Japan Earthquake: nuclear plants

mrcurious

You're referencing information from a ufo-magiccrystals-NWO-aliens conspiracy site. There may be some useful info posted there but I wouldn't trust the dialogue.

razzz

I guess it's just me that couldn't get to that .pdf. Thanks for the link.

rmattila

If you mean BWR plants under normal operation, they do have recombiners in the condenser vacuum/off gas system in order to recombine the hydrogen and oxygen back to water prior to transferring the gases to the actual off-gas treatment.

SteveElbows

Just for the sake of completeness I'll say that what is actually seen within the blue circle on this picture, is quite likely a device that has received attention on this thread many times before, because it can be seen from a few different angles and early on some people may have confused it with the missing refuelling bridge.



Possibly some people have been calling this 'the spanner' of late, but I prefer to use its real name. I had not realised that the house of faust website had already named it, and wasted an hour of my time finding out what it was called independently, doh.

Its a stud tensioner. Or at least we think it is. There is some chance that there is at least one other large, circular piece of equipment that may have a different function and lives on the service floor of the reactor, or what I've seen may simply be an alternative version of a stud tensioner, as the ones I've seen on the net come in a variety of looks. If I find a decent image of what I'm on about I will post it.

http://www.siempelkamp-tensioning.co...tensioner.html

GJBRKS

I'm aware of the reputation , but I liked the graphic enough to illustrate the idea.

Most counterarguments so far have been circumstantial :

- ' People would have died'
- ' It's not because we said so'
- 'The presented evidence doesn't fit'
- ' Something else would have broken'

But none of these are saying that it would have been impossible a priori ...

And considering the force and direction of the destruction I'm still not convinced that it wasn't the vessel itself that ruptured , perhaps by fuel entering the torus and starting a steam explosion , exiting back through the torus upwards into the drywell and reactor.
That's not to say that I do not value your counterarguments , I see more reason there than in this of mine ...

So thanks for your ideas , I'll go back to studying now ...

GJBRKS

That must be it

LabratSR

New(to me at least) set of ground level pictures posted at Cryptome. http://cryptome.org/nppw-series.htm

jim hardy

Re: Japan Earthquake: nuclear plants

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Would this qualify as a crude nuclear reactor (with steam as neutron reflector/moderator):


{Jorge i liked your sketch here but coldn't copy it, i'm a computer nebbish.}

""""EDIT+: Imagine that the water is boiling vigorously, so the steam is heating up as it flows along the hot fuel tubes; but leaves the racks when it is still well below 800 C, so the assembly heads (where no heat is being generated) remain relatively cool and undamaged. """


Jorge i like your thinking. I am not enough of a reactor physics guy to answer your question.

My personal belief is the molecules in steam at any reasonable pressure are just too far apart to make a decent moderator. Imagine yourself micoscopic and tagging along with the neutrons - water is a crowded street at rush hour of molecules but steam is an empty arena - what, a few thousand times less dense? So the neutrons dont get slowed down very well and wander away while they're still too fast to fission.
62.4 lbs cubic foot for water versus maybe 1/40th lb for steam is a ratio of maybe 2500 to 1 ? Hydrogen is a better moderator but still the atoms are far apart.
So my intuitive answer is i dont thinkk the pool went critical, but what you have suggested is logically correct. If something burped a big slug of water up into the dried out fuel maybe it'd do it, but to my thiniking a H2 blast should push water down.

My self i think Arnie is not on right track, but i could be wrong.

Take a look at 2:06 in that #3 pool video, Do i see rebar blown into pool and concrete rubble on top of prettty complacent fuel elements? Like a wall blown into pool?

and at 2:12 are we looking back through a hole in a pool wall? Maybe somebody will sharpen up that video.

apply your same logic to reactor.

MiceAndMen

That news item is absurd. Talk about comedy gold...
As a great American once said,

MiceAndMen

If you're going to dismiss the fact that a blown RPV cap would send radiation measurements off the charts, then there's not much that will convince you.

As for fuel entering the torus, there is no direct way for it to get there. The torus blowdown design is meant to accomodate gas, and any falling fuel would have to follow a path that just doesn't seem physically possible. A particle of solid matter cannot get into the torus by falling straight down from any point under the RPV.

jim hardy

i've been trying to follow the posts so excuse me if i missed discussion of this one, linked yestarday i think.

http://i.imgur.com/IqCPH.jpg

wold imbed picture if knew how.

Anybody know source of the photo? Is it credible?

Can you photo capable guys offer an opinion on the snaggletooth round looking shape in the red rectangle connected by red line to reactor vessel head? It's way down in the shadows.

I dont trust photographs since ever since Jurassic Park, but were i trying to mimic a vessel with head blown off that's what i would photoshop in.
The bolts will break in their thinned center section and stick up just as in that shadowy form. The bolts are thinned in center because that's where you want them to stretch wnen tensioned. So if the head lifted from overpressure and went someplace else it'd look like that.

Myself i'd expect the bolts to just stretch and the head to set back down after pressure relieves, but i'm no mechanical engineer.

The steam separators above the core would act as an upside down collander and strain out the big chunks of reactor, so the explosion looks to me consistent with steam explosion in vessel and ejection of water and small pieces of debris.
Remember steam shuts these reactors down, but gooses the throttle on Chernobyl type cores.

So a modest neutron boosted steam explosion could be plausible. the $64 question is "What does the head look like" - is it fine or are its bolts stretched?
You'd think there'd be a photo floating around.

.

is there a photodoc in the house?

SteveElbows

Can we bring the reactor 3 talk down to earth?

Specifically, since the talk of a crack in containment appears to have been confirmed in an IAEA presentation some days back, are we entirely sure that these people have seen images we havent?

Specifically, there was that Japanese defence force video taken in March, and one area where stuff was billowing out always caught my eye. I was not on this forum back then and although I did wade through many of the early pages, I do not recall whether this avenue of enquiry was picked up on at the time.

Im talking about the attached image, which as best I can tell from watching the video several times, shows stuff emerging from the area where containment could be said to begin. Im pretty sure we are looking at the steam dryer separator storage pool, and the area where the large concrete 'gate' is located which connects it to the upper part of reactor containment. Could this count as the crack that has been described, is it reasonable evidence of containment damage, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Its taken from this video, where this scene shows up briefly at around 3 mins 8 seconds, and again at approx 3 mins 23 seconds.

http://www.youtube.com/user/modchann.../0/ZKFGavZ_rf4

Attached Thumbnails

 

MiceAndMen

Please go back just 1 page and look at post 6454 and what follows. The reactor pressure vessel head did not blow off. That idea was debunked back in March.

jim hardy

okay thanks, i didnt find you folks till April. Will go back further.

jpquantin

Haa, interesting. Do you have an indication of their capacity? By design how much would they process (depending on plant power I guess)?

Edit: and are there such recombiners over spent fuel pools?

MiceAndMen

Where is that IAEA presentation, please? I must have missed it.

There are 2 pictures on this page http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-...i-photos14.htm that show Japanese SDF soldiers collecting "data and temperature" measurements on April 26 from a helicopter over the plant. Surely they were also taking conventional photographs. None of those have been released.

They almost certainly have imagery we have not seen.

razzz

What goes up must come down so I wouldn't get to excited about a pool full of debris as it is still holding water. I'd be more interested in the location and size of the crack in 3's containment vessel.

Edit: Searching for crack info might be tough as rumors claim references to it i.e. crack in a vessel, have been scrubbed. NY Times had an article mentioning it...maybe Google cache would still hold it but no specifics of size or location were reported at the time.