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

[Patrick Shirkey]

On 04/05/2011 01:47 AM, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote:
> 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.
>

Each fuel rod once "spent" has approximately 1-2 kilo of Pu-239 in it. 
That is what they have been creating and storing at Fukushima for the 
past 40 years. They have enough Pu-239 stored in the "spent" fuel rods 
to create over 400 nuclear weapons with a payload of 400 Kilo Tons each. 
If the worst case scenario happens and the fuel manage to "fissle" 
itself into a perfect state of high heat (which we already have) and 
high pressure we could very well see the whole facility go up in a fiery 
ball of annihilation.

> 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.

Sorry Jorn, I would sincerely love to bow my head to you but on this 
matter I have much greater authorities giving me the information which I 
am relaying.

I have to coalesce to their knowledge and expertise. I am just the 
messenger.

I do appreciate the sincerity of your replies though and I know you are 
genuinely concerned.


-- 
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd.