Recent content by thehammer2

I suspect that they'll use an airgap. It's simple and it's how your water supply is unable to set up a siphon and drain your sink or bathtub. If they don't put an airgap, I hope they wouldn't extend the pipe to the bottom of the pool. If they must terminate in the pool, I'd only stick the pipe...

Changing a core's surroundings can be of extreme importance. During the Manhattan project, the "demon core" that most people associate with killing Louis Slotin actually killed Harry Daghlian first. Daghlian was doing experiments on neutron reflectors with the subcritical assembled core. He...

Well, they will still show that there are temperature differences. You just won't know what those temperatures are or how large the temperature differences between the colors in the photos are. Think of a piece of iron in a fire. When you pull it out, you can look at it and from the glow you...

This story is of precisely zero importance. In the process and related industries, when a unit is new/repaired/modified/etc., one of the things you do is to run a hydrostatic test with just plain water (or a compatible fluid if water is not compatible with the process going on inside the unit)...

[/PLAIN] Isn't the hotspot in this picture in the wrong spot for the reactor? My understanding of the construction of the reactor building is that if viewed in elevation view from the side, it's L-shaped. The taller portion contains the RPV and is square shaped with the RPV centered in the...

This is neither how science nor logic works. The onus of proof is on those making claims, not those skeptical of the claims.

I've been thinking about the water and I'm wondering if the contamination to the water is largely particulates or dissolved matter. If it's dissolved matter, would it be possible to saturate the water with non-radioactive isotopes before it's pumped in an effort to minimize the amount of...

Oh, I'm definitely not suggesting that they don't test what this guy's developed. Test the hell out of it and do it quickly if possible, just don't do it at any nuclear plant currently going through a severe accident. We're talking long cleanup timeframes, so test it offsite and once we know...

Well, one source of reticence to use new things that people come up with only after the disaster has hit is because if it is tried and doesn't work, then they'd still have the radioactive water to deal with. However, in addition, they'd have the new cleanup material itself to deal with...

My math agrees with yours to an order of magnitude, so I don't think there's any problems with the arithmetic. However, I think the Chernobyl release was on the order of 1016 Bequerels for both Cs-134 and Cs-137 as opposed to 1015 in the reactor 1 basement. I still wouldn't want to go swimming...

Yeah, I retract my earlier stupid. I had a brainfart and completely forgot about the convection and the fact that the hydrogen was likely coming up premixed with the steam. I was definitely thinking about more discrete releases that I've encountered where the gas is pure enough and in...

Agreed. I was definitely thinking more of discrete pockets of gas coming out of the water that were large enough to have enough buoyancy to get significantly toward the top of the building before spreading out and mixing into the surroundings, not a nice mixture leaving the SFP. My mechanism...

I just want to bring up a point regarding NUCENG's calculations. When you consider the steam rate and the hydrogen production rate coming off of the pool, the ratio of steam to hydrogen in the space above the pool based on those production rates is only valid right at the surface of the pool...