Me US Army Special Weapons been on or ran Alpha Teams, Salvage Apraisal teams, full on NAIC teams, one other team I can't remember the name of
.. Trained at Sandia later taught at Redstone .. worked about half dozen incidents and accidents.. been up to my eyeballs @ about 200,000 cpm airborne alpha numerious times .. got my right arm beta burned pulling something important out of the fire so to speak... hey what can I say Savannah screwed one up. I can make an/pdr 54, 60, 27's sing...
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Max , look the reactors scramed.. yeah.. but that didn't make them safe.. you got fission products all the way to Sweden, the reactors are out of control and on at least three of them ever getting control is still in doubt.. TESCO is the one that brought up emtombment not me.. look at the logistical problem and they are getting ready to try and drain the sea water.. some very very hot sea water .. if you have warped and compromised rods what are the odds they can cool it.. ain't good and yeah I know about cavitation and feedback loops and heat of decay and how the age of the rods affects cooling times... and we are somewhat past the point where things should still be this hot.
I don't think you quite grasp what I was saying about my idea for a split core but thats beside the point.
Max I handled sub critical ammounts of U 235 and pure as you can make it in my own little gloved hands inspected and cleaned and polished it, spalling and all, for several years.. I know the storage issues back and forth and the consequences of seperation distances.
As I have admited before reactors.. we got briefings.. one training op in 16 years. we were back up to back up mostly for area monitoring we operated under DOE for DOE issues and USArmy for Army issues.
You can say what you want about the inherent safety, but thats not what is apparent in the field right now.. I've seen DU burn baby burn and I know what the clean up is like ... you can say what you want about how it is supposed to go.. but that is not how it is going. Fukshima is not following the game plan.. you've got product in quanity already in the enviroment .. you aren't addressing the spent rods outside of containment and the complication they present... and lets not forget.. Japan doesn't really have any place to put the clean up right now.. just like US reactors don't.. low level sure high level good luck charlie. I've seen the mess 1 teeny tiny weapon can make .. you are playing with 170 tons at fukshima a couple of orders of magnitude more than I have ever had to sweep up. and I know how many folks and barrels that took.. I'm old school just like the GE BWR MK1's we come from the same era.. there may be new walk aways in the wings but there hasn't been one that has acted like a walk away when the SHTF yet. Sometimes it doesn't all melt neatly somtimes air gets to it .. they are having trouble getting water.. you think they got enough purple K or metal X on hand to handle a problem? I don't see it.. given what has shown up as fast as it has where it has they are going to have to shrink wrap a couple towns and bury them.
Exactly what is the game plan for 6 reactors at once? You ever see one... I've never seen one.
Oh and I have seen how those guys are using the scintillation probes looking for alpha and I know the intracacies of health monitoring and they are holding way to far off to get solid readings, moving too fast, and some of them have shower caps over the probe face for alpha .. I have never seen folks trying so hard not to find something.. saw the same thing monitoring after Chernobyl poltical, social, and economic techniques for rad detection and monitoring what the hell does physics have to do with it?
You are telling me what is supposed to happen... my training is to deal with what has happened..assumptions that things will go as planed gets folks killed. Nothing has gone as planed yet, nothing has worked as designed, .. yeah yeah earthquake tsunami I don't care about the why it happened .. just what happened and how to assess it and how best to make it all go away.
Given the current situation in progress .. if you think some of the things I said made your head hurt... imagine how my head feels when you say the crew could have just walked away and these reactors would have in time been just fine.. okay you didn't say these reactors.. but you did say any reactor any design it is just the way they are built walk away it will be okay .. thats a school solution not real life. You say it isn't a reactor problem the reactors scramed it's a cooling problem. It systems problem unfortunately the cooling system is hooked up to the reactors that need cooling and thats not cool in so many ways when the cooling system doesn't work. You are making so many fine distinction you are starting to sound like Ready Killowatt containment isn't breeched if you deliberately vent fission products into the atmosphere... good to know we won't count those then .. You can't say with any authority what the reactor status is, just what it should be, nobody can yet.. but anybody can see it ain't what it should be. And what was vented, or more correctly, what was supposed to be vented in a situation where emergency venting was designed to be used wasn't what got vented.. in fact what got vented wasn't supposed to come out of a scramed reactor in safe mode at all.
And just out of curiosity where in the scraming of a reactor in a safe condition does enough hydrogen come from outside the reactor to blow a couple buildings apart? Water outside containment and unconfined gets hot enough to dissociate into hydrogen and oxygen? How long you got to leave a vent open to put an explosive mixture big enough to blow a building apart into a building that big? Is that SOP? part of the plan? an anticipated event? You get that kind of heat in a reactor that is scramed and safe? Really?