12 Comments

  1. I posted this on my FaceBook Page. Thanks for the facts Rod and not the overblown Alarmist Talking Points!!!

  2. Thank you very much for your very informativ blog – it gives very interesting insights. Do you have any sources, that can say how high the radiation levels are, split between Alpha, Beta and Gamma rays / cores? This would significantly help to understand the situation of the operators in the plant.

  3. It is going to be very important to have a valid time line of events available once this settles down. It was far too long before reliable ones were produced for TMI and Chernobyl , and that delay gave too much time for speculation by the media that helped make these events look much worse than they were. The sooner the truth is out, the better it will be for the public to put this event into perspective.

  4. Am I the only one to question the Appx 2 meters below top of fuel rods for water levels in the cores???? I didn’t think this was “A Good Thing”. ex MM1 Nuke here, currently shutdown mechanic working on MOV’s.

  5. I think some of the info may be getting lost in translation, or just a typo (hopefully).
    I’ve given others a hard time for making judgments without all the facts, but I’m starting to question the performance of their operators. I just can’t believe that an US plant staff would have allowed the spent fuel pool level to drop on Unit 4, with or without the explosions and radiation. Other countries may be as good too, I just haven’t worked on their plants to know.

  6. I’m worried that we will never know the true story of what exactly happened for cultural reasons.

  7. Ensign chews out a CDR? Too bad that’s the climax of a sea story I’d like to hear. How about a female MRFN chewing out a Marine in his skivvies while brandishing an M-16 (the Marine, not the MRFN)? Different tender, I’m sure– an AD.

  8. There is a new wave of hysteria about the spent fuel ponds. Nobody seems to notice that the reactor cores seem to have been stabilised, as seen on http://www.jaif.or.jp/english/ . Since when is a lack of water in a spent fuel pool “another Chernobyl”?

  9. I would think that anyone involved in a tense situation while tending uranium outranks even an admiral.

  10. @Jerry – I think that there are some people who have been working on convincing themselves for years that used fuel pools are a source of great concern. They have commissioned studies to determine “the worst case” of what would happen if all of the material in the pool suddenly turned into powder, lofted itself airborne and rained down at just the right place to impact as many people as possible.
    They have fooled themselves into believing this fantasy and they are selling it hard. The problem is that the real world of thermodynamics, chemistry and physics does not work like that. There are physical rules that must be obeyed, no matter who you have worked for in the past (Markey and Reid) or what you want to have happen. Water does not boil off without a lot of heat applied quickly (power). Temperature does not do it, energy does. Radioactive decay only generates a certain quantity of energy, and physical materials like water and the tank liner transmit a good bit of that energy away, limiting the rate at which fuel temperatures can rise.
    Remember, 95% of the material in a used fuel pool is already oxidized and cannot burn, no matter how many times someone writes about it or how many models – with many simplifying assumptions – show that it will.

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