The jet stream (travelling at up to 200mph) could quite easily take that radioactivity from Japan over vast parts of the North America.
Posted on 03/13/2011 8:58:27 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Musing about worst case scenarios: a “news” sellers dream.
Told you...
They have me quaking in my shoes./sarc
It might be a financial disaster, but no member of the public has been hurt, and I doubt anybody will be.
Funny, none of the newscasters lead with this line!
Chernobyl was many orders of magnitude worse. As long as they aren’t dumping tons of radioactive dust and smoke into the atmosphere we’ll be fine. Chernobyl was a different type of reactor that produced enormous amounts of dust and smoke for some 10 days before the even admitted there was a problem.
Worst case scenario would be a full scale meltdown and we’re already ahead of the game on that score. In the event of a full scale meltdown they can bury the thing under sand and concrete like they did chernobyl.
Not saying I plan on camping in the shadow of the containment building but there’s a lot of hype being pushed here.
So much for building any new nuke plants in this country, not that we were going to anyway. Back to tilting at windmills for the U.S.
Was anyone up in the wee hours last night who heard the interview with the Prime Minister’s spokesman? We now have a Tokyo Bob - nothing to see, we’re doing fine, it’s normal daily routine, move along. Normal? Evacuating for miles around, handing out iodine, and pumping sea water into the reactors is not normal, it’s a last ditch hail mary manuver.
Well, these guys will never see the talk-show circuit money.
They have no idea of how to write a worst case scenario!
How about mentioning the possibility of a meteorite strike or alien invasion to spice things up a little?
http://live.reuters.com/Event/Japan_earthquake2
A cooling system pump has stopped at Tokai No. 2 Nuclear Power Plant in Ibaraki, Kyodo, according to area’s fire department
by Aviva West at 12:03 PM
An absolute tragedy in Japan but the MSM, environmental extremists, and sheeples always start their hand wringing. Can’t wait for all the has been opportunistic entertainers to start their “funding” concerts.
“The steel vessel is four inches thick, and they could always put seawater around the vessel, and that would keep it cool, so it can’t melt. If you put a frying pan in water, you could put a blowtorch on the other side and it won’t make any difference. Then you have the other containment vessel, with a concrete faceplate underneath that’s between four and 10 feet thick. But melting through that is hypothetical beyond normal reasoning.”
But isn’t the concrete container for reactor #1 essentially gone? How can they put seawater *around* the steel vessel?
Notice they don't talk about the "LIKELY SCENARIO" since it isn't exciting.
This is nothing but fearmongering journalism. I'm sure the "MIT Nuclear Expert" is a lefty that is enjoying the fear growing in the populace. He's probably really a "nuclear expert" as in an "anti-nuclear expert".
Fallout could ride the Jet Stream and contaminate the farms in Kalifornia that are already dead because the EPA cut off the water because of a Minnow.
“But isn’t the concrete container for reactor #1 essentially gone? How can they put seawater *around* the steel vessel?”
I think the only thing that happened to the containment building is that the roof blew off, and it was designed to do that as a safety feature if pressures within the containment became excessive. With no roof I could envision contaminated steam being released, but melting through the containment doesn’t seem very likely.
As long as there isn’t a lot of dust and smoke, there will be no fallout. The danger from fallout is breathing or ingesting radiated particulate matter from the air soil or water. Radiation itself is like sunlight in the sense that it isn’t affected by wind.
You could have a completely unshielded nuclear reactor in operation and would be just fine if you kept your distance.
Frankly we should be building more reactors so we aren’t forced to use 40 and 50 year old designs. New designs would be much smaller and far more efficient requiring far smaller amounts of nuclear material to operate.
Half of the walls are gone too.
As I understand it the containment building had blowout panels built in. That seems to indicate that they’re designed to do exactly as they did.
Unfortunately the media is fixated on the video of the explosion and isn’t showing the scene as it is.
I’ll worry that something went wrong when Godzilla starts rampaging through downtown Tokyo.
Jack.
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