[LAU] OT: metal, money, changes, bleg

[Jörn Nettingsmeier]

On 04/04/2011 04:42 PM, Patrick Shirkey wrote:
> On 04/04/2011 09:04 PM, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote:
>
> When it comes to news about North Korea who do you trust?

i read a number of mutually independent news sources and try to form an 
understanding of the situation based on my limited layman's knowledge of 
physics, which i'm trying to expand while i learn about new phenomena 
such as the fukushima fuckup.
i believe that when you apply scientific reasoning to such a situation, 
obvious contradictions become evident, no matter what the spin of your 
media is. you can see that they are getting stuff wrong, and that often 
tells you a lot. and it's harder to be fooled. but you have to try to 
understand properly what's going on.

<tin-foil-hat>
of course, with a massive disinformation campaign including fake 
wikipedia articles and whatnot, possibly including spin-doctored 
high-school education and textbooks, i could still have been fooled 
utterly.
</tin-foil-hat>
but the point is: such campaigns would be uneconomical and almost 
impossible to make water-tight. so i tend to disbelieve they are 
actually happening on a scale that would bamboozle me completely.

> In the case of Fukushima it will be very nice if the whole facility
> doesn't go up in a nuclear explosion. 1760 metric tonnes of fuel would
> be entirely cataclysmic.

"tonnes of fuel" is a very imprecise estimate of the danger, as is 
"cataclysmic". it's about as helpful as constantly mixing up milli- and 
microsieverts and not stating the time base, as the mainstream press 
keeps demonstrating. how is aunt tilly supposed to make sense of 
1,000,000 uS per hour vs. 250 ms per year?

similarly, the "fuel" is not exactly stuff that you just compress and 
get a hydrogen bomb. most of it is spent, i.e. it's still very, very 
messy, but not really material for a world-wide disaster.

take the thermal residue power of spent fuel pool no. 4 as reported by 
the german ministry for nuclear safety:  the stuff (which is partly 
fresh fuel, as the core had been stripped of elements before) currently 
generates 2 megawatts of useless heat.
when i go into a large theatre and turn on all the lights, we are easily 
burning away .5 megawatts. now add some air conditioning and whatnot, 
and 2 megawatts is what two opera houses burn away just so. yeah, i 
don't want to be the guy with the fire hose trying to handle the 
situation, but it's not certain doom either.

fukushima will fuck up many million lives with a _very_low_probability_, 
and when it happens, it's easy to massage the data to deny any causal 
link, because random dna damage is not a bullet wound or a smoking gun.
which is why we have to concentrate on hard facts now, to change the 
political climate and re-assess the dangers while they are evident and 
still in aunt tilly's short-term memory.

 > They have not got the situation under control and they will
> not fix it any time soon. Therefore all the radionuclides that are
> spewing out of the earth as the cores work their way down to the mantle
> will continue until they cover them up by pouring tonnes of concrete
> down the radioactive pits.

you seem to be under the impression that the molten "corium" has already 
eaten its way through the pressure vessel, the concerte basement, and 
the earth's crust. this is certainly not the case.

what has likely happend is that one or more pressure vessels are 
breached and leaking, but there is no evidence of a large corium breach 
(yet).
it's no mythical substance with extreme powers. it's a big, hot, 
radioactive mess. when it melts, it looks like this (from chernobyl):
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/65/Pictureofchernobyllavaflow.jpg/220px-Pictureofchernobyllavaflow.jpg

you see that even in the horrible fuck-up that was chernobyl, the molten 
mass leaves the pressure vessel and just solidifies in the basement once 
it cools down. now this photo was very likely obtained by jeopardising 
human life, so there is a very palpable hazard to it, but it's not going 
to eat our planet from the inside.

and if it really melted through the crust, that would probably be the 
cleanest way to get rid of it (as unlikely as it is). i mean those 
substances are not evil by themselves - you just don't want them in the 
ecosphere. crude oil half a mile under the desert is hurting no one - 
the same substance in arctic waters is a biological nightmare.
same with U and Pu - you don't want them in your food, and not even in 
your backyard, certainly not enriched, but dilute them and forget about 
them for 10k years, and all is really really well. (not that i believe 
that there is a very good solution to safe storage of nuclear waste, 
which is why i'm opposing nuclear energy, among other reasons. but 
again: we are not fighting demons here, but threats that can be 
understood and estimated, at least to some degree.)

> Until that point there is every possibility
> that the situation could get substantially worse with a large "fizzle"
> explosion of 870 metric tonnes of melted cores. In the meantime the
> Japanese are being subjected to insane amounts of radioactive fallout
> and the Pacific ocean is also being polluted beyond belief. It is a
> catastrophe of teh like we have never witnessed before.

wrong. i don't want to hush anything up, but chernobyl, as well as 
countless surface nuclear bomb tests have been way worse than this.

> The point being that it will buffer against the explosions as the cores
> descend into the earths mantle.

i really don't know where this story comes from, but unless the entire 
core mass remains prompt critical (i.e. chain-reacting on fast neutrons, 
without moderation, since the entire moderating infrastructure has 
molten into a blob) and at the same time _under_control_ (so that there 
will be no minor explosions to tear the core material apart and end the 
chain reaction), where should the energy come from for the core to melt 
through the earth crust?
the odds for that to happen are really very very low.

and again, even if it did, i guess that would not be the worst outcome. 
point is, it never will, stuff will just leak out slowly, and that's 
enough of a bloody mess as-is.