People who keep an eye on the Fukushima Daiichi weathercam have often claimed "massive fires" or "massive steam releases" from the reactors which are easily explained as fog, clouds, or low-light-level camera noise
However, this video http://t.co/wa9KXinD , recorded yesterday (feb 28)...
It seems that methane will partly decompose to C + 2H2 at 1500-2500K; but other byproducts are generated as well, and it may not be easy to recover the energy used to heat it up to that temperature.
Methane can be cleanly decomposed to carbon black and hydrogen by radiofrequency heating. The...
If I computed correctly (please check, I am not a chemist),
CH4 + O2 → C + 2H2O + 434 kJ
Compare to
CH4 + 2O2 → CO2 + 2H2O + 871 kJ
C + 0.5 O2 → CO + 110 kJ
C + O2 → CO2 + 395 kJ
2H2 + O2 → 2H2O + 572 kJ
All energy values are per mol of reaction, at standard conditions. Thus the...
Thanks for the comment. The kinetics is a concern for part (2); as for part (1), what is your guess about the fraction of energy that could be obtained? (My guess for C(s) + 2H2O is around 30% of CO2 + 2H2O; unfortunately I do not know enough chemistry to compute it.)
What about, say, 2CH4 +...
Methane from natural gas could be a great source of energy (eg. in thermoelectric plants), but the need to curb CO2 emissions stands in the way.
I wonder whether one could get useful energy from some partial combustion reaction of CH4, that yields H2O plus some carbon-containing solid that...
Is that correct? All four reactors are still releasing steam to the atmosphere. That steam is water that boiled off in contact with the molten cores and/or SFPs, hence it must not be quite Perrier. Are there any estimates of the amount of radioactivity that is being released that way?
So, has there been any explanation of what happened in unit #3 in the early morning of march 21? Pressure and temperature plots show that something really significant happened inside the RPV, just prior of the black smoke. CAMS data show something also happened around march 18. But there...
Somewhere earlier in this thread it was said that hydrazine (which is quite toxic) is added to purified water in working reactors to fight corrosion, but in very small amounts --- parts per million or so. If that is correct, it would not make much difference to the pH.
Boric acid was...
I suppose that the contamination of water in the basements and SFPs is being measured near the surface, is this correct?
But then the measurements will be meaningful only for metals whose salts are generally soluble, like cesium;as well as forr elements with very soluble anions, like the...
Presumably workers wear their dosimeters inside their protective suits, whereas the ambient contamination measurements are taken with unshielded meters; is this correct?
Sorry for my confused prose. I meant to say that the steam leaking from #2's containment may be cleaner than that leaking from #3, because #2's may be going through the suppression pool scrubber, while #3's seems to be going straight into the service space through the refueling pool. So...
If there had been no explosion, would it have been possible to activate the #3 SFP cooling equipment? The primary containment of #3 seems to be leaking into the (former) service space, so if the building had not exploded it would have been filled with radioactive steam from the top down...
One thing that I find most disturbing is that TEPCO's knowledge of the state of reactors #1-#3, three months after the accident, is still entirely based on a dozen or so analog instruments, many of them clearly busted. Vital information, like water level and vessel pressure, are being read out...