Since 2 US subs and at least 4 Russian Nuclear subs have gone down, and not recovered, what is the status of their reactors? I have read that the US check the crash sites of the Thresher and Scorpion show no leakage so far, but I know nothing of the Russian subs. Any info?
Just a quick question…
Do we still have to be careful of trout coming from FROZEN Canadian Lakes?
[Simpsons paraphrase] These Frozen fish will devour us all! [/Sp]
Cecil,Cecil,Cecil…where do you get your information? The US Navy does not scuttle its decommed subs. As an active member of the US Navy’s submarine force I can asure you of a few things. When a sub is decommed it is sent to Bremerton shipyard to be disassembled. The core is sent to Idaho and the hull is cut into smaller sections to be sold to various businesses. One use (Ive been told) for the used hull sections is in razor blades, but this may be a submarine urban legend. There is much negative press about the submarine force from time to time. Just doing my part to set things straight. Better luck next time Cecil,
STS/2 SS Stimler
USN
Pearl Harbor, HI
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/k19/radiation_main.html
On the scale of things to worry about, this ranks somewhere between shark attack and lightning strike.
Depends on how picky you want be about your definition of “scuttle”"
From the American Heritage Collegiate Dictionary.
Well Q.E.D. you would have a point there except cecil said “You may recall there’s been some talk of the U.S. Navy disposing of its obsolete nuclear submarines by the straightforward method of scuttling them in mid-ocean somewhere.” This follows definitions “a” and “b” because we are in fact, dealing with a nautical subject thus, Cecil is Still wrong.
Hold your pickle, swabbie. Two things should be pointed out to you:
[ul][li]The article was written in 1983; and[/li][li]The article says, in part, "You may recall there’s been some talk of the U.S. Navy disposing of its obsolete nuclear submarines by the straightforward method of scuttling them in mid-ocean somewhere.[/ul][/li]
Emphasis added. Someone may have been kicking around the idea of scuttling a nuclear sub in the ocean 20 years ago, but fortunately it didn’t become SOP.
I just wanted to make sure that everyone understood it was just an idea that was kicked around and was never implemented.
The Russian Navy has dumped approx. 2.5 million curies of radioactive wastes — twice the combined total of 12 other nuclear nations into the ocean. This includes 18 nuclear reactors from submarines and an icebreaker.
Sixteen of these power plants were cast into the shallow waters of the Kara Sea in the Arctic, plus two into the Sea of Japan.
See Reference
This part concerns me. I don’t know much about a runaway fission reaction, but a China Syndrome is due to the reaction material becoming so hot it burns through reactor containment, building foundation, the crust of the earth, then through thousands of miles of [Dr. Evil]red hot flaming magma.[/Dr. Evil]
So what’s a little water gonna do to that kind of material?
I’ve seen underwater lava glowing red. It gets surrounded by an insulating layer of steam.
I don’t think an underwater China Syndrome is impossible.
Well, the phrase “China Syndrome” is slang, and only described a melting reactor core sinking in the general direction of China i.e. down through the Earth. There was never any assumption that it would actually reach China. More likely, the core would shortly touch underground water and explode.
And if that water contained sharks with fricken’ laser beams on their heads, they’d be very ill-tempered.
Yeow! Sharks with laser beams on their heads! Thats dang near as bad as the packs of yorkies with the piranna DNA. As far as the nuke material goes, sure there are a few subs on the sea floor (although there ain’t much sub looking about the Thresher), some satellites with nuke power plants, stuff the former Russian government dumped into the sea and etc. I saw a program (PBS I think) that said that there many, many little nuke power plants over in parts of the old USSR that were used to provided electrical power for remote equipment (of various types) in “remote” locations that are no longer used. If they weren’t in use, they were “forgotten” about. Also (supposedly) there is a program for hunting these units down now and “disposing” of them. An additional bit to this is (supposedly) the folks that put the little nuke power plants out in these remote places didn’t always keep good info regarding size, quanities, location, etc., so its not known how many there really are. Nice, eh?
Q: What would happen if a nuclear reactor were to break apart in the Ocean?
A: Not much. Why not? For one reason, the oceans are very very very big compared to your average anything else on the planet. For another, the oceans are already somewhat radioactive because of all the minerals dissolved in the seawater. The addition of one, or two or a hundred nuclear reactors full of fuel would not increase that natural background radiation by a measurable amount. Granted, the immediate vicinity of that reactor core would be “hot” for a few years, but in many areas of the ocean, that would not be much of a problem.
It was seriously proposed about 20 years ago that nuclear wastes be disposed of by diluting them to a sufficiently low concentration and then dumping them into the deep ocean, because all of the projected nuclear wastes for the next umpty-ump years would not raise the oceans’ radiation levels by a detectable amount. This plan was not implemented for the simple reason that it wasn’t politically feasible. Instead, we take our nuclear wastes and concentrate them so that they become much more dangerous. :rolleyes:
By the way, virtually everthing is radioactive. Beer is 3 times more radioactive than tap water and hard liquor is about 10 times more radioactive due to the concentration of minerals from the distilling process. Living in Denver, or other mountainous regions is more dangerous than living next door to a nuclear power plant because granite contains minute quantities of pitchblende (uranium ore) and the atmosphere is thinner, resulting in greater exposure to cosmic radiation.
Due to safety features of American subs the reactors on the Thresher and Scorpion are no longer operating. There is no reaction occuring in these plants. In these cases there is no threat of meltdown. Even if somehow they did meldown the seawater would contain the reaction enough to prevent them from creating any hazards anywhere but the close vacinity of the reactor. The reaction would only run out of control if it were to remain exposed to air. Eventually it would melt through the core (meltdown) and into the earth where it would spread out till the earth itself contains it (Chernobyl). Hope this clears things up a bit.
Actually, it’s highly unlikely that the reactors aboard the Thresher and the Scorpion would go critical even if they were raised and exposed to air. When the boats went down, they lost all electrical power; therefore, the hafnium control rods were driven back into the fuel cells. The hafnium absorbs (effectively) all of the neutrons that would be needed to enable further fission events.
And if meltdown (defined as the point at which the fuel cells begin to deform due to excessive heating) were to occur, the reactor would eventually lose its critical geometry, and the potential for self-sustaining chain reaction would go away. True, there would still be hazards connected to the uranium released to the environment, but as d1a1s1 points out above, those hazards would be extremely localized.
You live in the crater, d1a1s1?
You seem to be implying that the Chernobyl accident was a meltdown. Got a cite for that? As I understood it, it was just a plain ordinary fire, with the graphite moderator burning. If anything, this would have decreased the reaction rate, since neutrons not slowed by a moderator are much less likely to split a uranium atom. It was a major disaster, and radioactive material was spread across the globe, but the core should have stayed where it was.
As a matter of fact I do have a site for that my friend.
http://www.chernobyl.com/info.htm
Any more questions?
Doesn’t Cecil’s article strike you as one of the most uninformative and unresearched pieces ever published? Did Cecil actually look at any books or articles about sunken nuclear submarines to see what happens to them? He obviously copied some stuff about satellites out of whatever magazine he had open at the time, but didn’t bother to investigate the actual questoin being asked.
My understanding of the US Naval reactors (as used in Subs and ships) is that they are small (I think they have 2), and designed in such a way that they cannot remain in a Critical state if they suffer damage or failure (loss of coolant/containment breach or power failure). Because they are water-cooled, the fuel rods are corrosion resistant, thus protecting the uranium from the environment. Even if the sub was completely ripped apart, there would only be localized heating from radioactive decay and minimal contamination in the environment.
If you did had a core meltdown under the ocean, you would expect an explosion that dispersed the critical mass. The molten, boiling mass of critical metal would react with the water, releasing hydrogen and possibly oxygen that could well explode violently (along with the steam explosion) . Of course, the remaining uranium (or plutonium) is pretty reactive as a metal, so would react with salt water to disperse over a large area of ocean. In fact, the problem is how to deal with a reactor core fire - CO2 feeds the fire as the U strips O2 and releases C or CO, and H2O releases H2, which may explode with atmospheric O2. At Chernobyl they tried to use Helicoptors to drop Boron-laced sand on to the core, to smother the flames and dampen down the radioactivity.
As for the reactors in satellites - these do not contain a critical mass of radioactive material (and it is not usually fissile material). They are thermal units, converting the heat of decay into electricity. They have plenty of dense thermal and radiation insulation (you want to stop as many decay particles to convert them into heat), and you don’t want radiation affecting the satellites primary job (like fogging film or tv cameras or affecting radiometers). They do contain shorter-halflife isotopes (hundreds/thousands of years rather than millions) with a higher activity (more radiation, more heat, more power from the weight). Given the design, I would certainly expect that they are highly unlikely to break apart on re-entry. You certainly wouldn’t want that to happen - 1 microgram of inhaled Pu is considered terminal (eventually, via lung cancer).
Simon