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.
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