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The Japanese physics guy on GMA this morning said that it was a failure of the back up system to release coolant water whose sole purpose is to absorb the heat from the reactor.....

There is no magical chemical used, just plain old water - H2o. The stuff fish swim in and the stuff that falls from the sky just when you start your annual family picnic..........

When I heard this report, since it was "coolant", it must have been a
liquid sodium cooled core, and the US was replacing the backup supply.

Foggy Bottom strike again.

“The Japanese physics guy on GMA this morning said that it was a failure of the back up system to release coolant water whose sole purpose is to absorb the heat from the reactor.....

There is no magical chemical used, just plain old water - H2o. The stuff fish swim in and the stuff that falls from the sky just when you start your annual family picnic.......... “

Indeed, nuclear power plant cooling is a function of those giant concrete cooling towers you see as part of the plants. They operate on exactly the same principle as home evaporation coolers, namely they rely on the tremendous latent heat of evaporation contained in water. The whole thing is quite simply, involving some really gigantic fans, some sprayers, and some big pumps.

Evaporative consumption for a typical nuclear power plant is about 14,000,000 gallons a day (if my research is correct). However, most of that would be to condense and recover spent steam from the generators. However, the amount of cooling just to carry away the residual heat of an “idle” reactor core would be much, much less.

The problem with the Japanese plants right now is that there is no power to run the evaporative cooling fans and pumps. Clearly an idle plant itself can’t produce the needed power, so backup generators are built into the system for that purpose. But apparently those have failed; presumably they’ve been flooded.

So the problem is not a lack of “coolant”, namely plain ol’ water, but it is a lack of electricity to operate the cooling towers. What the plants need are replacement backup generators, but these things can be the size of a train locomotives, and it would be pretty difficult to patch in a spare, even if the right spare can be found and delivered.

Bottom line is that Hillary Clinton is clueless idiot, a complete ignoramus, and has absolutely no idea in the world about what she is talking about. Not only does she not know what “very important coolant” is (namely water), she was even wrong about the face that some “coolant” was supposedly “being delivered”.