Recent content by dh87

PuO2 boils at 2800 °C. That's slightly below the melting point for uranium oxide (2865 °C). (Wikipedia.) I think that the reference to Fukushima No. 1 means Fukushima Daiichi, not reactor #1.

I don't know exactly how to think about the melted fuel, and Mueller points out that the lack of experimental evidence makes a lot of this into conjecture. Inside molten corium, elements and salts can migrate, but I don't know who will go where. The crust could be a nearly homogeneous and...

Mueller divides the fission products into high, medium, and low volatility. At Fukushima, a lot of iodine and some cesium probably were boiled off (together with all the noble gases). However, there's been considerable extraction of the spent fuel by boiling water. Most of Muller's medium...

Thank you.

I can't find the slides that you refer to. Could you or someone provide a link? Thanks. The residual material isn't volatile and isn't soluble in water. The only way it can be distributed is as dust in an explosion. It could be quite hazardous, but it's not very mobile.

The previously reported 370,000 TBq release is from p. 20 of this document (dated 4/25): http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/fukushima-np/f1/images/f12np-gaiyou_e.pdf The document says 130,000 TBq of I-131 and 6,000 TBq of Cs-137. Then, there's a mysterious "Iodine value conversion" before...

I am not sure that your statement that the volatile elements would be trapped if the uranium oxide remained solid is correct. Wikipedia says, "In the oxide fuel, intense temperature gradients exist which cause fission products to migrate. The zirconium tends to move to the centre of the fuel...

I think that the 720,000 TBq is just in the water. There's also a significant airborne release of Cs. I can't find the numbers at the moment. I think that a lot of the radioactive Cs and Sr may not be in the cores any more, as I tried to say in post #8701...

I have two questions/comments: 1. All the news stories about cooling the #2 SFP say that the point of this operation is to reduce the humidity inside the #2 building. Does anything establish that the humidity actually comes from the SFP? Presumably, there are holes in the containment vessel...

The 99+% removal of Cs+ will require very high affinity for Cs+. At the same time, affinity for Na+, K+, Mg++, and other ions has to be low. I can't find numbers for zeolite, if that's what they're using. I think that there are technologies that might have the high affinity and selectivity...

Salinity data are here: http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/fukushima-np/images/handouts_110522_04-e.pdf The conductivities show that the salinities are 0.5 - 0.8X that of seawater. The potassium may be a larger problem for a cesium-specific ion exchanger than the sodium, even though its...

I don't think that this is good enough. The starting concentration of radioactive Sr is around 2e+05 Bq/ml (from here: http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/fukushima-np/images/handouts_110522_04-e.pdf). To calculate the concentration of Sr, where A(t) is the remaining amount and A0 is the starting...

The diagram shows a "Cs adsorption tower" before the reverse osmosis treatment. My understanding was that Areva was talking about a selective precipitation procedure. For Cs+ removal to be effective, the selectivity has to be enormous. The Na+ and K+ concentrations exceed the Cs+...

1. The conductivities say that these are 0.5x seawater. Will Areva's precipitation protocols work in seawater? Is this seawater together with all the things that are added to precipitate Cs and Sr what TEPCO claims they'll be using to cool the reactors in perpetuity? 2. Why aren't there any...

I am many pages behind in reading, but I am wondering whether I am correct that there has been only one publicized reading of radioactive materials in the Great Turbine Lakes in late March. The (corrected) numbers from #1 (low), #2 (very high, near 30 Sv/hr), and #3 (high, 750 mSv/hr) were...