Published: November 17th, 2011 at 12:32 am ET
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Hydrogen buildup at Fukushima? What does it mean & why does it happen?, Fairewinds Associates, Nov. 15, 2011:
TEPCO recently discovered hydrogen buildups within the containment buildings in Fukushima Units 1, 2 and 3. Could there be another explosion, and if so how? Fairewinds conducts a laboratory experiment to show that if oxygen is present with hydrogen in a nuclear power containment, a deflagration explosion might occur.
“As a reminder, this November, we are asking for your financial support so we can continue our educational efforts. For those of you who have gone to the Fairewinds website and found the donate button and clicked it, thank you very much.” -Arnie Gundersen
Hydrogen buildup at Fukushima? What does it mean & why does it happen? from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.
Published: November 17th, 2011 at 12:32 am ET
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I wish he wouldn’t stand quite so close to the thing he knows is about to explode. It seems like it’s barely a foot away from his face.
Arnie, we need you to keep yourself in one piece so you can keep informing us about stuff. Please don’t take any unnecessary risks. . . . and thanks as always for the explanation.
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The hole in the bottom of the bottle is so large that it will let the flame and pressure out the bottom quite readily without stressing the bottle much at all.
He forgot to mention this detail, which does matter.
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What buildup the buildings leak like a sieve
The pipes can hold some gas but hydrogen rises so fast it acts like propellant to push all those pluto dust particles upto the jet stream. Arnie seems to be fishing this time.
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I’m not sure, but I think the holes where the leaking occurs are mainly toward the bottom, where the melted fuel collected/burned through (with the possible exception of #3, where some say the RPV itself exploded). He seems to imply that, if the top-most portion of the pressure vessel is still relatively intact, the hydrogen can still get trapped up there and just remain there; since it is lighter than air, it only goes up, so it doesn’t seep out holes that are lower down.
The soda bottle that he uses illustrates that–even though it has a pretty big hole in the bottom of it, the hydrogen doesn’t leak out because it only travels upward, away from that hole.
(For those of you west of Pittsburgh, “soda” = “pop”).
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dpl:
The pressure vessels melted out their bottoms.
That, in concept, leaves a very large RPV structure much like the plastic bottle, still standing upright.
Plenty of volume to hold a lot of hydrogen gas.
As for hydrogen acting as a propellant, that is a stretch (to me).
Fuku could generate a lot of hydrogen at a slow to medium rate that it might take days or weeks to fill a volume above where it is getting generated.
Also, consider the mass of a hydrogen atom compared to the mass of a plutonium atom on said dust particle.
Even if you could put some velocity behind the hydrogen atom, it will be hard to get much kinetic energy stored in it in order to move a dust particle or even single atoms.
One would need some serious flow rate (i.e. lots of hydrogen!)
to pick up the dust and keep the dust moving “up”.
A lot of hydrogen gas with some serious flow rate and yes, the dust could get kicked up.
Yet in all of what we have seen aside from the explosions of months ago, I have seen no evidence of lots of hydrogen spewing.
Leaking, of course.
If there was as much hydrogen to kick things up as much as you are assuming, I am confident we/they would have had many more explosions than what we have seen so far.
Just some thoughts to clarify things.
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Iam335:
Wow!
What timing!
Yours posted while I was down screen typing mine!
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I assumed they were still nitrogen flushing the RPVs
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Here is a link to some recent pics of Fuki,
http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-111211/daiichi-111211.htm
Hydrogen is produced when nuclear reaction splits the cooling water to produce hydrogen and Oxygen. Cooling water is constantly being poured onto the melting mass what else can they do? I believe they
can’t do a total cover like with Chernobyl as they need to maintain a cooling system. We are in uncharted territory. Just look at these pictures. Reactors including #3 experimental MOX plutonium are trashed. Plutonium reacts and combines with oxygen and hydrogen as I’ve posted before. Check the pics out they are cool. Cheers
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Good pics. In the one at the Fuky EOC headquarters, I thought wouldn’t it be cool if someone at the roundtable had Enenews up on their laptops.
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The explosions at units 1 and 4 were hydrogen explosions within the reactor buildings. Unit three was a multi-phase explosion, three detonations in rapid order, with a very high probability that either the reactor or spent fuel pool causing the main detonation (probably the latter). Unit 2′s explosion was much smaller that the rest, but it was an internal hydrogen explosion, happening inside the vessel. It primarily blew out gaskets and seals. A larger internal explosion would be a much bigger event, much like unit 3′s detonation series, but in all likelihood much worse.
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At least the theory of Richard Webb that BWR and PWR with line-ups of several reactors can be much more dangerous than a Chernobyl type of reactor and create an atomic bomb didn’t completely get realized – at least there wasn’t a big nuclear explosion which he feared. Merely just one contender – the Unit 3. A near miss perhaps.
Webb wrote that BWR and PWR are or can be more dangerous than the Chernobyl Reactors.
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The Risks of Catastrophic Accidents at Nuclear Power Plants, by Dr. Richard E. Webb
A paper for the Conferència Catalana per un Futur Sense Nuclears, Barcelona, Spain, 25 April 1990
“…The information given in this paper… is all still valid; but my subsequent research has uncovered that the nuclear accident hazards are far worse even than evaluated in this paper particularly in respect to the health hazards of nuclear radiation and the potential catastrophic consequences to life on Earth in the event of another nuclear eruption (the Chernobyl eruption is small compared to the full potential for explosion and radioactivity releases in the type of reactors used in United States, France, Germany, Britain, Japan, Sweden, &c., mainly, the PWRS, BWRs, AGRs and Magnox)…”
http://technidigm.org/c5001/nucl_haz.htm
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GAWD… at least put the lid back on the muriatic acid just in case.
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So, after all this time we still are talking about hydrogen. Do the math. If one gram of Uranium= 2000 tons of coal in potential. There will be a release equal to approximately 3,000,000,000,000 tons of coal before all is said and done, spread out through space and time. All the while there will be the snap, crackle, and pop of spontaneous fission from the transuranic isotopes. No large scale criticalities should occur, because there is just too much moderating, neutron absorbing material around. If hydrogen harms anything or anyone it will be out of shear neglect and stupidity.IMMHO!
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I’m wondering what you all think of the relative risk scenarios posed by
a.) A very large explosion at the plant (accidental or precipitated)
v.
b.) Ongoing continuous fissioning and radiation releases – our current scenario.
Potrblog suggested that an explosion might be, in the longer scale, “risk mitigating” because of the accumulation of radiation contamination.
I have been thinking about those EPA radnet readings that are off the charts in certain US cities. Those readings are taken off the ground – up in the air (that is my understanding at least).
How much contamination are we facing in our soil and water through ongoing releases?
In his recent radio interview Arnie mentioned 100 disintegrations per second in about 2 pounds of dirt in the Cascades.
He didn’t give a date for when the sample was taken.
Based on the radnet readings, I’m sure the contamination is worsening…
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Lets have an explosion, send it all over here at once. However, wouldn’t a lot of it still remain (all over the place) thus multiplying the amount of continuous fissioning and radiation release spots?
That might be a double whammy.
But if it explodes then USA economy that is projected to be the last one standing in the room will fall sooner.
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How does it stop and when does it end? I keep asking these questions, but I realize there is no real answer. Nobody has a clue and if they do, they are not speaking.
a.) Explosion, accidental or precipitated…
b.) Ongoing radiation releases…
Not a very good list of choices.
“How much contamination are we facing in our soil and water through ongoing releases?” – majia
Whatever the amount, it is accelerating and accumulating. Slowly but surely. Non-stop! Some of us see this and others choose to ignore all warnings.
This ongoing low dose, (with spikes and a mixture of contaminants), scenario has not been anticipated or properly calculated. There is nothing to compare this unimaginable nightmare to. There is nothing to compare for what is to come. We ARE the experiment now.
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The question is: Could there be another explosion at Fukushima? After watching the video I’m left with 2 possible scenarios to chose from. #1 YES it will explode again or #2 it won’t explode as long as Tepco continues to pump Nitrogen in.
If I go with #2 I’d have to ask myself do I trust Tepco to pump limitless amounts of nitorgen for an undisclosed amount of time until the reaction stops? in 1000 years or more? If that is the case then #1 is my answer with the caveat that it will be because Tepco will FAIL at continuously pumping nitrogen in for an undisclosed amount of time. So it’s #1 AND #2 combined which means the whole thing will blow SKY HIGH eventually. It’s only a matter of time. I don’t believe Tepco can or will maintain their responsibility. Another earthquake could knock the nitrogen pumps out and Buh Bye.
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Fukushima could explode with hydrogen build-up
http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/news/intrnational/2011/11/16/1746.html
Transcript of Gundersen video.
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