Disaster...

[Lester Curtis]

Not a very fun topic for the 'Fun & Games' forum . . . Japan got ass-raped . . .

It's nightmarish, for sure . . . I'm keeping an eye on the news about this.

There was an explosion in the #2 reactor yesterday, and they think there may be a leak in the reactor vessel.

Another quake this morning, magnitude 6.0, SW of Tokyo. Nearby nuclear plant shut down, but not reported damaged.

If one of those reactors has a melt-down, it's gonna be a world-wide catastrophe: shipping & air traffic will be pretty well shut down across the Pacific, and Japan will have no more export market and may have to be completely evacuated (I'm guessing). Contamination would be widespread into the Koreas, China, and Russia, if not farther.

If there's no melt-down, though, they'll have the whole place looking shiny and new in a few years, and better than ever. Just hope that's the case.

[Robert_Moriyama]

...
In my line of work we have an equation:

Ignorance + Fear = Job Security

...
Bill Wolfe

= Tea Party / Fox News / George Bush / Stephen Harper (Canadian Prime Minister and would-be Emperor) formula for success

[Lester Curtis]

It's not the end of the world. It's a big old expensive mess, but it's not going to be the catastrophe that the Media is portraying. Melt down just means you have a pile of very radioactive slag at the bottom of the reactor vessel, it's not a melt-through to the core of the planet. Somebody's been watching too much TV.

Bill, I really, sincerely hope you're right . . .

[Lester Curtis]

Okay, Bill . . . maybe you can comfort us all some more . . .

Please tell if you think that the concrete in those containment structures is ordinary construction concrete or if it's refractory cement.

You see, once upon a time, I made my living with cutting torches and arc welders. Many times, I have seen blobs of weld-metal and slag drop onto the concrete shop floor. The result is some rice-crispies noise, and a crater in the concrete.

I understand that in the absence of cooling water, the temperature of those fuel rods can reach 4000 deg. F -- steel flows like water at that temperature, so the concrete is going to be the deciding factor here. If it's refractory cement -- the kind used for lining blast furnaces -- then certainly, the mess from a full melt-down can be kept contained in one place, and they can bury it in other stuff. Ordinary concrete -- I'm just guessing, but I envision something like volcanic lava, and sooner rather than later.

If the containment vessel leaks in any way, though, they're gonna have a nasty job on their hands. Pour water on incandescent rubbish all you want, the steam will make any leaks bigger really fast, and carry assorted radioactive debris with it. Steam explosions act like large charges of dynamite.

I know the dangers of radiation exposure are over-hyped -- I think you can get the equivalent of a chest X-ray just by flying across the country. Big deal, and so far, not much has gotten out -- but I am worried about the potential for much worse.

[Megawatts]

I worked in a coal-fired generating station for almost thirty years. We owned Three Mile Island, but I never wanted to go there. Most of the guys I knew who did after the accident have been sick ever since.

I can't understand why the back-up-systems didn't handle the cooling problem at that Nuke?

In a coal-fired plant, we have two to three back up systems to handle the Closed Cycle Cooling Water and the Service Water. We can draw power for the net, start-up our emergency-diesel generators, or use our storage batteries. Plus, our fire-system diesel pumps can be piped into both cooling systems by just opening up a cross-tie valvue. And we can transfer cooling water from one unit to the next. This is just to protect equipment mostly by cooling the oil that flows to it. Nothing would blow-up. The equipment if overheaded would just have to be replaced at a great expense.

If a coal-fired plant not sitting on a fault line has so many back-up systems or redundant systems, then surely a Nuke build in an earthquake zone would have much more and much better back -up systems and procedures in place to handle the most dangerous senario imaginable.


I believe we are being bull-shitted again. The plant wasn't properly built, or some other problem associated with it is the root cause.

[Lester Curtis]

Bill,

Shame on you. All the time you spend berating other writers about making sure they get their facts straight when they're writing fiction, and you, of all people, throw you own fact-checker out the window to put this in front of us. Did your bosses put you up to this? Now, I can't believe anything you've posted here. Document, or retract and apologize.

The plant is new enough that they would probably be using about 16 feet of high-density, laminated concrete consisting of discrete concrete layers (about 4" per pour) of alternating glass fiber composite cement and carbon fiber composite cement. It's rated at about 8000 C, for heat and a neutron flux density of about 1-E11 n/cm square. About the same flux density found inside the average star.

New enough? The newest of the six in question started in 1979. Oh, and the walls of those Japanese containment vessels are five feet thick, not five meters. And I doubt GE put anything fancy into the cement, especially as they were using low cost as a selling point. Composites do burn, by the way.

The steel is also a molybdenum/thorium poly alloy, which uses catalytic hardeners because a blast furnace doesn't burn hot enough to smelt it in its final form. It forms the base plate over the concrete. You never welded that stuff. Ever.

You're right, I haven't, because, as near as my research has taken me, it doesn't exist. And, by the way, if it can't be welded, how exactly do you fabricate anything out of it?

For starters, ALL steel comes from blast furnaces. Period. Hardening isn't done in blast furnaces, either; that's its own special process. I studied the steel-making process when I was ten years old.

Second, if anybody is putting thorium into a steel alloy, my research hasn't found it. And poly? Poly what? Also, I looked up "catalytic steel hardening" and found a patent for case-hardening of stainless steel parts (publication date 10/07/2008). I doubt that applies to these 30+ year-old vessels. From my own experience with stainless, I have a hard enough time imagining why it would need hardened anyway, but what I found said it was for resistance to wear and abrasion. Must be some really tough environment.

I have welded plenty of stainless steel -- a real bitch of a job. The joke among weldors is that, if you've got the arc hot enough to weld stainless, then you're running too hot. Look up 'austenite' and 'martensite' to understand this; basically, too much heat changes the property of the metal and it ain't stainless anymore, so you get rusting weld seams.

And, the first welding job I got was working for a company that had a radwaste contract, so I learned a little about the importance of all this. And, no, I wasn't trained on the job; I took an excellent comprehensive training program -- including theory -- at Lincoln Electric, prior to finding employment in the field. No, I didn't weld on the radwaste contract; they had nuclear-certified operators for that.

There's an old joke in the nuclear industry that Ted Kennedy has killed more Americans than nuclear power.

Tell that to the Russian naval personnel who died trying to save their submarine when its reactor core melted. Tell it to the people who worked containing the mess at Chernobyl.

Oh, and just as a side note -- I saw this on France News -- when the French were shopping for reactors, they refused to buy this model that GE was peddling (with a low-price appeal, no less) as being too dangerous.

Irony of ironies . . . it looks now as if the biggest threat is not from a core meltdown, but from the spent fuel sitting in insufficient water in an open pool outside of its containment vessel.

[Lester Curtis]

Bill,

The steel is made with thoriated tungsten, the same stuff they make your oft’ quoted welding rods out of. It’s the most heat resistant steel in the world. It ain’t particularly strong steel, but it’s really hard to melt. It’s not stainless steel, so everything you said about that is a little moot. I’m not a metallurgist. I don’t know how they make it.

There are no "welding rods" -- consumable electrodes -- containing either tungsten or thorium. What you're talking about is a non-consumable electrode for a TIG machine. These are made of tungsten, and some of them add a little thorium. That's controversial, as the thorium is thought to add to the health risk from exposure to welding fumes. Actual operators just laugh and light another cigarette. "Non-consumable" is a misnomer; it does get used up; the distinction being that the electrode is not intended to add fill metal to the weld puddle. Tungsten steel is used for tool bits, to make them harder and more heat resistant. It is quite strong, but brittle.

So, when you say, "The steel is made with thoriated tungsten," in a way you're right -- it's fabricated with TIG machines using tungsten electrodes, which may or may not be thoriated. But, the pressure vessels aren't made of that material. For nuclear work, everything is stainless; don't ask me what family, but I'd guess something in the 3XX series would probably be sufficient.

POLYMER-DISPERSED METAL HYDRIDES -- all I can find on that is that it's being investigated as a means of storing hydrogen. Nothing about the nuclear industry. It has a very low density, which makes me wonder why it would be used for floors. However, in the radwaste project I mentioned above, there was some chemical involved which was intended to possibly absorb radiation from the radioactive waste water, which was mixed in ordinary steel drums with cement. I don't know the nature of it.

And I never said the walls were 16 feet thick, I said the floor was. Bottom of containment vessel to the ground. Clean your glasses.

No, you never specified ANY particular part of the containment. I'll give you this: I didn't either; my original statement could have been taken to mean the building. I was talking about the reactor vessel.

Any of them Americans?

Oops, my bad -- foreigners don't count . . . and we're not risking any Americans there now -- we're sending equipment and keeping our personnel at a safe distance.

One more thing -- Scully says you look pretty hot in the bomber jacket; if she were twenty years younger, she might be interested.

[kailhofer]

All right, everybody grab hold of themselves. Name calling is beneath both of you. People have the right to disagree, but discuss the topics, not the people giving them.

Or I'll delete this thread. Consider yourselves warned.

[Megawatts]

I agree with Nate. Each can contribute--- and each can learn.

[Lester Curtis]

Well, I agree, we've had enough of this.

Today I heard that the Japanese have discovered radioactivity in some food and in Tokyo's tap water. I'll preempt Bill here and say it was there all along and that they either never looked for it before, or never thought it was worth mentioning. The media haven't been doing a very good job at all in this whole mess; they should have included information about the levels of radiation typically associated with everyday items; it would help reduce people's anxieties. I've been watching foreign sources more than domestic, and none of them have offered any decent explanation of what safe levels are, where they're found, or how they're measured. If the general public had this information, there wouldn't be so many of them accusing the Japanese government and the nuclear industry of lies and cover-ups.

The really good news is that they've got the pumps running again -- some of them -- I think. Reports are still aggravatingly vague and inconsistent. They'll have it under control soon, though.

[Lester Curtis]

Tell you what. Lets just see if we're alive, next year.

Well, Bill, I hope we both are, and I apologize for offending you.
The Cinci mini-con was fun, and I'd like to think we could get together again sometime and enjoy each other's company. When, where, and if -- first round is on me.

First day of Spring; I hope everyone enjoys it.

[doc]

Coming slightly late to the conversation, but Randall Monroe over at XKCD has a very useful infographic to help people understand the comparative dangers of the radiation of various sources.

http://xkcd.com/radiation/

[Lester Curtis]

Thanks, doc -- I was wondering about that . . . and the chart you linked to still didn't define a 'sievert,' so . . .

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

I hadn't heard the term 'till recently; I'd always thought radiation was measured in curies or roentgens or something. Progress.

According to that chart, I should be a public health menace just walking around . . . I had, I think, three major x-rays and one CT scan subsequent to my appendicitis last year.

The "Tissue weighing factors" are a little scary . . . I think someone could publish that and clean up in the lead-lined jockstrap market. Meh . . . I've been sterile long since anyway.