AFAIK, if the roof of reactor 4 collapsed it would be a local disaster worsening local radiation conditions. Presumably they’d use helicopters to drop concrete down over it and then built a sarcoughagas and the vast majority of the radioactive material would stay exactly where it is.
I don’t have the indepth knowledge to discredit the bizarre hyperbole (make all of North America unihabitable!), so I call on the dope.
Well, to start with. Chernobyl didn’t make Russia/China unihabitable did it? Hundreds of US and Russian and others above ground nuclear weapons testing didn’t make the north hemisphere unihabitable did it?
So, how’s this large pile of radioactive crap going to now do so? Particularly given the fact that even if the roof collapses the large majority of the crap will still stay right there.
The roof of unit 4 already collapsed. It’s gone. Nothing going to happen there.
The concern is the foundation under the unit 4 spent fuel pond, which is damaged. It’s being repaired, but in theory, if there was a really really bad earthquake in just the right are at just the right time it could cause the fuel to collapse and spill the spent fuel rods on the ground.
Which would at worst make the area around unit 4 slightly more contaminated. The fuel from unit 4 has been cooling off for over a year. It’s not hot enough to actually be a concern for melting down.
The absurd mass extinction claims are complete nonsense. You would have to somehow magically grind the fuel up and insert just the right amount of it inside people’s lungs to kill them. There’s no mechanism to make that happen, and there are quite a few substances around the world that could also kill people in contrived ways. Why, the lead balancing weights in my car’s tires could probably kill hundreds of people!
Good lord - hard to know where to start with all that. I’ll just pick one or two points to start with, with the warning that I am not a nuclear expert myself.
First of all, WTF is this page talking about rendering North America uninhabitable without mentioning what such a [del]impossible[/del] hypothetical scenario would due to Japan and the Pacific ocean? That alone marks it as an alarmist piece of a crap in my mind, it’s all about scaring Americans and nothing about reality.
That bit about the Chernobyl area being uninhabitable for “centuries” - the worst spots need to be avoided for a couple hundred years, yes, but they’re a small part of the whole and at this point well mapped. Radioactive fallout doesn’t fall evenly, it’s spotty stuff, so while you get danger zones there’s safer territory between the hot spots. Actually, quite a few people have moved back to the Chernobyl area, predominantly senior citizens who are no longer reproducing and probably won’t live long enough to develop cancer from the environment due simply to age, not radiation. Other parts of the area will probably be reinhabitable within a human lifetime.
Um… what exactly about being an ambassador to Switzerland and Senegal qualifies this man as an authority on anything nuclear? Those are political, not scientific, credentials. Does he have ANY sort of degree or formal education in radiation and/or related fields of physics? A quick googling reveals only diplomatic education, and some honorary degree type things which don’t actually require any real knowledge of the fields in question. In other words, this guy is no more qualified to speak with authority on radiation and nuclear matter than I am - and I admit I’m not an expert.
About that “10 times” or “85 times” the radioactive cescium being spread around - even if that is the actual amount (which is a pretty broad range of estimates, and apparently supplied by non-scientists) it would be spread over an area much larger than the Chernobyl area, which means it would be massively more diluted. Also, most of it would land in the Pacific, not on land, so it would be further diluted by the massive volume of the Pacific ocean. Yes, it would probably be detectable, but that doesn’t mean the level would be hazardous, or even much above current background levels. It wouldn’t render Hawaii uninhabitable, much less the North American continent. Depending on which way the wind was blowing it might cause some serious issues in Japan, but other land areas will experience little to no effect.
Yes thats reasonable to you and me, but I’ve seen variations of that page being spread all over the place right now and I’d like to be able to refute it in a bit more detail than “it’s nonsense”.
Eg Lets create a worse case scenario, specifically if you put all the spent nuclear fuel rods at Fukushima in a pile and detonated them with conventional explosions dispersing all the material there, whats the actual effects going to be?
While it’s probably true that no apocalypse will occur, it’s worth noting the difference in ladn size. If you look at the chart under effects here: Chernobyl disaster - Wikipedia you’ll see that the seriously affected land area is about three times the size of Japan. the map further down is also illustrative.
Thats no where near 3 times the size of Japan. There’s no scale on it but comparing it to google maps looks like its about 400 kms from Krychaw to Korosten (north south spread of the periodic control zone).
Honshu (main island of Japan) is more like 1200 km long, then there’s Hokkaido and Kyushu etc etc.
To put it into perspective with your map, Japan’s total land area is bigger than Belarus.
Okay. Lets go with these rough numbers. 200 above ground tests. 20 pounds of mostly plutonium per test (at the very least). So, 4000 pounds of that crap alone spread into the atmosphere (yeah, a good bit fissioned (into even nastier shit) but a good fraction did not). Often these bombs were surrounded by a dense “tamper” to make the bomb work better. Whats dense? Lead and uranium for starters. So each bomb had hundreds of pounds of that stuff. And all the explosives. And the electronics. And the test equipment. And the casing.
ALL that stuff surrounding the core of the bomb, even if its not radioactive to start with, gets bombarded by the neutrons from the explosion and also becomes radioactive. AND the stuff in the air around the bomb. AND the air around the bomb. And the stuff on the ground that later gets sucked into the mushroom cloud and injected into the atmosphere.
So, we have about 4000 pounds of plutonium. Something like 40,000 to 400,000 and maybe even millions of pounds of now very radioactive former bomb and testing parts. And the air and the dust and the dirt? How many times more of that stuff got turned radioactive compared to the bomb parts? 10x? 100X? 1000x?
It doesnt take long to figure a metric shit load of radioactive material was pumped into the atmosphere for 30 odd decades give or take.
Now, given that, how many tons of radioactive stuff are in reactor 4? Now do the comparision between the two numbers.
Yeah, I am playing fast and loose with the numbers. If somebody wants to do better have at it. If they can’t then they don’t understand the problem enough to understand whether there is a problem or not.
Thanks for that. Yes, the simplest debunking I can think of is indeed to do a direct comparison to the biggest US and Soviet Tests, to compare a detonation of all the spent fuel rods to the amount of radioactive material released by Castle Bravo and Tsar Bomba.
Can anyone do the numbers?
BTW google “fukushima reactor 4 spent fuel” and you’ll see that the conspiracy theory websites are going crazy with this story right now, it’s very very hard to find any credible info on the amount of fuel thats actually there and how radioactive it is.
Hubster and I watch a show on the National Geographic channel called “Doomsday Preppers.” It’s entertainment.
One of the featured people was preparing for the “nuclear plume” from Fukushima. He had decon tents, purification units (with LIGHTS!) and sealed seeds so he could grow uncontaminated foods.
The plume passed over the US a LONG time ago.
Go with the guy in Nebraska who is building subterranean condos in a decommissioned nuclear missile silo.
~VOW
I’m lazy and busy right now. But a good back of the envelope calc would be this for amount of radioactive created.
So many megawatt reactor working for X number of years produces Y amount of energy. Big ass bomb releases Z amount of energy at once. Very roughly the ratio of those engergies will be how much radioactive material in total those create in relation to each other.
I don’t think this is true at all. A bomb attempts to convert as much of its mass into energy as possible. A reactor only converts a tiny fraction of it’s mass (the few percent of U-235 in the fuel rods)- the rest ends up as mostly U-238 and PU-239 and 240, along with numerous fission products.
The number of neutrons released are pretty proportional to the amount of energy produced. Its mostly those neutrons that are making stuff OTHER than the fission products radioactive.
So, you have two things. Fission products. Are the ones in a reactor wildly better or worse or about the same compared to a bomb?
Then there is the other stuff made radioactive by the flying neutrons . Now perhaps neutrons that hit mostly air (the bomb) produce radioactive materials that are much less nasty than those neutrons that mostly hit stuff like metal and the uranium in a reactor. Or maybe they are worse. And, of course the now radioactive air is like, ya know, already in the air, while the massive fraction of reactor stuff is going to stay put.
Yeah, you can do a massively complex and much more correct calculation, but are simple people with no background in nuclear science, or for that matter, science in general going to understand it?
The OP needs a simple, straightforward explanation of why “it aint the end of the world”.
my google-fu is drawing a blank trying to get figures for the total amounts of Radioactive material or radiation levels released by Castle Bravo and Tsar Bomba, likewise for realistic figures of the amount of fuel rods at Fukushima. Anyone?
I freely admit I don’t have the nuclear science knowhow to do the calculation for total radioactive material at Fukushima based on kilowatt hours, thats why I’ve come to the dope.
IIRC, the problem with Chernobyl was that a fire started, the core was uncovered and dry, the control rods were graphite. So a big fire started and a substantial part of the core went up in flames and spread core material (a) over the immediate neighbourhood and (b) in a high plume across Ukraine, Poland, and even into Sweden. (Where nuclear plant workers heading home for the night set off exit radiation alarms and were herded into containment until they could find the leak… until they figured out the radiation detected was coming in from the outdoors.)
There was a good article a year or two ago about wildlife in the no-go zone. There’s some debate whether it is self-sustaining, or whether deer etc. are there as a result of influx from less contaminated areas.