Posted on 03/15/2011 8:13:35 AM PDT by SE Mom
“Thos scum sucking libs will not be happy until the population is a million people and we are all living in caves”
And called Morlocks.
There are seven total spent fuel pools at Fukushima Daiichi: one at each of the six reactor units and one commonly shared pool. There are over 15,000 spent fuel assemblies stored in those pools. All pools have some number of fuel rods in them, based on that figure and the storage capacity described at #381.
Reuters FLASH: White smoke seen coming from No.4 reactor at Fukushima Daiichi plant:
Wow. Thank Harry Reid for blocking storing our Spent Fuel Rods in the Nevada desert. Much safer to let them pile up around a live reactor, I guess.
Thanks,...all the media seems to think it is the fuel rods.
Looks like the world press moved on to Japan. Now Gadafi can bomb the shit out of the rebels with little eyes watching.
Normal work force in that power plant complex....is 800...currently they have only 70.
That probably includes a large number of "mainenance people"
Not much mainenace going on at the moment...but it still seems shorthanded.
Read a report that stated the US Military helped put out fire #1 in reactor #4. This is of a global concern, no question.
That dope Robert Kennedy was out agitating to trash Indian Point Energy Center because he said they stored spent fuel there and that made it unsafe. Yet he led the fight to have the Yucca Mountain repository trashed by Obama. So Indian Point can't move the fuel. So Kennedy says it is unsafe, but it is his fault the fuel is still there. Nothing but a duplicitous SOB.
I hope you're not suggesting that Fukushima was piss-poor engineering. It withstood an earthquake 40x more powerful than it was designed for, plus an end-of-the-world-sized tsunami, and while the situation has been dangerous and difficult, none of the reactors failed catastrophically.
There obviously was a common-mode failure in that the quake-tsunami scenario taking out the diesels was not accounted for by waterproofing the diesels. Station blackout is one of the most troublesome issues plant operators face. Couple that with a failure of emergency power and you have a situation difficult to deal with because we depend on those diesels to keep AC on the plant safety buses. Lose that and there is not much you can do other than scramble to get it back on, which they did. But by then other things had happened to complicate things.
Almost.
“In the wake of the fire at the No. 4 reactor, TEPCO ...sought cooperation from the Self-Defense Forces and U.S. forces to extinguish the fire. However, it was confirmed about 11 a.m. that the fire went out by itself.”
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T110315004749.htm
Tepco official on NHK: We can’t say exactly what is going on at the moment.
Either #3 or #4 smoke
Was that Fire #1 or Fire #2 ? So US Military and Japanese Military aid was sought initially, obviously since Fuel Rods on Fire would be catastrophic, but was not needed. So our guys are on standby ?
The big fire last night.
I guess the JDF and the US military would do anything they can to help.
These aren't just hot bars of steel like you'd find in a blacksmith shop, that spit off a bit of steam when you throw them in the water. They are actually creating an amount of heat that's hard to understand in the context of everyday life.
Freshly-spent fuel can generate up to about 13 watts of heat per kilogram of uranium, and one rod is about 6 kilograms, and a single fuel assembly contains about 95 rods. So that's nearly 7,500 watts of heat, or about 25,000 BTU per hour, in a single fuel assembly, out of hundreds and hundreds used in the reactor core. And that's AFTER they're used up.
Just three assemblies would be roughly equivalent to the furnace in my home running non-stop 24x7 for year after year. It's hard to imagine that there's that much energy in such a small amount of material, but there is. God works in mysterious ways.
So you can see why the water they're sitting in would heat up and evaporate in a hurry.
Unit 4 has a report of “white smoke”. Looks a lot like steam to me, although it may be something else. They could be trying to refill those storage pools again.
I gather modern reactors are designed to passively cool for an extended time using natural convection, rather than having to rely on pumps to circulate water. These reactors are about 40 years old.
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