Let me ask you this.
from an engineering/construction perspective...
Look at reactor 3 compared to Reactor 4.
What caused the fire in 4.
Reactor 4 was still intact after Reactor 3’s explosion so none of the damage is from Reactor 3.
Don’t pay attention to the annotations because they are discussing photos on another forum and some of these may be off
just look at the detail of the buildings
http://www.houseoffoust.com/fukushima/fukushima.html
Have you seen any pictures or video of the supposed explosion in reactor 4?
So what do we have today on fukushima versus Chernobyl???
A big ...they have no clue.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/world/asia/13japan.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=asia
“Mr. Shiroya also said there was a threefold margin for error involved. The outside estimates of total releases would range from as low as 6 percent to as high as 51 percent of the unofficial totals from Chernobyl.”
What is a threefold margin of error??
“Although [Seiji Shiroya, a commissioner of Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission] did not provide a comparison to Chernobyl, [a release of 630,000 terabecquerels] works out to 34 percent of the official Soviet estimate of emissions and 17 percent of the unofficial higher estimate.”
So what does that mean...a threefold measure of error means it could be the same as Chernobyl and thus the warning from Tepco????
It doesn’t really matter if it is worse than Chernobyl or if it is less than Chernobyl
There is no end in sight and there are a lot of people paying the price for this disaster.
The presumption is that there was hydrogren buildup in #4. My guess based on what I’ve read from the time was that they weren’t paying attention to #4 since it wasn’t operating, that somehow water was leaking out without them knowing, that the fuel became partly uncovered, generating hydrogen, and there was an explosion.
I don’t remember seeing a video of an explosion in #4. There are some videos labelled #4, but I can’t tell if they are the 4th explostion, or an explosion in number 4. It is clear from the pictures that #4 didn’t blow up as spectacularly as the others. But it did blow up later, so you’d think someone had film on it. I guess if it blew up in the dark, and didn’t make a really cool flash, there might not be enough to see.
#4 is the most curious to me, simply because it wasn’t running at the time, and it seems like it would have been so easy to maintain it, if they just had paid attention and realised they were losing water (assuming that was the problem).
I think someone else suggested there was a fuel load shift from the earthquake that might have put fuel too close together — but I’m not sure the assemblies CAN be moved “closer together” in any meaningful way, and I haven’t read any non-alarmist work on that matter.
On that last point — I don’t mean to sound dismissive of alarmists, as sometimes they are right. What i mean is that for general descriptions of what COULD happen, if the only people saying something are alarmists, I discount it.
For example, it might make sense that an alarmist thinks the water drained out, while others don’t. Water COULD drain out. But if the alarmists say the rods moved too close together, and no competent non-alarmist will admit that they COULD be put closer together, there’s no point in speculating that it might have happened.
That’s also why I spend a lot of time calculating weights and measures — it’s a good way to independently verify certain facts to determine if the author should be taken seriously. If someone talks about hundreds of tons of nuclear material in a reactor, when I know what the reactor actually holds is much less, then I can guess they aren’t seriously evaluating the situation.
After all, I’m mostly guessing. I’m not there, I don’t have my own measurements, and in this case, I have only a layman’s knowledge of nuclear reactors. I know about twice as much now as I did a month ago; but I’m not ready to work at a power plant (I certainly could have done so if I had chosen that field of study, but a few days browsing the internet does not make up for 4 years of focused college learning on the subject matter).
Back to the #4 question. I thought they had reported the fire before #3 blew up, but I could be mis-remembering. If not, I wondered at the time if the explosion at 3 could have shot debris THROUGH the wall of #4 small enough and on the side that was hard to see such that we wouldn’t notice in the overhead or side pictures, but if that debris couldn’t have done something to trigger the fire.
I assume there’s nothing really flammable in the buildings, so it had to be a hydrogen explosion, but what if I’m wrong and they had flammable liquid stored and it was hit by a hot projectile from the #3 explosion? Just speculation of course.