you wrote on Thursday, September 30, 1999 12:28 PM
BBC even has a video that shows the
hole blown in the roof by the accident. "4,000 times safety
limits" could infer a very big problem inside.
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Comment : this would seem to contradict the following statement,
"The nuclear reaction was set off when the workers accidentally mixed too much uranium in the tank, company officials said. They said they thought that while radioactivity was released into the atmosphere, the radioactive material itself remained contained."
from http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/19990930/ts/japan_nuclear_accident_6.html
....the description above would seem to indicate a LOW-yield criticality accident TYPICAL of fissile aqueous solutions (as opposed to heterogeneous core supercritical bursts like SL-1, SPERT, BORAX, etc.).
There is a "lethal" radiation burst (netrons & gammas), but as the quote says, most of the liquid remains in the pot (the more gets ejected, the less chance of re-criticality...). There are no solid projectiles to "blow a hole in the roof," at most only a spray/foaming.
Has anyone else seen this BBC video ?
jaro
frantaj@aecl.ca