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Comment by mrleinad | Hacker News Reader

I read the article referenced here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2318980), and since the author seems so certain that the third containment shell would hold the meltdown safely: Can someone answer me why won't they just allow it to happen, so they can clean up the rest and get the whole nuclear plant back online? Is it just an economical reason? Or is there any other risk?

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Even if they're 99.9% confident that the containment would hold against a molten reactor NO ONE would want to be the official to actually just "let it happen."

If you allow meltdown, you're looking at contaminating the entire reactor building. Clean up costs would be astronomical. If the pressure vessel remains intact, the whole thing can be lifted out with little effort, leaving an uncontaminated building behind.

Why? Isn't the "last line of defense" prepared to avoid any contamination at all?

As I understand it, spreading out the waste leads to more material being contaminated. Surrounding concrete, pipes, cranes beams etc... Most equipment used ends up contaminated. I know an engineer who cleans these places up, and its mad, bad and very very expensive. Massive amounts of planning for simple jobs. Plotting safe routs, zones, dose rates etc. Maximum containment makes the job way way easier.

Yes, of the surrounding environment. This is a single building more or less single-purpose-build to be contaminated as a last measure.

All these exercises are inherently economical -- they could just have walked away on the first day and have the whole thing melt down, and the surrounding area wouldn't have been any better or worse off, radiation-wise.

I'm going to guess that building a new reactor is a lot cheaper than fixing up a 30 year old reactor that has gone through even partial meltdown, and that no no-one involved in managing the reactor is worried about getting it back online.

40 years in the case of unit 1, and scheduled to be decommissioned in 2011 anyway.

Things get worse as the temperature goes up. Instead of the rods starting to melt, eventually the fuel could melt.

(Also, there's no chance of it going back online after getting flooded with seawater.)

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