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.
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