I have no fear that any more radionuclides are going to be expelled than there ever were ~ that part of the science is certainly settled, eh! It ain't gonna' blow up, but the fellows running the show (presumably all highly trained physicists and atomic power plant engineers and designers) said the heat increase wasn't explainable.
The electroweak interaction is a unification between the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces. This unification does not occur until particle interaction energies are in the range of 100 GeV, the so-called unification energy. This energy is generally not available in natural reactions except just after the Big Bang. You can get it in high energy particle accelerators, but not fission or fusion reactions. Uranium or plutonium fission releases total energy in the range of 200 MeV (MeV, not GeV). Common fusion reactions (D-D, or D-T) release energies in the range of 25 MeV per reaction. Nowhere near those needed for electroweak interactions to occur.
I have no fear that any more radionuclides are going to be expelled than there ever were ~ that part of the science is certainly settled, eh! It ain't gonna' blow up, but the fellows running the show (presumably all highly trained physicists and atomic power plant engineers and designers) said the heat increase wasn't explainable.
I think it is explainable using convention heat transfer theory, as I noted previously.
I think maybe what they were saying was that they were not sure of what was causing it, or even certain it was occurring. Remember that they said they had three "thermometers" (really thermocouples) monitoring the temperature inside the pressure vessel, one showed an increase, the others didn't. That raises the question of an instrumentation problem with the one thermocouple. If it was a legitimate reading, the mechanism for the increase could be any number of things that are explainable by conventional heat transfer effects, things like blocked flow, buildup of vapor (which can inhibit conductive heat transfer), shifting of the heat-generating mass, deposition of insulating materials (debris) from the coolant flow, etc.