|
Wow! For a minute think about the physics of
a molten core and "how" it traverses a media (displacement and
melting). Also, consider the molten core's change in geometry and cooling
as it traverses the media, especially water and debris it picks up.
A molten core is a problem of minor scale when it is allowed to expand and cool,
especially tens of feet below the surface, if it gets that far.
In my opinion, TMI's core, if could have breached the reactor vessel, would have
stopped at the containment mat after it naturally spread out and
cooled.
"In science there is only physics; everything else is stamp
collecting."
--Ernest Rutherford
Dean Chaney, CHP, IBA (aka High Plains Drifter) Fairfield, CA magna1@jps.net
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, August 17, 2001 4:13
PM
Subject: Cherynobl and groundwater
radionuclide transport...
Hello radsafers.....
From: jpreisig@aol.com
It has been interesting to read through about
50 e-mail (radsafe)
messages
each day for the last two days.
August is here and the boss is on vacation.
Web it up,
radsafe-wise......
About truck radiation
monitors... I don't know about portable truck
radiation
monitors, but Brookhaven does have a truck radiation monitoring station
for
trucks entering (or exiting???) the laboratory. Layendecker's HP
division
probably has more information about it.
Concerning melting cores (Cherynobl and TMI),
there is an excellent
videotape shot of the internal damage to the
Cherynobl reactor.
The core fuel/metal mixture appears to have flowed like
molten lava.
H. Kahnhauser (UGH) at Brookhaven probably recalls the source
of this
videotape. Probably US Nuclear plants have sufficient
concrete under the
reactor (50 feet +???) to stop the so-called China
Syndrome.
Even if the hot core material would
reach the aquifer (not aquifier),
not all
radionuclides would
transport well from that point on. From what I
remember from Presto
and other groundwater flow/transport computer
codes, radionuclides which
transport at the rate water flows are:
H-3 (i.e. tritium), C-14, Tc-99,
I-129 and Np-237. Other radionuclides are
"retarded" with respect to
water flow rates, i.e. they transport much more
slowly
than water.
The physical parameters which describe the relative transport
rates
are Kd values or the related parameter R (known as retardation
factors---
a horrible name for something in our line of work). More details on
all this
can be found in the Hydrogeology book by Freeze & Cherry and
another
Hydrogeology book by De Marsily. Fractured (rock) flow
changes much of
what I have described in the previous paragraph.
It is funny to see TMI documentaries
resurface, as nuclear power is
staging a comeback. From what I have
read here about coal plant emissions,
I think I'd rather live fairly close
to a nuclear power plant. The problem
with
reprocessing nuclear
waste is that no-one in the USA really wants to
do it --- it's one of
those tasks best left to others.
When compared
to fission, fusion still wins readily. The major
radio-nuclide in
fusion is tritium, with its relatively innocuous half-life
of 12 years.
Maybe George W. should funnel some of the particle-beam
money to
places doing Fusion research, like Princeton U.
In the meantime, Brookhaven Lab. is running
gold collisions at 100
GeV on 100 Gev (collision) energies (that's energy
per nucleon or something
like that) at the Relativisitic Heavy Ion
Collider (RHIC). They will also be
running 100 GeV on 100 GeV proton
collisions fairly soon. Not bad for
an accelerator that was dead
(ISABELLE) and came back to life
as RHIC. RHIC is a very viable
physics machine. They claim to be
looking for the quark-gluon
plasma, but they could do so much more with this
accelerator. Let's
get to it. The Large Hadron Collider (CERN) is still five
years off.
Brookhaven could create 5 Nobel Prize winning efforts in those
5
years.
Well, I've said too much already.
Best wishes to Nisy Ipe in her new job
away from SLAC.
STAY
COOL!!!!!
J.R.
Preisig, Ph.D.
P.S. RHIC at BNL has its web-page which shows
some of its experimental
results. The
experiments (not small ones) are Phenix, Star, Brahms
and Phobos (I think).
|