Diablo Canyon - America's Fukushima?

America's Fukushima? - On shore one mile from a fault.

So I am watching the coverage of the Japanese nuclear problems on CNN (Anderson Cooper 360).

Dr. Gupta is there.

He explains about the type of suits the people remaining at the Fukushima nuclear plants are wearing.  He shows the suit (some sort of plastic/nylon) and a respirator.

Then he explains the respirator will prevent the wearer from breathing gamma radiation...

(Homer Simpson moment "Duh!")

Gamma rays (not radiation) are exactly that - rays.  They are like light or X-rays - not bad odors.  They travel in straight lines.   They penetrate plastic and nylon and disrupt molecules inside your cells - much like X-rays.

You don't "breath" them in...  Good thing Gupta is a doctor.  Who knows what he might have said otherwise.


Now they show pictures of the empty "cooling pools" where the spent fuel rods sit.  These are on top (!) of the buildings housing the reactors.  The pools (formerly glowing nuclear blue because of Boron doping) are now empty.

Of course the fuel is still "hot" - radiation hot.  Nuclear fission in a reactor only reduces the fuel in the rods by one or two percent.  The rods would last longer except that the fission reaction in the reactor splits apart various atoms in the rods.  The results of these splits create barriers for the neutrons and slow down the reaction.

So the rods in the pools are still 98% full of fuel.

Since the rods sit in pools on top of reactor vessels I imagine that the extra radiation from the not-fully-in-control reactor below are contributing to the heating - particularly after the water is gone from the pool.

You have to ask yourself "Where did the water in the pools go?" and "Why is it not there?"

No doubt the plant requires electricity to run the pumps which run the water into and out of the reactor as well as into the pools.  Electricity not available in a disaster.

(Terrorists take note: Crashing airplanes into the mess of wires and pools and equipment outside the reactor will create a lot of havoc.)

What are these governments thinking?

What are these power companies thinking?

What were the engineers thinking?

Oh wait - they aren't and weren't...

Clean safe nuclear energy.

Now I'm watching Glenn Beck explain how when all the fuel pellets fall out of the melting rods and land the bottom of the pool everything is perfectly safe.

Glenn Beck is ignorant of finance and science.

The helicopters are now supposedly dropping water into the pools - its convenient they are on the roof (!) of the reactor buildings - with fire retardant equipment.  Large helicopters with big tanks of water.

Most of the water in the live RT video blows away in the wind.  I doubt its doing much to fill up the pools.

Science, government and media at its best...

Lost.

GE BWR Mark I reactors - the top designers resigned in the 1970's because they thought the reactors would not stand up to natural disasters (video here).

Spent fuel is safe - at least that's what they say...  Let us ship it through you neighborhood.

After all of this things will be the same - SNAFU.

My sympathies are with the Japanese people.  This is a horrific situation.

Sadly, my point here is that ignorance is obviously compounding the problem.  While pretending the water dropped by the helicopters is actually doing something its clear from the videos that it cannot be - so why do it?

Politics and new media require immediate gratification - which means that an added burden to placate these elements is added to every decision.

What you are watching on TV could easily be happening in Diablo Canyon in California - which, by the way - was not required to have an emergency plan for an earthquake (or tsunami I suppose) even though its located less than a mile from a off-shore fault.  I suppose there is some good news in that the plant does not have a GE BWR Mark I reactor.