In comments, Tim provided a link to a short but useful post.
I fear the poster is right. Earlier I mentioned that when I worked fuel pools we never worried about “cracking” water (heating it zirconium oxidizing it so much the hydrogen and oxygen separate accumulates). The reason is that we never had a threat of losing enough coolant for it to be a consideration. The pools are 40′ deep, and even dropping the water level by a few inches would be a RED ALERT RED ALERT!
Pool integrity is supposed to be engineered to ridiculous lengths. Because if you develop a leak along the side or (!) the bottom…oh boy. You’ll spew tons and tons of highly contaminated water somewhere down below. And that’s not even the problem.
The problem is that reactors have massive containment buildings around them, and the spent fuel pools I’ve worked do not. Oh, they have sturdy surroundings, but not “crashing 747″ tough. And if you expose spent rods and accumulate enough free hydrogen for a massive explosion…you get what we’re seeing.
There are millions and millions of Curies of activity there, and not of noble gases. Now, most of that will stay in the immediate vicinity even if all coolant is lost and the rods slag down. If those 40 rem/hr. dose rates outside the building are from spent fuel fragments, most of that activity will remain localized. It’s not Chernobyl, with a massive graphite infrastructure to catch fire and lift tons of material toward the stratosphere.
But an exposed mass of rods would be just as deadly to nearby Fukushima workers as Chernobyl was to Soviets. And there’ll still be plenty of airborne activity.
I’m not trying to score political points here, but this is part of the reason THE reason why we wanted Yucca Mountain. Instead of a hundred pools stuffed with spent fuel, we consolidate it in a facility that’s orders of magnitude more secure than even a reactor containment building.
You know, I followed the link before I actually read through your post and my first thought was, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could use this (likely, alas) horrible occurrence to help get the Yucca facility open? At least there would be a silver lining”
My nightmares generally involve spent fuel rods lying around the 100 or so US power plants and less incompetent terrorists. Better one hard target than 100 soft targets.
What I liked about NTS was that protesters got arrested for endangering the habitat of the desert tortoise.
Welcome, Leopold!
For some reason wordpress thought you were spam, thus the delay in posting your comments. Apologies.
I guess it’s possible that anti-nukes could now approve of Yucca Mountain-lite, while still pushing for phasing out the plants. That would be defensible.
Yucca Mountain wasn’t just a secure storage alternative, it is remote.
Great stuff here Wormme. Keep up the good work. Though reading you it is clear things have taken a significant turn for the worse.
Thank you for the compliment, abUWS!
Yeah, it got real bad real fast. And I’ve not checked on the situation in a few hours…
How on earth is it cracking water when water boils before it dissociates at standard pressure? Why would anything in there be >100C? It is at standard pressure, right? Even if they can’t prevent the pool from boiling, can’t they fix this with some sort of pilot light or something?
Er…because I didn’t do my homework? Since water can be disassociated, I assumed it was. Terrible, terrible. Sparky explains in another thread:
I’ve screwed this up enough that it needs a corrective post.
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