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

On 04/04/2011 04:42 PM, Patrick Shirkey wrote: 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. "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. 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/Pictureofchernobyllavaf… 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.) 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. 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.