Fukushima fuel rods eating through solid concrete
As has been speculated here before, now confirmed:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-12-02/fukushima-fuel-rods-eating-through...
Fukushima fuel rods eating through solid concrete
By North Asia correspondent Mark Willacy
Updated December 02, 2011 08:08:11
The findings indicate that Fukushima came much closer to a cataclysmic meltdown than previously thought.
Molten fuel rods at the Fukushima nuclear plant may have eaten two-thirds of the way through a concrete containment base, the plant's operator says.
The statement from TEPCO is based on a new simulation of the March meltdowns.
It says its latest calculations suggest the nuclear fuel inside the number one reactor has melted entirely.
Simulations predict the molten fuel has eaten through 65 centimetres of concrete in a containment base below, stopping just 37 centimetres short of an outer steel casing.
It is also believed that the molten core has eaten part of the way through the concrete bases of the number two and three reactors.
The findings indicate the facility came much closer to a cataclysmic meltdown than previously thought.
The operator's assessment comes about six months after international nuclear experts warned that molten fuel could eat through containment vessels below the reactors.
WTF???!
The posted link is to an ABC Australia story. I naively googled the story to obtain the US main stream media spin..... nothing. Zip. Only alternative media links to the Aussie report.
Now wtf is that about? This is important information, yet no US MSM sources reported on this?
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-1
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57335955/in-meltdown-japan-dodged-...
How many pages down in google
How many pages down in google did YOU have to go to find this? I looked at page 1 and 2 on dec 4th and found nothing main stream, only alternative. Haven't checked today.
And c'mon...you found one MSM story? This deserves attention, investigation and either corroboration or debunking.
I literally listen to news broadcasts all day long.. never heard one reference to this story. So frustrating.
Why such minimal coverage?
Why no MSM coverage?
Hm let's see..MSNBC=General Electric=nukes (for example)
All these major media companies are blacking it out.
I work for a national radio news wire and my editors continually rejected my stories about Fukushima this spring and early summer, then came out personally in August and told me not to write them because my beat is Southern California. (I was doing it on my own time and no one else at the news wire was writing them.)
But it might be time to try this battle again.
I couldn't believe it....that people would willingly withhold this information from the public with the excuse that people want soft news, entertainment news, people do not want to know serious news that might bum them out.
Entertainment=prozac
Cold shutdown by dec16 where's the 68 ton corium blob
Cold shutdown of corium Burrowed in concrete that's intresting is this a knew term.seems there still dealing with hydrogen buildup too this all leads me to a conclusion this situation is still in total chaos.which IMHO is why brawm should continue testing .We all know tepco=bs and situation is undoubtably worse than bieng reported by tepcos pr spokesmen.
Ps when posting don't multiple post because u can't see yor post it will appear later .
Ah, I see. They used to
Ah, I see. They used to appear instantly. Sorry about all the posts...I thought the spam filter was blocking them so I kept trying to re-word it .
Why can't I post?????
Why can't I post?????
That is misleading. At unit
That is misleading.
At unit 1, a maximum 65 cm depth of concrete was eroded, which, in the worse case, leaves only a 37 cm thick layer of concrete between melted fuel and the PCV's steel bottom. As there is a 7.6 m thick layer of concrete below that, the ground has not been reached by the melted fuel.
(as I seem unable to post a link) See physicsforums dot com in the nuclear engineering section and the thread titled "Japan Earthquake: nuclear plants" page 739 for more details.
Was salt buildup from
Was salt buildup from vaporized sea water injections factored in to cooling time melthrough simulation ?according to NRC this was a major concern salt preventing effective cooling.
That is misleading. "At unit
That is misleading.
"At unit 1, a maximum 65 cm depth of concrete was eroded, which, in the worse case, leaves only a 37 cm thick layer of concrete between melted fuel and the PCV's steel bottom. As there is a 7.6 m thick layer of concrete below that, the ground has not been reached by the melted fuel."
(as I seem unable to post a link) See the website physicsforums dot com in the nuclear engineering section and the thread titled "Japan Earthquake: nuclear plants" page 739 for more details.
That is misleading. "At unit
That is misleading.
"At unit 1, a maximum 65 cm depth of concrete was eroded, which, in the worse case, leaves only a 37 cm thick layer of concrete between melted fuel and the PCV's steel bottom. As there is a 7.6 m thick layer of concrete below that, the ground has not been reached by the melted fuel."
(as I seem unable to post a link) See the website physicsforums dot com in the nuclear engineering section and the thread titled "Japan Earthquake: nuclear plants" page 739 for more details.
That is misleading. "At unit
That is misleading.
"At unit 1, a maximum 65 cm depth of concrete was eroded, which, in the worse case, leaves only a 37 cm thick layer of concrete between melted fuel and the PCV's steel bottom. As there is a 7.6 m thick layer of concrete below that, the ground has not been reached by the melted fuel."
http://physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=480200&page=739
Simulations predict the
Simulations predict the molten fuel has eaten through 65 centimetres of concrete in a containment base below, stopping just 37 centimetres short of an outer steel casing.
==========================
If the above numbers are accurate; then TEPCO built the reactors with a base that is only a little more than a meter thick ( 65 cm + 37 cm = 102 cm = 1.02 m ).
The US NRC is more stringent than that.
containment
All it takes is one really big spewing fubar, LIKE FUKUDAI, and the THE WHOLE F%@(ING world ends up frosted in Cs137, Sr90 and a hundred other, deadly for hundreds of years, genome trashing poisons.
Our secretive, sycophant-ridden NRC's policies mean NOTHING. Fallout crosses boarders more freely than arms merchants and their bankers.
All we can hope for is the economic damage is so huge that it breaks both legs of the world financial order. It might and here's hoping. God knows NOTHING ELSE will get the attention of the the glow boy bankers. Human and environmental tragedy mean nothing to these cretins. Time to knock this fifty year old economic basket case baby OFF THE PUBLIC TIT.
All further ACTIVITY, FUNDING AND OTHERWISE, should be directed at research and cleaning up the diapers of this grotesque industry.
Have a nice day.
RE: "Containment"
Love your post. Your appropriately targeted anger and disgust reflects the sentiments of a heck of a lot of people.
And yet, we continue to fund our own destruction, don't we?
fork in the road
We have brilliant science in the realm of physics. The next unavoidable is a solution to energy problems in our evolving relationship with our planet, our earth(ship). The solution is alluringly simple: conservation, a broad spectrum of well-sited alternative energy, enhanced distribution with minimal hydrocarbon development. This should give us a few decades to system fusion into a power source. We have fusion in or about to be in numerous labs AROUND THE WORLD. Fusion has its problems such as excess tritium production so there are some pretty tough questions left that could consume decades of further R and D. Right now there are two fusion teams racing to market so it is conceivable we could have wide implementation in a decade. While we have learned so much it seems like research is suffering from economic captivity and control having been drawn and pushed down the rabbit hole of fission. At this point the greatest man-made threats to life are products of fission or fission/fusion weapons technology.
Fusion power should have been fifty billion dollars 5 or 10 years ago. We could simply create best possible trained and educated populace(they naturally reproduce less) on the planet or planet wide with the net savings. Right now everyone is being trained - to tolerate and accept scarcity and a degraded environment. We need to focus on the solution and set limits for all resource consumption as energy no longer governs as the limiting factor. This is not a video game. Let us learn and move forward as a species because completion for resources will lead to expensive conflict with you and I, the populace, to pay. In every way.
First and foremost someone must deal with the dropped and dropping cores or many of us are toast. Where are we on this great scientific opportunity ? Waiting for it to become an ELE ?
But we already have fusion
But we already have fusion power,
there's a huge fusion reactor parked at a very safe 93 million miles way,
it's called the Sun.
Why on Earth do we want or need another one?
Ever hear of "night"?
Our society uses electrical energy 24/7. We need power at night.
Even on that point, I've gotten flack from the solar proponents, who claim you don't need power at night.
One of the largest users of electrical energy in the average home is the refrigerator, and it has to run at night, or what's the point?
Solar power doesn't work at night, and land-based solar will NEVER work at night.
Solar power just can't meet the demand if there is no way to store the energy - and right now there isn't, although there are proposals in the lab scale but not an industrial scale.
A typical fossil plant is about 1 Gigawatt. In a single day, the amount of energy a 1 Gw(e) plant produces is, by definition, a Gw-Day. ( The product of a power and a time is a unit of energy ). This can be converted to any other unit of energy, just as you convert inches to feet. 1 Gw-Day is 20.6 kilotons or about the energy of the bomb that blew up Nagasaki.
A solar plant naturally operates on a 25% duty cycle. There's no power at night, very little in the early morning or late afternoon due to the Sun's angle. The vast majority of a land-based solar power plant's output comes in the 6 hours of 9 AM to 3 PM local solar time. Therefore a solar plant has to store about 75% of its output.
If we wish to supplant a 1 Gw(e) fossil plant with solar, then we have to store 75% of 20 kilotons or about 15 kilotons or the amount of energy in the bomb that blew Hiroshima to bits.
The solar advocates never seem to talk about the need to store atomic bomb sized amounts of energy.
That is misleading. "At unit
That is misleading.
"At unit 1, a maximum 65 cm depth of concrete was eroded, which, in the worse case, leaves only a 37 cm thick layer of concrete between melted fuel and the PCV's steel bottom. As there is a 7.6 m thick layer of concrete below that, the ground has not been reached by the melted fuel."
http://physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=480200&page=739