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No Fuel In the Fukushima Reactor #1
An anonymous reader writes To nobody's surprise, the Japanese press reports that a new way to look at the inside of one of the Fukushima 1 damaged reactors has shown the fuel is not in place. Engineers have not been able to develop a machine to directly see the exact location of the molten fuel, hampered by extremely high levels of radiation in and around the reactors, but a new scan technique using muons (details on the method in the media are missing) have shown the fuel is not in its place. While Tepco's speculation is that the fuel may be at the bottom of the reactor, it is a safe bet that at least some of it has burned through and has gone on to create an Uruguay syndrom.
What on earth is "an Uruguay syndrom", and why does google have no idea either.
'Safe bet' == 'pure inflammatory guesswork'?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
With the decommissioning expected to take 3 to 4 decades, that's pretty good job security.
Just too bad that the half-life of the workers will be less than the half-life of the job. But it "is" a lifetime job."
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
> Since the core contained tons of material it is impossibly naive to believe that it is even remotely contained.
I agree with you completely, but want to point out that a great number of armchair physicists online have been scoffing and mocking people who indicate that the reactors melted down, that the fuel pools are not fully intact, and that the earthquakes caused real damage. Slowly, the picture of damage is becoming clear and those armchair physicists are being proven wrong. It's almost like global warming deniers. Fukushima deniers?
Depends on what you mean by "Essentially all of the fuel is at the base of the reactor vessel".
If you mean that no fuel escaped the reactor pressure vessel, I'd take that bet in a heartbeat. If you mean that most of fuel is inside the primary containment vessel, I expect you're right but I wouldn't take that bet one way or the other.
This particular disaster has a track record of confounding optimistic expectations. In fact I think that's the lesson to draw from it. When events move well outside the parameters you expected you can't rely on optimistic expectations, you need data. We have to assume that fuel outside the PCV is at least a possibility until we have evidence which rules that out.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.