Posted on 04/01/2011 8:22:34 PM PDT by SteveH
The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station says 3 of the plant's 6 reactors were shaken on March 11th by tremors exceeding forces they were designed to withstand.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company, known as TEPCO, says reactor No.2 suffered the largest horizontal ground acceleration of 550 gals, which is 26 percent stronger than the reactor's design limit.
TEPCO says the readings were 548 gals at the No.5 reactor, about 21 percent higher than its design limit; and 507 gals at the No.3 reactor, topping the capacity by about 15 percent.
The power company says the strength of ground motions were close to or within the design parameters at the remaining 3 reactors, and at all 4 reactors of the nearby Fukushima Daini nuclear plant.
(Excerpt) Read more at 3.nhk.or.jp ...
gals? gals? you learn sumtin new every day
This reactor pulse is pretty cool..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgNwtepP-6M
well that is until you start thinking you might be seeing it
here
look at the puff of blue
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLZdArVij5E
look how different this one looks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_N-wNFSGyQ
Yeah, I was kinda clued into that when I saw the cloud over the reactors...
The Japanese nuke reactors generally handled the earthquake well.
The American nuke reactors are generally not designed to withstand tsunamis, but America generally does not have tsunamis.
The Japanese nuke reactors generally did not handle the tsunami well.
I think there may be a pattern here...
In the first explosion.....could that be a sound blast? I’ve seen similar explosions during volcanic eruptions.
1 gal is shorthand for an acceleration of 1 cm/s^2.
A whole lot of people are learning that they should have taken at least one physics course. It might have helped them understand the real world.
Hey, Rummy.....here’s an interesting slo-mo of the explosion.
It’s about :12 and beyond into the clip.
Don’t know.
I have difficulty seeing the puff of blue every time in the distance shot even though I know it is there..but in the closer shot you can see it.
So what is it??
Fox is saying there are blue flashes at the Nuke Plant.
I have seen still photos taken from Tepco’s cam that could be a blue flash - or not.
I am not sure where Fox is getting the info about the blue flashes.
But if occurring..it is quite important.
I took a couple of semesters of University physics - where you derive the problem instead of plug and chug an equation - and never heard of a “gal”.
Must be the mech. eng. folks that use the term.
I would like to see. Can you post the clip.
Physics jocks, actually. People who study gravimetry and variances in gravity on earth.
It is a “derived” unit, and not part of the SI system, and usually one doesn’t see them used outside of some CivE’s doing quake stuff and the aforementioned physics jocks.
Personally, I never understood the need for such a unit. I’m someone who likes to observe oddball units tho - eg, in the VAX/VMS operating system, the engineer who wrote the login code made the configurable login timeout in “micro-fortnights.” Most people have never heard of a “fortnight,” much less one-millionth of one.
So should we be expecting eventual earthquake related problems with reactor #5 ?
Gosh, Rummy. I’m sorry. I thought I posted the clip! What a dumb, dumb!
Here it is!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHfR_wybvw0&feature=relmfu
i heard that also
Magnesium, cobalt, potassium, sulfur and selenium burn blue
blue flashes could also be static discharge to ground (i.e., lighteningbolts)
blue flashes could also be ionization of the air (again, lighteningbolts)
blue flashes could also be fusion going on - if there is mox in that reactor - mox sweats explosive molecules as it swells up to 70%, which could be reacting with the potassium in the seawater or whatever other elements are present such as those leaking from other breached fuelrods
hard to really say unless we know the weather conditions - only one reactor makes it suspicious and points to mox
I believe the “blue flash” was the shock wave from the hydrogen explosion as a hydrogen ignition in a suitable oxygen-hydrogen mixture would have a nearly invisible flame front in broad daylight. What disturbs me more and has since I first viewed it is the second explosion with the highly visible flame front, my question is, what was the fuel for that ignition?
Hey, you’d be in trouble too if you had 500 gals shaking you! That must be a good thirty five tons of vibrating flesh.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzglQ3T9ZJk
1.2096 seconds according to my cheap calculator.
Criticality was reached upon the technicians adding a seventh bucket of uranium solution to the tank.[6] The nuclear fission chain reaction became self-sustaining and began to emit intense gamma and neutron radiation. The technicians, one of whom had his body draped over the tank, observed a blue flash of ionized air[7] and gamma-radiation alarms sounded.[8][9] The two technicians closest to the tank immediately experienced pain, nausea, difficulty breathing, and other symptoms. The technician closest to the tank lost consciousness in the decontamination room a few minutes later and began to vomit.[10] There was no explosion, but fission products (fission fragments of U‑235 with atomic masses typically around 95 and 137, such as yttrium‑94 and barium‑140) were progressively released inside the building.
NB in the description what happens when the water was drained off in the surrounding jacket: they dropped out of criticality. Many people talking about “criticality” obviously have no idea of the physics involved in creating and sustaining a critical threshold in a reactor.
BTW - we had an incident similar in result (3 dead) here in the US in the early 60’s. Unlike the incident you’re mentioning, it was a boiling water reactor, not a breeder reactor, the men were killed by mechanical effects of a nuclear mishap, and it resulted in a release of radioactivity.
The men were buried in lead-lined coffins.
http://www.inl.gov/proving-the-principle/
Jump down to “The SL-1 Reactor” if you’re impatient. That’s an example of “prompt criticality.”
BTW - we’re still here. That area of Idaho grows trainloads of wheat .
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