There's something to be said about the logic or otherwise of building nuclear plants on major geographical fault lines.
I would have thought that it was odds on that this tragedy would have occured one day.

When the Fukushima Meltdown Hits Groundwater

Fukushima is going to dwarf Chenobyl. The Japanese government has had a level 7 nuclear disaster going for almost a week but won’t admit it.

The disaster is occurring the opposite way than Chernobyl, which exploded and stopped the reaction. At Fukushima, the reactions are getting worse. I suspect three nuclear piles are in meltdown and we will probably get some of it.

If reactor 3 is in meltdown,  the concrete under the containment looks like lava. But Fukushima is not far off the water table. When that molten mass of self-sustaining nuclear material gets to the water table it won’t simply cool down. It will explode – not a nuclear explosion, but probably enough to involve the rest of the reactors and fuel rods at the facility.

Pouring concrete on a critical reactor makes no sense – it will simply explode and release more radioactive particulate matter. The concrete will melt and the problem will get worse. Chernobyl was different – a critical reactor exploded and stopped the reaction. At Fukushima, the reactor cores are still melting down. The ONLY way to stop that is to detonate a ~10 kiloton fission device inside each reactor containment vessel and hope to vaporize the cores. That’s probably a bad solution.

A nuclear meltdown is a self-sustaining reaction. Nothing can stop it except stopping the reaction. And that would require a nuclear weapon. In fact, it would require one in each containment vessel to merely stop what is going on now. But it will be messy.

Fukushima was waiting to happen because of the placement of the emergency generators. If they had not all failed at once by being inundated by a tsunami, Fukushima would not have happened as it did – although it WOULD still have been a nuclear disaster. Every containment in the world is built to withstand a Magnitude 6.9 earthquake; the Japanese chose to ignore the fact that a similar earthquake had hit that same general area in 1896.

Anyway, here is the information that the US doesn’t seem to want released. And here is a chart that might help with perspective.
Radiation Dose Chart
http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Making matters worse is the MOX in reactor 3. MOX is the street name for ‘mixed oxide fuel‘ which uses ~9% plutonium along with a uranium compound to fuel reactors. This is why it can be used.

The problem is that you don’t want to play with this stuff. A nuclear reactor means bring fissile material to a point at which it is hot enough to boil water (in a light-water reactor) and not enough to melt and go supercritical (China syndrome or a Chernobyl incident). You simply cannot let it get away from you because if it does, you can’t stop it.

[b]The Japanese are still talking about days or weeks to clean this up. That’s not true. They cannot clean it up. And no one will live in that area again for dozens or maybe hundreds of years.[/b]

Link -
http://hawaiinewsdaily.com/2011/03/when-the-fukushima-meltdown-hits-groundwater/
==============================
Well, I agree that, HIS ONLY SOLUTION IS NOT A GOOD SOLUTION!

perceptions_now wrote on Apr 1^st, 2011 at 12:05pm:


So this substance that looks like lava has water in it? The bottom of the reactor pressure vessel has ruptured? - and they can maintain water and steam pressure?

Interesting. I think I'll leave too much in depth comment out until they have the situation under complete control.

Until then, you can work out which articles are far out and which ones are totally in orbit. 

Actually it's all a big cover-up and there are actually giant Godzilla like creatures attacking Tokyo right now as a result of the radiation.  They're pretty pissed actually and they are using cars as missiles, and pulling helicopters out of the sky.

Foolosophy wrote on Apr 1^st, 2011 at 12:25pm:


I agree. Especially the ones who write articles like that. I think we should have a thread for the most far out scenarios.

I'll go first. The Uranium 238 interaction with the Iodine 131 created a split in time. The consequences were a nuclear explosion which went back in time and created a huge earthquake and Tsunami which killed 27,000 + people.

Can anybody match that?

muso wrote on Apr 1^st, 2011 at 12:25pm:



To be fair, Muso: since there are 4 affected reactor units, spent fuel cooling pools and buildings - containing different fuel sources and different types of reactors and all with differering degrees of chemical and physical damage involved here - it is possible that there are vastly different scenarios evolving inside, underneath and adjacent to each of the 4 buildings...

It remains to be seen how this infinitely-complex disaster will unfold - but I would suggest that it is not possible to rule out one or more significant explosive releases of radiation in the coming days, weeks or even months...

muso wrote on Apr 1^st, 2011 at 12:31pm:

Just for the Godzilla 'deniers'...

"Just don't call it a meltdown, some engineers say.

"Meltdown is a Hollywood term; nobody really uses it," said radiation safety specialist Bruce Busby of the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center in Seattle. "What we are really talking about is core damage."

Core damage sounds bad enough, but the distinction does matter.

"Meltdown is what I call the 'Jane Fonda scenario,' " said nuclear consultant Lake Barrett, a former Energy Department and Nuclear Regulatory Commission engineer, referencing the 1979 movie The China Syndrome, in which a melting reactor core breaks through the containment barriers below it.

In such a meltdown, the fuel rods inside a reactor melt together into a mass, hugging the steel floor of a reactor chamber. In this Hollywood depiction, the process goes out of control, the hot fuel eats through the 8-inch steel floor, and goes all the way to China. It reaches the groundwater and spreads radioactivity for hundreds of miles.

In reality, "that's impossible; it didn't even happen at Chernobyl," said Barrett, referring to the 1986 disaster in Soviet Ukraine, the worst nuclear reactor disaster in history.

Busby calls the fuel-rod disintegration more of a "crumbling," where the discs fall apart. Others use different analogies.

"In reality, first (the rods) drip down to the floor of the reactor like a candle melting," Barrett said. "There is still water at the bottom of the reactor. That cools the fuel off.""

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2011-03-15-1Anuke15_VA_N.htm

The author of that Hawaiian article was a certain Dr Tom. I left a message asking how much he charged for treating sick horses because judging from his wacky report he was obviously a doctor of veterinary medicine rather than nuclear science.