On 07/09/2016 10:22, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 07/09/16 10:06, Tim Streater wrote:
In article , The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 07/09/16 09:41, Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,
newshound wrote:

As usual, the program kept saying it's the worst place in the world,
but there have been some nasty issues with the storage facilities at
Hanford in the USA, and by all accounts some of the Russian sites are
even worse.

IIRC, one of the Russian sites was so bad that serious fission was
going on.

AS opposed to humorous fission?

The whole point of storing spent fuel rods in ponds is because fission
is going on.

Yes I know that Oh Witty One. I'm talking about a pond that went
critical and perhaps even exploded - sometime in the 50s IIRC.

Hard to see how a pond can explode. There is nothing to confine the
pressure.

If you shove a few hundred megajoules into the pond all at once it will
explode.


And criticality is nothing special. It just means the thing doesn't
start to decay in radioactive terms till the fuel runs out.




More rubbish, the fission products start to decay as soon as they are
produced, they don't wait until someone hits the off switch and drops
the control rods.