Questions from a non-Nuclear Physicist

[maxrandb]

I know a couple of rather smart folks who were/are Navy Reactor Department Officers and have been through Navy Nuke Power School and Prototype training. We (the Navy) have been operating Nuclear Power plants for some 50 years now. These folks have said that this could and possibly will be devastating to large areas of Japan, but not "global".

I'm not a scientist...heck, sometimes I'm not even a good speller, but to those on DU that may have some experience and science background, a few questions.

1. One scenario in the fictional work "The Hunt for Red October", involves a loss of cooling water to the reactor plant on a Russian submarine. To fix the problem, they basically flood the submrine with sea water and allow it to sink. I'm told this is even a "worst case plan" for nuclear submarines, the thought being that sinking in 5,000 feet of sea water will effectively cool and kill the reaction. Could they push these reactors in Japan into the sea and kill the reaction?

2. In a worst case scenario, could this be what is called a "global event"?

3. Why not begin the process now of burying these reactors under sand and concrete?

Again, I'm just asking some questions. I freely admit my ignorance of the way nuclear power works, so calling me an idiot, or belittling my knowledge of nuclear physics is really just a waste of your time, which would cause some to wonder who the "idiot" really is.

Maybe this is a big enough story that the mods could create a Japan Disaster forum where knowledgable people could help us novices understand.

[shraby]

1. Any answers to your questions would be highly technical in

nature. I doubt seriously if there are many on du who could answer them adequately. Maybe a forum that includes many nuclear physicists and researchers would be more appropriate and deliver the answers to your questions.

[CoffeeCat]

6. It never hurts though...

I've been pleasantly surprised by the number of experts on DU--in various fields.

I've learned so much from DU--just reading the posts.

The BP Gulf disaster is an excellent case in point. So many people understood
the complexities of oil rigs and the processes that were unfolding when they
were trying to stop the oil from gushing. Others chimed in about the dangers
of Corexit and what it does to sea life.

It never hurts to ask thoughtful questions on DU--even if the questions are technical or
involve complex science.

[snagglepuss]

2. No expert at all but regading burying them in sand can't be done till reactors are

cooled. Sand on hot reactors would turn to glass making cooling impossible. An informative discussion thread about the crisis are the daily Fukushima threads at The Oil Drum.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

3. Burial at sea?

I'm no physicist, but I doubt if there's any feasible way to push a large building, intact, into the sea, and then propel it out to where the ocean is 5000 feet deep.

This may not be a global "nuke" event, but it's already a global economic event. Assembly plants are being shut because parts from Japan are not available. People are being idled.

[kentauros]

13. And not just any building.

These buildings aren't really much larger in volume than a smallish office building. However, no office building is composed of as much concrete and heavy machinery (not to mention extremely heavy radioactive materials) like that in a nuclear reactor.

The only scenario that comes to mind for any possible chance of working, would be to utilize every carrier fleet we've got with massive (and likely custom-made) chains to drag each building. And just pulling them into the sea wouldn't be enough. You'd have to go off the continental shelf to get to those deep waters, another few hundred miles. I don't get the impression that any all-concrete building could survive something like that.

I'm not a scientist, either, but I have had plenty of 'exposure' to engineering through my field of drafting :)

[CoffeeCat]

4. I love your questions...

You may not be a nuclear physicist, but you are an intelligent, curious person--and I applaud
you for asking these questions.

These are terrific questions!

Furthermore, it is obvious to anyone who is paying attention--that we are not getting the full story. Shoddy reporting,
fuzzy facts and contradictory articles spark questions. I've found myself more inquisitive about this issue than most
recent stories, because there are so many unanswered questions.

I am particularly interested in question #2. What if all of these reactors blow up or melt down? Of course that is
a worst-case scenario, but if this does happen--could there be global implications. More to the point--would dangerous
radiation levels/heavy metals reach the United States? When you are fuzzy on the particular state of multiple reactors--
it is natural to wonder about all scenarios and eventualities--including worst case.

Also, I am put off by the neocons and infamous corporatist kow towers who insult and belittle anyone who is concerned
about radiation; or what is happening to the reactors. Ann Coulter went on Fox News and demonized people who were
concerned about the radiation that was supposed to hit the US from Japan. Yes, the levels were reportedly low. However,
this is a serious matter. Slicing and dicing Americans for asking questions smells funny. We all know how Coulter and
her ilk side with corporate interests and it looked as if Coulter was attempting to chill open discussion--by being a
bully. We all know the big energy companies (like GE) who profit from nuclear energy have a stake in this. Just
how much are they affecting new stories? Are they providing right-wing talking points? I'd like to know the answer
to those questions as well. Don't mean to derail your thread with my own questions.

Thanks for starting this thread.

[JVS]

5. Problem seems to be that the Japanese reactor has busted open.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_submarines

There are already sunken nuclear ships and reactors. The thing is that the vessel itself can serve as a containment vessel of sorts.


Pushing the fukushima reactor into the drink will just serve to pollute the ocean instead of the land.

[wtmusic]

7. The experts don't know exactly what's happening - that's the scary part.

The pools contain decaying nuclear fuel and there's no way to "kill the reaction" except wait - for years. They must be kept cool or they can possibly burst into flames and spread radioactive material even farther than they are now.

The spent fuel rods have a lot of concentrated energy being given off, and pouring concrete on them isn't going to help - the concrete will boil and crack. They either have to be constantly cooled or somehow broken into smaller pieces so heat can be dissipated. The problems with that are obvious.

Within the reactors there's a danger of nuclear fission reoccurring, which could cause a mini-nuclear explosion - enough to blow the containment vessel apart and spread radioactivity extensively. Not extremely likely, but possible.

Like Chernobyl, this accident will increase global radiation levels slightly. In that sense it's already a "global event". It won't come anywhere near increasing global radiation like atmospheric testing did in the 1940s and 1950s. Locally, for Japan, it's already a catastrophe which will have ramifications for decades.

[Bandit]

8. Why did they do exactly that at Chernobyl?

They buried the Chernobyl reactor in twenty five feet of concrete because they were not able to contain the radiation any other way...:shrug:

[wtmusic]

10. A different design.

At Chernobyl the graphite-moderated reactors weren't housed in a containment vessel. What was initially a problem became (ironically) an easier problem to solve - once the roof was blown off the reactor building, helicopters were brought in which were able to drop boron (neutron-absorber) directly on the reactor preventing the possibiliity of further fission explosions from occurring. The reactor fuel had already been dissipated by the explosion itself, which made it cool enough to dump concrete on.

Chernobyl was a local problem that solved itself by blowing radiation to the four corners of the earth. Preventing that from happening at Fukushima will make it a headache for a long, long time.

[JVS]

12. Fission explosions don't happen higgledy-piggeldy

It might cause enough heat to ignite a fire or detonate something explosive nearby, but fission explosions are quite hard to arrange intentionally under ideal circumstances.

[wtmusic]

14. If you're referring to a nuclear-weapon scale of release that's true.

However, it was a fission explosion that blew the roof off Chernobyl, and at Fukushima melted nuclear fuel could approach criticality in any number of unpredictable ways. Even getting close is enough to release enormous amounts of energy.

[izquierdista]

9. Answers from a nuclear chemist

1. That would take a VERY big bulldozer. Yes, it would cool the reaction, but then you have reactor guts bleeding out all over the ocean floor. No way to contain that kind of mess.

2. As the detection of radio-isotopes gets better and better, we can pick up a fart from a hamster fed radioisotope enriched feed three time zones away. The area of detection is going to be FAR larger than the area of concern. We will be monitoring the effects of this globally for a long time to come.

3. It may be too hot to even get close enough to start. The fire needs to be put out (making sure no parts can go critical later) before a permanent containment can be started. That said, the sooner the whole mess can be encased in high neutron capture concrete, the better.

IMHO, this is going to be a problem as long as "containment" structures continue to be built above ground. The only way to keep accidents such as Chernobyl and this one from occurring again, as well as to take care of the spent fuel problem is to solve the containment problem in the first place, i.e., put the whole reactor underground. Find a geologically stable formation FIRST, then hollow out a place to put a reactor and run a long extension cord down to it. Even Chernobyl would have been no big deal if it had been a hundred feet underground. Oh, it could have contaminated the Pripyat marshes that surrounded it, but to nowhere near the extent that the above ground fire did.

This idea came to me as I was standing at a burial pit on the Hanford reservation, looking at submarine carcasses that were sitting in a trench maybe 60-80 feet deep, waiting to be covered over. Radioactive contamination travels MUCH slower in solids than it does in gases. One of the principles in radioactive waste management (which I used to work on for DOE) is not IF the containment can be breached, but how fast does it move WHEN it breaks open. If the migration rate is slow compared to the half-life, only then can you relax.

[kudzu22]

11. Acutally the accident in Red October was fake

to fool the Soviets into thinking it was at the bottom of the ocean. But your point is well taken.

[PufPuf23]

15. I have wondered why liquid nitrogren has not been used (like Chernobyl).

From wiki:

>>The immediate priority was to extinguish fires on the roof of the station and the area around the building containing Reactor No. 4 to protect No. 3 and keep its core cooling systems intact. The fires were extinguished by 05:00, but many firefighters received high doses of radiation. The fire inside Reactor No. 4 continued to burn until 10 May 1986; it is possible that well over half of the graphite burned out.<6>:73 The fire was extinguished by a combined effort of helicopters dropping over 5,000 metric tons of sand, lead, clay, and boron onto the burning reactor and injection of liquid nitrogen. <<

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Immediate_crisis_management

Also it seems to me that the helicopter water drops (and liquid nitrogen drops) would have been much more effective using bladders rather than standard fire fighting buckets.

[hunter]

16. There's no burning graphite in the Japanese reactors.

The liquid nitrogen used at Chernobyl was meant to smother the fire by displacing air.

Imagine the ruined reactor at Chernobyl as a giant burning pile of hard coal with big chunks of radioactive red hot metal in it...

The reactors in Japan don't use graphite as a moderator, just water. Metal that gets hot enough will break water down releasing hydrogen gas, which had catastrophic consequences in Japan because plant operators were reluctant or unable to vent these radioactive gases and steam (which made the situation much worse...) but there's nothing injecting liquid nitrogen would have accomplished but to damage the reactors further by thermal shocks and increased pressures.

[PufPuf23]

17. Gotcha. Thanks.

My thought was that liquid nitrogen would be much more cooling and not release hydrogen but I can see how liquid nitrogen boiling into gas could be very expansive compared to water.

[maxrandb]

18. Thanks for the replies and answers

This entire catastrophe is a perfect example of man messing with things he can't even begin to comprehend.

I'm all for innovation and technology and complex science, but it seems that even the "experts" in Japan are not sure what will happen, or what to do with these plants.

Again, it's hard to imagine, but at this point, this disaster at the nuclear power plants pales in comparison to the devastation and destruction caused by the massive earthquake and tsunami.

The reason this is such a big part of the story is that we "know" what to do with other disasters. The waters will recede, the spilled gasoline, diesel and other contaminants can be cleaned up. The mud can be dug out, and the buildings can be rebuilt. It's the fear of the unknown, and the fact that this nuclear material could be around for 10,000 years is why this is such a big deal.

We know what happens to buildings buried under mud, but what do you do about this stuff? Will it reach the earths aquifer? Will it contaminate worldwide food supplies? Will it make large sections of Japan a wasteland for 10,000 years?

It's a tough genie to put back in the bottle.