In article ,
[email protected] says...
And of course that is the only pump to be had in the entire nation of
Japan. Understand, "the heat" comes from a post shutdown temperature
transient which should mostly have passed by now, not from an ongoing
high-power chain reaction.
Critical mass does not mean what you seem to think it means. Three of
the Fukushima reactors are shut down and cold. It would take an act of
deliberate sabotage to make them melt down at this point. Of the
remaining three, one has a few problems but seems to be cooling down in
an orderly manner, the other two seem to have taken damage but so far
there has not been a containment breach or any reason for anyone other
than alarmists to believe that one is imminent. The coolant pump on one
failed, hence the flooding with sea water, which seems to be working.
As for the other reactors, there are three nearby reactors at the
Onagawa plant that appear to have no problems at all--there was a fire
in the turbine section at one of them but that would have no effect on
the shutdown of the reactor.
Now, with regard to being "much worse than Chernobyl", the controls on
the Chernobyl reactor failed with the reactor operating at very high
power. The Fukushima reactor rods are all the way in so the reactors
are shut down--what remains is to keep them cooled until the temperature
transient passes. The Chernobyl containment was ruptured by a steam
explosion due to a huge spike in thermal power output, more than 30
times the rated power output of any of the reactors at Fukushima. This
has not happened at Fukushima and at this point is exceedingly unlikely
since the rods are in and the chain reaction is halted, unlike Chernobyl
where the rods were almost all the way out. The graphite moderator in
the Chernobyl reactor caught fire and (a) spread massive quantities of
radioactive material and (b) had to be extinguished with further spread
of radioactive material. The Fukushima reactors use water for a
moderator and unless the laws of chemistry have changed since last time
I doused the grille water doesn't burn.
So, this could be worse than Three Mile Island, but saying that it's
going to be worse than Chernobyl is alarmism pure and simple.
