One more thing.

The building that was blown up IS the containment building.

The reactor is inside a containment vessel -- a steel pressure
vessel. The vessel is inside the building, which by now is collapsed.

I hope that I am mistaken about it.

Here's a good read.

http://allthingsnuclear.org/post/382...ushima-reactor

i

On 2011-03-13, Ignoramus25538 wrote:
On 2011-03-13, Pete C. wrote:

Ignoramus25538 wrote:

I disagree with those who say that "it was just a hydrogen
explosion".

1) That explosion made the outer building crash, so, there is little
access to the reactor and likely all pipes are damaged too.

The reactor is likely impossible to control and even to access, in
fact if the containment vessel is undamaged but access to it is
prevented, I am not sure how they can pump seawater into it.

Perhaps they can find a way to just hook up the reactor to a huge
steel cable and use an aircraft carrier to drag it to the ocean.

2) The hydrogen could only be produced inside the reactor, by exposure
of water to superheated rod cladding. If so, this means that the
reactor was, well, superheated even at that time, so I would surmise
it has gone worse since then.

For some reason, I find myself very skeptical about what will happen
to the reactor in the future.

3) Even if it explodes like the Chernobyl reactor, the damage to
mankind will be limited due to prevailing western winds, which will
carry most of the fallout into the Pacific.

Myself, I had a benign thyroid tumor in 1993, 7 years after
Chernobyl. I was in the Ukraine at the moment when it exploded. I was
lucky that the tumor was found during a routine medical check.

i

Chernobyl isn't really a good comparison to a commercial power reactor.
Chernobyl was a very old reactor design, with limited safety systems, in
a state of pretty poor maintenance, and it still performed safely up
until some idiots decided to play with it. Chernobyl is a great example
of how safe nuclear power actually is since it took real effort to get
it to fail.

I agree with you, but the Japanese plant is also a very old design.

Instead of idiots, they had an earthquake and a tsunami.

i