect from it in the vicinity of the plant).

The fun fact is, ALL reactors in the whole world rely on the fact that the water keeps on cycling without stop. Inside the working reactors AND in the used fuel rod containers. The problem is that the water pumps are usually powered by the plant itself, and some backup generators just in case. Here, all the backup was destroyed in the earthquake and in the tsunami.

The "good" news is, this will not be another Černobyl. The radiation fallout will be quite minimal and limited to a small area around the power plants (the American evacuation zone of 80 kilometers is a bit excessive for that) whatever happens, because it's not the reactor core or the used fuel rods that will explode and burn for an extended time (if they don't get the water running on full force again), only its immediate physical surroundings due to the hydrogen.

In my opinion, in the worst case, the used fuel rods will overheat significantly (this is called meltdown) and sink into the concrete slab under it.

That's all I know from what is relevant to the "threat" over Japan. Too bad the engineers and physicists didn't really think the chemistry through when designing the nuclear plants used in the world today.

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