But it is fairly obvious there is no containment anywhere
But it is fairly obvious there is no containment anywhere
Please point out the exposed core in this picture. Thanks.
If you have seen a diagram of the buildings, it would help. Each building is actually like two buildings. The first is a solid concrete structure, starting underground and going up several floors, at the center of which is the core of the reactor. The top of that building is the solid concrete floor of the “2nd” building. The cap for the reactor sits on this floor; there is a pool inset into the lower building, which houses the spent fuel. In this 2nd building, on top of the first, is the crane to lift the lid off the reactor (this lid is huge, greated than 20 feet in diameter); the same crane can lift fuel rods out of the core and place them in the spent fuel pond.
This 2nd building is made of metal framing, with concrete wall sections attached which can be blown off in pieces. It is a known but unwelcome possibility that this section of the building can blow up.
There is no indication that the explosions effected the lower concrete structure. In the picture you have shown, you can see a secondary square inset into the concrete floor of the 1st building (in the upper right-hand corner), that is not the fuel pond. I believe the fuel pond is in the lower left, but I’m not sure because without labels I don’t know which reactor we are looking at (the one next to it with the hole in the roof might be reactor 2).
Note that the only thing “containing” the spent fuel radiation is the water in the pool. The upper building provides provides some protection against radiation leakage, but it’s an emergency protection only, under normal conditions they don’t expect much radioactivity on the floor. Without the upper building, if they dont’ keep water on the spent fuel, they can have a major release of gas-borne radiation, and in some cases particulates (if the fuel rods get hot enough).
But re-covering the fuel rods with water should stop that leakage. Which is what they were working on last week with the water spraying, which unfortunately also would wash a lot of radioactive materials out of the rubble and into water basins. Now they have to clean the water basins, by filtering the water through the condensors, except they had a leak in one of those basins, which they are trying to fix.
At this point, they have fresh-water cooling to all reactors — that is a good thing. The temperatures on all but one look really good; I think #2 still has a rather high temperature on inlet.
You are confusing building containment with reactor containment. It’s obvious from the photo that the buildings have been destroyed, however the reactors are buried beneath the rubble.