MadderDoc
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Charles Smalls said:The image from the video is good because it's above the water line so you can clearly make out the textbook morphology of heat induced damage where the material breaks up in a characteristic layered sheet-like manner. But it's just an example. The real spall site of interest is directly outside the Unit 1 pedestal doorway to the PVC. This is the presumed pathway any molten fuel would have flowed along as it left the RV and the latest data shows that the deposited material found there is too inactive to be the fuel itself. That indicates that the fuel did pass through or under that area.
The image from the video from the unit3 inner pedestal area is below the waterline. Perhaps that's also what you meant to write. As regards unit 1 I haven't looked enough into that to really comment, I would be interested in the latest data, if you can give me a pointer. I noticed you wrote, that we know that molten fuel ejection from an RPV into a dry PCV happened in all three units. I can't say I know that it didn't, but how do we know that it did? Looking at the imagery from unit 3, I see lumps of solidified material that appear to have solidified on contact with water, as well as solidified material that may have dropped, while still having been sufficiently liquid to flatten and flow out somewhat, when it was delivered to its present position. At the level of the CRDMs we see material that has solidified and become stuck up there, somehow managing not to flow to a deeper level. While the whole area appears to have suffered at severe beating, the final result does seem to me to have been produced by more than one destructive event, like if something melted down, did some damage, then solidified, then remelted. Everything indicates to me that the core substantially ended up inside the pedestal, but when, or in which stages this final result was produced is not really clear to me. The window of opportunity would be from no earlier than the morning on March 13th until a week or so after that.