Comment by deeviant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deeviant | Hacker News Reader

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> No, the building doesn't appear to have been structurally sound enough to have enabled a larger pressure explosion than it suffered.

The steam explosion would have resulted if they were unable to prevent the core from melting through the floor to water below.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Core_meltdo...

> Well, closer to 250k were actually sent to the site.

"According to the WHO, 240,000 recovery workers were called upon in 1986 and 1987 alone. Altogether, special certificates were issued for 600,000 people recognising them as liquidators." Perhaps you may just now be getting the sense that nuclear disasters don't just last 2 years? The clean up was long and dangerous, and you didn't get the certificate unless you were somehow exposed.

> ... No, that's ridiculous. That's at the level of an engineered disaster, where you take all the fuel and light it on fire and then let it continue to burn...

You have no clue what you are talking about. I literally gave you the source and it was from a report by the Japanese government. I'm sorry if you don't like facts that don't agree with your precious world view. Spent fuel rods remain radioactive and hot for years to decades, if they are not constantly and actively cooled, they shortly get hot enough to ignite their casings. Maybe you are just now learning that nuclear power is dangerous? Do you know how many thousands of spent fuel rods are sitting around in cooling pools onsite with reactors around the world? Better hope nobody has an OOPS.

I'm done.

> The steam explosion would have resulted if they were unable to prevent the core from melting through the floor to water below.

But it only creates a significant explosion if the building is intact, which it wasn't at that point. You were talking about a kiloton level blast. Had they not drained the basement it would have made the disaster worse, but nowhere near as much so as you think.

> Perhaps you may just now be getting the sense that nuclear disasters don't just last 2 years?

The part of it that would give liquidators a lethal does in a few minutes, no that didn't last two months, let alone two years. The first few weeks of running onto the roof and pushing a few shovel-loads of debris back over the edge into the reactor room before being replaced by the next guy were much different than the people calmly walking through the woods looking for bits of ejected core. Still dangerous, but orders of magnitude less.

> You have no clue what you are talking about. I literally gave you the source

Your source wasn't worth anything. It was nonsense they came up with before they knew the scope of the problem. Evacuate Tokyo. Lol! Not even close. Not even if all reactors had been impacted. It was redacted because it was wrong, not badly covered up so that people like you could find it as part of some strange conspiracy.

> Spent fuel rods remain radioactive and hot for years to decades

Many fission byproducts have a halflife and minutes to months. The first day/week/month/year of a spent fuel rod's afterlife are the most dangerous. If rods sit for a while (6m - 2y generally) they're safe enough to transport to a secondary pool.

> Maybe you are just now learning that nuclear power is dangerous?

No, I knew radiation was dangerous when I first read about the demon core accident. But nuclear power is still about 100,000 times safer than traditional power. You just refuse to value distributed deaths such as miners and pollution sufferers.

> But it only creates a significant explosion if the building is intact, which it wasn't at that point

Totally clueless. Unlike you, I'm not just making stuff up. If you drop gigawatts of thermal energy into a body of water, you don't need a containment vessel to create a large steam explosion.

Perhaps read the source I linked you? But we both know you won't do that, right. It's obvious at this point you only read or comprehend sources of information that confirm your worldview. How 2020.

> Perhaps read the source I linked you?

The redacted Japanese one, or the Wikipedia article?

The Wikipedia article doesn't contradict me. It says "serious explosion", but nothing about kilotons, and says "would eject more material" but nothing about a large area. That's a reasonable estimate.

> you don't need a containment vessel to create a large steam explosion.

You said a "kiloton level" explosion. That does require containment.

> If you drop gigawatts of thermal energy into a body of water

Before it melted entirely through, the concrete it was melting would be hot enough to boil the water on the other side. That steam would have been uncontained and would have vented out of the entrances to the basement, blowing doors open if needed. Based on how slowly the molten core was progressing downward this likely would have removed a fair bit of water before it actually melted through and began boiling the water rapidly.

And then, have you ever seen someone stick their hand (quickly) in liquid nitrogen or molten lead (done with a wet hand)? The Leidenfrost effect limits the contact with a layer of steam. You can't transfer those gigawatts straight into the water all at once. And while you're waiting, the steam is venting up through the new hole in the ceiling.

Without a sudden, contained, steam generation event the further core ejection would be limited if it happened at all.

> The steam explosion would have resulted if they were unable to prevent the core from melting through the floor to water below.

They drained the water and installed a heat exchanger. But this turned out to be unnecessary, since the core did not melt through the concrete flooring.

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