Thankfully the world keeps rolling along, no matter how many things you don’t understand. 
So. If you are claiming that all the radiation picked up is of no consequence, it is incumbent upon you to prove it. People in Tokyo are refusing to buy food grown in the area because it shows radioactivity. If it were trace and irrelevant, the nuclear news machine would have trumpeted that fact. They have not.
Unlike you,** GIGO** can back up his claims.
I’d like to see a citation for that. A full core meltdown can be over 5300 degrees F. Nothing can hold that and the core will melt on down through the water table, irradiate the local aquifers will evaporating them, causing steam geysers on the surface spewing radioactive material. That was what was expected of the TMI design had they not figured out to start flooding with water, which someone had turned off during the first alarms.
Now back to my previous question to you once again: Who screwed up what? Those were your words, no citation required - just clarification, please.
This is not true - it cannot happen in this case. It is untrue that “nothing can hold” a core meltdown, even fully melted fuel rods cannot melt through the steel and concrete containment structure encasing the core.
Cite, with my emphasis added:
So, no citation that a/the plant is designed to contain a full meltdown. That is simply untrue. But you presumably knew that before you lied to us about it. Nuclear meltdown - Wikipedia
Why do the nuclear proponents keep lying that containment breach is impossible? TMI didn’t breach because they vented. Chernobyl and Fukushima breached.
Those containment breaches are why I consider everything you and your fellow travelers say about nuclear power to be untrustworthy. Now you might just be the biggest fucking idiot on SDMB and not lying. Not the rest of them. They are liars. Meltdowns and explosions prove it.
I wish you’d have just let me refer him to where it was posted earlier in the thread so I could point out his petulant inanity.
But it’s all good…
With Wikipedia, no less. (cough) :rolleyes:
Do you even read my post? I did provide a citation that the plant is designed to contain a full meltdown. I did not lie at all - I provided a cite specific to this crisis, and not just a link to a long, general Wikipedia article.
And yet another strawman from you. No one has said that any type of containment breach is impossible. My post was in response to the assertion that the core can melt down through the bottom of the structure and into the water table. I have a cite that says the plant is designed specifically to prevent this from occuring. If you have an actual cite that says otherwise, please provide it.
A meltdown occuring doesn’t make me a liar - I have said that a meltdown can and may occur, but if it does it won’t melt down through the building into the water table. And explosions occuring doesn’t make me a liar, because those were hydrogen explosions and can occur with or without a meltdown, so they were irrelevant to my post.
If the worst case is assumed, there remains at least some tens of minutes to a number of hours from corium relocation to the lower plenum to RPV breach in a maximally contingent Western LWR limiting fault with complete loss of the ECCS.
Even partial ECCS activation can delay this significantly, and provide time for the remainder of the ECCS to be brought back online; it is highly unlikely that the staff of a Western LWR will be completely unable to restore at least part of the ECCS prior to the RPV being breached.
ECCS activation may not be as useful as might be thought, however, if the corium has intense decay heat and is in a non-coolable geometry (for instance, the core is at end of cycle and the corium has formed a deep pool); in these circumstances, the ECCS may not remove sufficient decay heat and breach may be inevitable.
Thank you for that citation. Here’s why I don’t buy it for an instant:
To which I must respond: bullshit. Chile had a 9.5 earthquake on the ring of fire in 1960 and there is no reason to believe that such could not be exceeded. 9.5 should have been the minimum designed for anywhere in the ring of fire, yet 7.5 to 8.0 is the standard. That is just wishful thinking. There have been four 8.9 or greater seismic events on the ring of fire since 1960. If any people on earth should anticipate tsunami’s larger than measured before, it should be the Japanese. Tsunami is a Japanese word to described the water influx from the ocean after a big quake. They didn’t invent it as an exercise in lexicography. They have the word because it happens regularly to Japan.
As for the limits of the diesel pumps being at 8 hours, there is no law of physics or rule of thumb in geology that things are back to normal after 8 hours. It’s arbitrary. And what if the generators are flooded by earthquake and tsunami? Nobody could have expected that? That sounds just like the bullshit we heard after 9/11. Anybody studying the matter could have expected these kind of events. Mega-Earthquakes are not just possible, they are a certainty. So are the tsunamis that follow them. A certainty.
Preparing a coastal nuke plant for only a 7.5 to 8.0 quake is just stupid. While it is possible to go for the life of the plant without a such an event or larger, multiply plants and overlap lifetimes and it becomes a certainty that you will have a disaster in excess of the design limits. Design limits that seem to be made by someone saying we cannot afford precautions for a quake 10 times the size (7.5 to 8.5) so let’s figure we will never have one that is greater than measured around here in the past 50 years.
There is no reason to believe that had the plant been designed to be inundated with water and hit by a 9.5 quake that without human error this particular disaster would not have happened. But somebody realized that would cut into profits and a bunch of cowardly engineers went along with it.
The true believer probably believes it’s impossible for a modern reactor to breach the containment.
40 year old reactors of course have nothing like the modern containment vessels, so they are at much greater risk.
I give up - moonbats win.
:mad:
Sorry, when it comes to nuclear disasters, everybody loses. Nobody wins.
They guy is a liar if he says that a meltdown cannot bore through rock, concrete and steel. Which he seems to say. It certainly can happen. He argues that it cannot for this reactor. Hopefully he is right, but he is so full of errors that I don’t trust his opinion anymore than I trust yours.
Your honorable concession is graciously accepted.
So basically you say they should have anticipated a larger earthquake/tsunami, and I agree with you. But how does that invalidate the cite that the concrete and steel secondary containment should be sufficient to contain a full meltdown? They are unrelated topics. If you just don’t trust the engineers to have done any aspect of the design with enough caution then that’s your prerogative, but that’s your opinion based on emotion. If you have a cite regarding the containment not holding a meltdown then that would be more persuasive.
I’m not a “true believer”. I think nuclear may be a necessary part of our energy mix until better and cleaner technology comes on line, but that it’s currently preferable to something like dirty coal, which pollutes far more and kills orders of magnitude more people every year.
And do I have to repeat yet again that I never said it’s impossible to breach containment? The whole point of my post was that breach != meltdown sinking through the basement into the water table.
Just because a limited breach and radiation release is possible doesn’t mean you need to be unnecessarily alarmist and use insane hyperbole and strawmen to attack anyone who doesn’t absolutely agree with you 100%
I know you won’t, but can you stop this true believer crap? No one, least of all in this thread, is claiming that there is nothing that could cause a containment breach.
If the container was capable of being built that would withstand any earthly catastrophe, you’d still bitch if a meteorite hit it with enough force to cause another dinosaur extinction saying we should have anticipated such an event and planned accordingly.
How can you say “it certainly can happen”? Has it ever happened in before? Even with far shoddier construction, it didn’t happen at Chernobyl. It also didn’t happen at Three Mile Island.
From the Wikipedia article cited upthread, it seems experts are conflicted over whether it could theoretically happen, and most models and consensus are that it’s extremely unlikely. But that doesn’t make is post “full of errors”, unless you can actually bring a cite to this thread that contradicts his statement that the secondary containment at Fukushima is designed specifically to contain a full meltdown, or that it wouldn’t be successful at doing so.