Posted on 05/20/2019 5:07:27 PM PDT by BenLurkin
In the second episode of "Chernobyl," ...A large fire rages in the ruins of the No. 4 reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. ... Deadly radioactive dust has drifted all the way out of the Soviet Union and into Sweden. The air above the reactor literally glows where the uranium core has become exposed. And the people leading the disaster response decide to dump thousands of tons of sand and boron on the core.
But why did first responders use sand and boron? And if a similar nuclear disaster were to occur in 2019, is this what firefighters would still do?
Modern reactors are outfitted with chemical sprays that can flood a reactor building, knocking radioactive isotopes out of the air before they can escape. And unlike Chernobyl, nuclear facilities in the U.S. are entirely contained in sealed structures of cement and rebar ...You could crash a small jet into the side of one of these buildings, and it wouldn't expose the core. In fact, as part of a test, the U.S. government did just that to an empty containment vessel in 1988. The NRC states that studies regarding large jet impacts are still ongoing.
...U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has, for every one of the 98 nuclear power reactors operating in the country, drafted emergency handbooks hundreds of pages long.
Those handbooks are available in plain English on the NRC's website. ...You can find instructions for when to shove lots of boron into the core...It saw what to do if hostile forces attack the plant (among other things, start preparing a regional evacuation the moment it becomes clear that the forces might cause a significant radiation leak). And, in the event of significant amounts of radioactive material escaping into the atmosphere, it says who declares an evacuation...
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
leaded glass then fill with 20-mule team
didn’t the boron/sand create a sort of lava?
Great Briton used them too.
My comment was supposed to be LOL funny.
Perhaps a little too subtle?
Perhaps not even funny?
Is that the chemical formula for Jihadi repellent?
The sort of cockiness displayed in this article
is exactly WHY incidents like Chernobyl happen.
Every Titanic is unsinkable. Until it does.
It does matter. I was surprised to learn while watching a documentary last night called “Chernobyl Cafe” (AmazonPrime) that reactors 1 and 2 at Chernobyl were still fully operational through 2005, and are still kept at idle (as of 2016), because they can’t remove the fuel rods and they can’t be fully shut down. There is staff still running them, monitoring them. There are still twelve more of identical design throughout Russia in operation today, no containment buildings. Also, the French have quite a few reactors of similar designs with containment buildings.
There is another very good documentary called Zero Hour, Episode One, which covers the hour leading up to the disaster, filmed in the control room of Chernobyl #2, and using reactor #2, as a set, documenting how the disaster occurred. They use Russian actors, speaking in Russian with closed caption, who look exactly like the original people who were there when it went down. It’s also on AmazonPrime.
Presumably, though, the proximate cause of the Chernobyl explosion, which they originally though impossible in such a reactor design, has been ameliorated in the remaining reactors. What they determined happened, beyond the sheer stupidity of not following the test protocols by performing the test at 200MW instead of 700-1000MW, was that, the control rods had graphite tips, which when inserted into an already out-of-control chain reaction had an unexpected synergetic effect which somehow cause the chain reaction to exponentially increase instead of damping down. Had the control rods NOT had the graphite tips, they would have worked as expected. It was the unexpected synergy of the graphite being inserted into an area of the reactor that was already non-homogenously over-fissioning that caused the explosion. If they have removed the graphite tips from the control rods at the other similar designed reactors, this type of disaster should not recur. . . and, of course, not be stupid again and ignore protocols.
You probably don’t know their names, but 30 years ago, they saved Europe.
https://www.upworthy.com/you-probably-dont-know-their-names-but-30-years-ago-they-saved-europe
Finally something good on HBO.
Had the control rods NOT had the graphite tips, they would have worked as expected.
No. They stopped because the heat had already warped the channels. About five meters down, which had the effect, as you cite, of keeping the graphite tips in the reaction zone. They were screwed as soon as they pulled the rods, they just didn't know it yet.
Uh, no. That would have exacerbated the already severe problem. Nuclear bombs are dirty too. . . and this started dirty. Incinerating radioactive material doesn’t change its radioactive nature. It needs to be encapsulated and put somewhere safely away from anything it can harm if it can’t be processed into smaller, more easily handled sizes, by separating out the non-radioactive isotopes. In this instance, the Soviets were faced with hundreds of thousands of TONS of secondarily irradiated material in the environment, and thousands of tons of primary radioactive material in the corium (the melted melange of fuel and material from the reactor itself) below what had been the reactor. That mass of corium is a mass of semi-solid magma called the “elephant’s foot” which will be radioactive (It’s now at over 70,000 mSeiverts per hour — fatal to a human in five minutes of exposure — 1 mSv/hr is considered very dangerous as 20 mSv/yr is the maximum dosage allowed) for over 100,000 years and maintain a temperature of 2500 Centigrade throughout that time.
Using a nuke would distribute that over a wide area and contaminate the entire area. . . Worse than using a neutron bomb over the same area as the Neutron bomb uses a case that has a half-life that would be over and done after only about 100 years. . . and has much less mass to distribute over the area covered.
Good idea. Moron is an element much denser than Lead or Boron or even Gore-on, and would be better at stopping those pesky neurons. . . Because all Democrats are lacking in neurons. Perhaps if they capture enough neurons, it will change the Moron into Einsteinium. . . If that happens, then they can get smart.
The boron and sand added to the melted fuel rods and other materials of the core to form a large semi-solid stalagmite of magma called the “elephant’s foot” of what’s called corium which is radioactive at 70,000 mSv/hr (five minutes exposure is fatal to 100% of people).
Last night’s episode began showing the effects of radiation of people. Ugh. Then they got a crew of miners to tunnel under the reactor. They wouldn’t let the miners use any fans, so the temperature approached fifty celsius, over a hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit. The miners stripped off everything except head bands and shoes.
And you don’t want to see a sweating miner full frontal naked.
saw it. The long shot of the one guy in the hospital bed was too real. If not, it still got my attention. i like the lead miner. You just know they all know they will die.
Very riveting show and historical for my money.
Nothing is meltdown proof, but reactor operators could learn from the US Navy. They operate lots of reactors.
You’re mincing words. Others here know exactly where I’m coming from. Too impatient to hand-hold today.
The EPA won’t allow a nuke plant to built because of past problems, but they don’t seem to notice that the Navy is operating a lot of nuke plants without major problems.
One govt agency isn’t paying attention to the successes of another.
Almost 3/4’s of France’s electrical power is nuclear derived.
“...
Nuclear power is the largest source of electricity in the country, with a generation of 379.1 TWh, or 71.6% of the country’s total production of 519.4 TWh, the highest percentage in the world.
.......”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
There was some synergistic effect that suddenly caused that area, when they dropped the rods in, to exponentially increase power. Power was doubling every second. Not a linear increase. That’s documented.
It may actually be coincidental that it exponentially increased in power then exploded after they pressed the AZ-5 panic button to shut down the reactor by dropping the rods.
However, their nuclear physicists came to the conclusion that the design flaw was the tipping of the control rods with graphite that was the proximal cause, along with the design being notoriously touchy to control at low power levels, being designed to run at higher power. The two lower lever, line engineers, had done everything according to protocol, including pressing AZ-5 to abort the test. The senior engineer had over-ruled their objections, spoken several times prior to starting the test, that he was breaking the protocols for the test by performing it at 200 MW rather than at the protocol 700 MW to 1000 MW as they had been instructed to perform it, once even demanding he put his orders in writing in the log. Neither of the younger engineers survived radiation sickness beyond a few weeks of the event. Ironically, the senior engineer who broke protocol lived until 1995, dying of a heart attack.
The Chernobyl plant had been rushed to completion as well, with specs fudged by on site Party member managers (the roof, for example, was designed to have been built out of non-flammable materials, but to meet a bonus goal for the plant manager, it was constructed from wood instead), that night’s test was to have been done before reactor #4 was commissioned, but instead was done after the reactor was put on line, again to meet a bonus date for the plant manager.
What’s currently worrisome is that the entire exclusion zone around Chernobyl has been systematically stripped of metal by looters with the complicity of corrupt military members of Russia and then later by military forces of Ukraine since the fall of the USSR. This metal has concentrated radiation, some of which has as high as 30-50 mSv/hr or perhaps even higher of induced radioactivity. 1 mSv/hr is considered dangerous exposure. There were thousands of military vehicles abandoned in the containment zone after the cleanup, bulldozers, tractors, etc. These looters, none wearing protection, are smuggling this metal out of the containment zone to sell to recyclers who in turn sell it to smelters in Russia, Ukraine, and China and elsewhere and the radioactive metal has been detected in products around the world. Some of the buildings in the area have been stripped entirely of their metal. It’s estimated that almost 800 tons a day are being smuggled out by these looters through the military guarded gates into the area.
The area around the disaster area is so radioactive that construction workers who are building the new moving “Sarcophagus” to contain the radioactive plant which when completed will be moved to cover over the plant, are allowed to work only ONE eight hour shift per month. . .
Sure, and we know why. Running at 200 MW got them into what is known variously as Iodine Valley or the Iodine Well or Xenon Poisoning. Within the fuel rods this stuff normally burns off in the neutron flux in normal operation. At low power levels, though, it builds up. Both Iodine 135 and Xenon 135 will decay by themselves in time (half lives of 8 and 12 hours respectively IIRC, although I didn't look that up). But while they're still there both have large neutron capture cross-sections and soak up the neutrons that would normally be moving between the fuel rods. And bringing a reactor in that situation up again by pulling the control rods means that nothing happens for a while, which tempted them to bring them up still further, and so they did. The exponential increase in power was essentially a reflection of the iodine and xenon burning off within the fuel rods, and when it finally did so the reactor was running wide open. It gets hot faster than humans can react and faster than the control rods can descend. They did get the rods moving, but as you say, it made things worse.
This was compounded by the lack of real-time measurement. The actual heat distribution within the reactor was only visible after the equivalent of a 286 computer crunched the input numbers and printed the profile out on a dot-matrix printer. That process meant that the operators were always 10 minutes behind what was actually happening. Minutes for a decision, seconds to move the rods, heat increase in milliseconds. "Unstable" is an understatement.
My sources for this, if anyone cares, are James Mahaffey's Atomic Accidents and Grigori Medvedev's Truth About Chernobyl, (formerly "Chernobyl Notebook"). Great reads, both of them. Medvedev was the guy who was flown in to clean up the mess.
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