Breaking: The japanese Government says a meltdown may be occurring.
That's from an understated, low key race of people. I think they lost it.
www.cnn.com "Meltdown Possible"
Now I'm not a nuclear engineer, a Plant Operator, and I don't play one on the Internet,
But I read schematics well, and I'm marginally familiar with the systems, having read
up a lot, so I figure I would try and explain what's going on as the Media is not covering
this nor are the usual suspects.
Everything Important is in this picture....
So is everything bad, let me try and explain.
There is a possibility, we see the possibility of a meltdown," said Toshihiro Bannai, director of the agency's international affairs office, in a telephone interview from the agency's headquarters in Tokyo. "At this point, we have still not confirmed that there is an actual meltdown, but there is a possibility
The japnese are distributing Iodine Tablets
nuclear tourist is a good source of data as well as wikipedia, but, NT had the pics of the GE Design, so,
that's fantastic.
GE installed a Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) in Fukushima in the 1960's. It was an older,
cheaper, simpler system, not so efficient, but, it was the first of te designs.
A Boiling Water Reactor is a lot like a Moonshiners Still or your teakettle.
Everything is running at low pressure, 5-75 Atmospheres Maximum, it's a simple loop,
and the heat the reactor vessel to about lower temperatures then a Pressurized Reactor..
The Reactor Boils the steam by letting atomic Rods (The Red Ones) in the drawing
engage in near critical reactions. Uranium Releases neutrons, the nuetrons split
other Uranium atoms, releasing heat and more Neutrons. Do this right and you get
steam. Do this wrong, the reactor either quenches or runs away.
The Problem is splitting the uranium and the neutron flux create other short lived
Isotopes (Isotopic Oxygen, cesium, Radium, Iodine, Thorium,,,,,) Basically everything
that can be made will likely be made at some point in that process. they are short lived
but they will decay generating decay heat. So even if you stick the control rods in the
reactor will generate boil heat if you don't keep it cool and moderated.
now the Steam with a little bit of radiation (Little enough to make you sterile)
runs out and goes into the steam turbines, spins them and makes power.
(Trust me, you never want to get the job of maintaining the turbines in a down period).
but the cooler steam, hits those condenser pipes, cools down and is pumped
back into the reactor. That's the Blue and Green on the diagram.
This is called a two loop system. The Radioactive water/steam (Lite Blue and Dark Blue)
never mixes with the Clean water (Green). The Green goes out to a river, or to a cooling tower and should in a perfect world be safe.
Now here's a GE BWR Reactor, it's a model 6, so it's more advanced, but close enough.
GE BWR 6
I'm assuming the Control system was alerted and tripped the reactor, so the rods should be all Up and the primary reaction should be shut down...
well, the word was when the Grid lost power from the quake, Fukushima instituted
a Station trip, so, I'm going to assume the main nuclear fires are out.
however, the work is just starting.
Now it's hard to see but here are Three views of the Whole Smash.
now the nice easy schematic in the beginning was the easy view, here's the operators views.
Note all the stuff? Yeah, you Booming have to get to understand it all.
now the Station lost power so the battery systems came on line.
Thats good, the were supposed to start up,
to power like this
but the tsunami came in, flooded the diesels so they were offline, which meant, the
station was now in a 2 fault failure. The Grid was down, and the station diesels were down
that means you lack power to run the High Pressure Coolant injection Lines,
HPCI, you are looking at real troubles.
So the Operators probably started trying to figure out what to do.
I suspect they were trying to get diesel generators in.
I suspect they had to start venting (Those Yellow lines, to reduce pressure in the
Turbines and reactor. Thats' why we saw early runup in radiation...
As i see it, they went to venting to drop pressure in the reactor core, and allow them
to start the low pressure core spray, and to later run the Liquid injection core coolant
system. i suspect they were in a low power situation so they were runnign only
the low pressure systems.
when the batteries died and they couldn't run the recirc pumps they probably turned on
mauve thing in the upper left hand corner. That's a emergency coolant injection system.
It will flood the reactor for 90 minutes giving the operators time to think.
but 90 minutes went and they were still in trouble.
I suspect what happened was they started to lose the reactor and got a boil off
going, and had to vent boil into the Torus, Now tat's better then venting up the
stack, but, the temps in reactor were dropping water levels and i suspect the
water began producing hydrogen. At some point the hydrogen bubble got big
enough it began filling the torus also.
I'm guessing here is where the operators screwed the pooch.
Instead of venting Hydrogen up the stacks, they let the hydrogen into the torus.
something sparked the Hydrogen and it exploded in the Torus.
That's outside the reactor but in the containment building, and it blew the roof off
the torus and the secondary containment building.
now it's possible they had a venting and the explosion occurred in the ventlines and the
torus and reactor are intact but, we have to look at a possible torus breach
or a bleed out of the reactor.
Look, the operators are the only ones who know what's going on but if you read the
schematics you have a much better feel for wha'ts going on.
Initial venting led to a release of a small amount of radiation, a hydrogen or steam explosion is a fair bit of radiation, but, a breach of the torus allows radioactive
reactor water into the environment.
What is worse is we may have a reactor pressure spike that can drive the rods out of
vessel, or the boiloff, may cause a meltdown which can burn it's way out of the reactor.
given secondary containment is shattered, then we lose the reactor contents.
Right now the operators need to be doing this
now crisies in reactors take a while, they have large thermal inertia, and even
the worst disasters take a while, but, they also when they screw up they
take a long time to unscrew.
we need to find out what was the explosion? did they lose control on a valve and
vent into the secondary building instead of up the stack? Did they have a hydrogen
build up and flash? What is the condition of all that secondary infrastructure?
Can they get power up?
Honestly, if you ask me? They didn't get power up soon enough and now it's
just a matter of time until Godzilla comes out of the ocean, to finish the job.
Breaking: The japanese Government says a meltdown may be occurring.
That's from an understated, low key race of people. I think they lost it.