Thursday, March 17, 2011

forecast for plume's path a function of wind and weather

7 comments:

Big Don said...

From deep in a well-fortified abandoned Mineshaft, safe from the Cobalt Thorium G fallout, BD resides with ten of Tiger Woods' former girlfriends, actively working to re-populate the earth...

John Kurman said...

That plume model is only if the whole thing goes seriously kablooey, and the crap makes it into the stratosphere and is carried by the jetstream. Otherwise, it's all local... which is bad enough. Ain't gonna stop me from taking a visit to Japan off the bucket list. But... skydiving from orbit is on there too...

Tom said...

My friends from Japan feel like they're getting nada news-wise from home. The stuff they see on our news, for once, is looking like better info.

umbrarchist said...

That is F-ed Up!

I haven't read about reactors in ages but why wouldn't a reactor in an earthquake zone automatically drop in all of the control rods.
.

arnach said...

I believe that is probably exactly what happened. However, if the pumps/plumbing & etc. systems (and backups thereof—any y'all got a 1-2MW diesel genset rated to fire up and run after a KNOCK like that?) that carry away the latent heat should fail (probably what happened,given how things look at this point), the only way to avoid core meltdown and Chernobyl (even after the reaction is quenched) is to get that heat out. NOW. Seawater with added boron (to absorb additional neutrons) is the book when things get to that point, particularly given that any turbines that might have survived the quake have nowhere to dump a couple MW of electricity into a torn and shatterd grid. Instant write off on the 40-year-old reactors, but they were at their design nominal (if not actual) end-of-service life and that tradeoff is probably already in the dictionary as a definitive example of a no brainer.

CNu said...

What Arnach said...,

Oh - and it must be remembered that Chernobyl was a Fermi-Chicago-style graphite pile, not a contemporary reactor design by ANY stretch of the imagination.

nanakwame said...

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning
Werner Heisenberg

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