Published: April 18th, 2012 at 8:19 am ET
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Title: Arnie Gundersen Interview
Source: WBAI’s Five O’Clock Shadow
Date: Tuesday April 17, 2012 5:00pm
At 25:45 in
There’s enough fuel in that pool, that it’s almost as much cesium as in all of the atom bombs that were ever dropped into the atmosphere, 800 bombs were dropped into the atmosphere, well there’s as much cesium in that one pool as in those bombs.
It could very easily cut Japan in half [...]
h/t Anonymous tips
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Published: April 18th, 2012 at 8:19 am ET
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Like a Tweet said this morning: "We should all be building Lead Houses" Posted.
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Actually, there have been;
2400 Global Nuclear Atmospheric Bomb Tests 1945-1998
http://agreenroad.blogspot.com/2012/04/nuclear-atmospheric-bomb-testing-1945.html
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A glimpse into our futures:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbLgszfXTAY
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Afraid so kintaman, coming soon to your town if not already !
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Thats just #4 Fuel pool !
We have and the prospect of x millions of bombs with the others and continuing China syndrome's !
ELE
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Speaking of SFP's does anyone know the condition of Reactor 1 and 2's fuel pools? I never hear a word about them does anyone have info. Thanks in advance.
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moonshellblue,
Or the status of the plant North of troubled plants, there were many reports of problems there as well !
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Mornin', xdrfox,
Weren't there 1700+ above ground nuclear tests? Or did the no. I saw on a video someone posted (with the timeline and location of the explosions) include the underground tests?
A friend of mine wrote a Master's level Hydrology thesis showing radiation from the Nevada underground tests would eventually reach the Los Angeles basin water supply.
She was never able to get a job in her field afterward, & assumes she was blackballed for telling the unpleasant truth.
Lies & obfuscation has been the order of the day since the Manhattan Project.
Last night I watched the movie, "Radium City" from a link at A Green Road's blog. The women who painted radium on the dials of watches, & on parts for war instruments were used as human guinea pigs by Argonne Labs in Illinois. Argonne Labs would X-ray the victims of the radium factory workers, whose bones had turned to a fragile honeycomb. The victims were not told what radium had done to their bodies. They only knew when they died of exotic and rare cancers. Often their fragile bones shattered, collapsed, & their bodies never healed. Many, many young women died untimely deaths due to radium exposure. An entire Illinois town is now radioactive.
Every time we're told by "health physics" experts "low level radiation" is mostly harmless, remember the suffering of thousands of radium factory workers, & the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
We are all the guinea pigs of the nuclear war machine and…
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… nuclear war machine and the nuclear power industry.
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HoTaters,
… Brush-sucking was probably an unsafe way to hand paint china, but with radium the technique became a death sentence.
The women were told that the paint—a mixture of glue, water, and radium powder—was harmless. An instructor once made a show of swallowing some just to prove the point. The girls entertained themselves by playing with the "harmless" paint, decorating their nails and teeth with the luminous mixture.
The radium they were using emits low-energy radiation, which bounces harmlessly off the skin. However, if the material is swallowed, it permanently insinuates itself into the skeleton, where it continues to emit radiation for the rest of the victim's life, and indeed long after she is dead. Investigators would later measure the radioactivity in the bones of long-dead dial painters to prove that they had been poisoned. …
~~~~
Illinois Town to Honor Memory of 'Radium Girls' Poisoned at Work …
Jan 20, 2011 … Illinois Town to Honor Memory of 'Radium Girls' Poisoned at Work … Investigators would later measure the radioactivity in the bones of …
http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6876/illinois_town_to_honor_the_memory_of_radium_girls_poisoned_at_work/
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Radium in Ground Water from Public-Water Supplies
in Northern Illinois
http://il.water.usgs.gov/pubs/fs137_99.pdf
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In the spring of 1979 thousands of people in Tucson were contaminated with tritium from the downtown plant of American Atomics, who replied that the total radioactive content was "very low."[11] See Killing Our Own for complete chapter: http://www.ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/KOO10.html
"Routine tests in early June at the Tucson school system's central kitchen, near the plant, found food with radiation counts 2.5 times above permissible levels. The kitchen regularly fed approximately forty thousand students. Water in cake that had been served to twenty-eight thousand pupils contained fifty-six thousand picocuries per liter; federal standards allowed only twenty-thousand picocuries….
Meanwhile urine tests of people living near the plant revealed at least six cases of abnormal levels of tritium. Six-year-old Tony Bruckmeier tested at 89,100 picocuries per liter, a level termed by Gail Schmidt of the Bureau of Radiation Health as "small but not negligible."[13] Groundwater contamination with tritium in a desert area is very serious. Eventually the plant was shut down, and Gov Babbitt intervened. He had troops seize hundreds of thousands of glass vials full of tritium and bury them in the Army depot/waste storage facility near Flagstaff, AZ. Wonder how that groundwater up there is doing now?
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Thanks Arizonan! Yeah,….and I WONDER if Tony Bruckmeier is dead or alive?
It's the Tony Bruckmeier's of this green orb,….that I want to comfort!
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HoTaters, StillJill
Mislabeling of Seafood Widespread In LA
To Gulf Oil Spill on Wednesday, April 18, 2012
http://beforeitsnews.com/story/2041/695
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Dumping Radioactive Waste at Sea, Radiation Legacy104
To Mass Animal Death on Friday, November 11, 2011
http://members.beforeitsnews.com/story/1356/501/
Opp's, dam stuff stuck in my mouse like gum to the shoe, better then sh*t Huh ?
: D
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SFP4: If the water drains, the fires will rekindle, as they did after 311. Since there are no walls or roof, there will be no hydrogen explosion. Temperatures will rise, the remains of what was 135 tons of fuel rods will burn and melt. The bottom of SFP4 will become a lake of lava burning through concrete. Since TEPCO will try to cool SFP4 by pouring water on the lava that never cools, steam will put lots of radioactivity into the air, and water could run out of the hole in SFP4 and into the Pacific Ocean. If a prompt criticality occurs, it's anybody's guess how large the resulting explosion could be. The fourth corium could simply burn through the bottom of SFP4, burn down through the building, and eventually into the ground.
If SFP4 collapses, the radioactivity at Fuku could drive away all workers. Left unattendrd, six other SFPs would burn and/or explode (SFPs 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, and one common SFP). Japan would be permanently evacuated. The North American West would have to be evacuated east of the Rocky Mountains. Worldwide cancer deaths would rise dramatically. All nukes would be shut down permanently by public outcry. The world economy would likely be depressed for decades.
Not a bright picture. Accurate? Time will tell.
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Posted your comment at HP. Thank you philip, time will tell is right.
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TIME IS HERE http://enenews.com/china-syndrome-japan-times-on-melt-through-molten-lava-melted-bottom-of-containment-vessel-says-nuclear-engineer-given-access-by-top-official-huge-amounts-of-fission-materials-released/
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TEPCO's website states the following The Tokyo Electric Power Company, Incorporated, would like to make comments on subjects that are reported by the newspapers, TV or websites.
Reactor buildings will not collapse even if earthquake with the same scale as that of Tohoku – Pacific Ocean Earthquake occurs again.
April 5, 2012
NO NUKES me
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That's a big reassurance statement… don't know that I believe it though.
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Well done Philip.
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Absolutely not accurate Philipupnorth. Start again…
In "Reactivity Profile"……"and cesium will react violently, even explosively, with an excess of zirconium powder [Ellern 1968. p. 249]."
http://cameochemicals.noaa.gov/chemical/8183
Look closely and see what it means please,
I have elaborated….borated this in the past.
Hydrogen is just too childishly simple. Instinct alone would reveal there is more to this than hydrogen Zirconium.
The case is closed in view of the above information, in as much as that it is wrong.
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West of the Rocky Mountains?
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@ phillipupnorth, you meant west of the Rocky Mountains, right?
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Yes, HoTaters. I meant to say that those who live west of the Rockies will have to be evacuated to the east of the Rockies.
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philipupnorth,
A video of the bottom of these pools would be most reveling !
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xdrfox: SFP4 burned for days, and repeatedly, didn't it? Must be a puddle on the floor. But the tops of the fuel assemblies look intact and unburned, don't they? I would expect to see more fire damage.
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philipupnorth,
Videos released the other day the fuel rods have something on top of, (from burning ?) so much so that one can not see the handles used to place and extract them ! Did they fission and are now at the bottom of the pools ?
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Clear thoughtful comment. I have also reposted it. It gives people a lot to think about. Thanks philipnorth!
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But can the contents of no.4 explode with the force of 800 bombs? Surely there needs to be a specific interaction and certain ingrediants etc. Does anyone know? The bomb that was dropped on hiroshima wasnt a bucket of chemicals, it would have been engineered right?
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cardi77u: I am not a physicist, but I read some time ago an article that speculated that the lava at the bottom of a SFP meltdown would separate into layers by element, according to atomic weight. If an element like U235 reached critical mass, it could go boom. My thought is that the lava will be roiling, unable to separate into layers. Will a prompt criticality occur? Certainly. It doesn't take much. The Little Boy bomb that destroyed Hiroshima converted a mere 600 – 860 MILLIGRAMS of U235 from matter into energy, according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy. SFP4 has about 135 TONS of uranium and MOX fuel. Quite a "bucket of chemicals". The fissile elements will not be configured like the components of a bomb. But a rifle cartridge can explode, even if it is not inside a rifle. If SFP4 goes, it may go big.
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No Card, I do not believe it will explode with the force of 800 atomic bombs. It will have a very fast reaction, but not that fast. More like a small explosion that continues for days or weeks. Releasing more radioactive elements than 800 bombs.
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Spectrometising: Would you please offer your prediction of what would happen should SFP4 go dry.
I said that there would not be a HYDROGEN explosion from a dry SFP4, because there is no longer an enclosed building, in which the hydrogen can build up. An explosion or explosions may occur, from a prompt criticality or other source. According to the linked article, cesium reacts explosively with zirconium POWDER. Will burning zircaloy in SFP4 become the fine powder it needs to be to react explosively with cesium?
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Glad you asked philipupnorth. It will be a composite of an explosion and various parts of SP4 ate various "moments" all conbined to form a composite…..I had been working on a question and dialogue approach.
What about "China Syndrome" spectro??
China Syndrome blob has its own metabolism.
If it gets larger it gets hotter, until it reaches a boiling point and then it merely volatilizes/boils away as a pure nuclear vapor.
So the mythical China Syndrome blob can not exist as a larger mass beyond its ultimate critical mass.
This is how it has a metabolism/homeostasis of its own if you like.
If the zirconium is heated until it vaporizes, then an explosion will occur between the cesium and zirconium in volatilized state..
During high heat, ALL water steam and oxygen is displaced, and the cesium boils off first. This will not be the same in all parts of the SFP4 or other resulting in the volatilised cesium and zirconium exploding and blowing the remaining un-volatilised assemblies at various moments of meltdown out of the SFP4
Not all the Zirconium will be volatilised to form explosive cesium/zirconium mixture
This might be a blessing in disguise as it might prevent the other rods from reaching the heat required to melt and volatilize those also.
In this meta scenario, the nuclear fuel fragments and rod assemblies will be blown out of the containment, but at least they will be in one piece or in pieces and not in a gaseous volatilized form…
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This secondary stage beyond the stage of having a plentiful supply of O2 from water, is the stage where the Zirconium is starved once again of oxygen,
It is also the stage where any steam is displaced by boiling Cesium vapour, and so on, followed by the zirconium which has a higher boiling point.
I suspect that Zirconium will not have to form a gaseous or a divided state to perform an explosion if bits of unoxidised zirc have broken off into the molten corium.
I really do suspect this is what the nuke industry never intended anyone to know.
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Spectrometising: It strikes me that encasing uranium fuel pellets in Zircaloy cladding constitutes a fatal design flaw that is present in operating nukes all over the world. Why would any reasonable person incase nuke fuel in something that is combustable, reactive with nuke fuel byproducts, and potentially explosive? You'd have to be an idiot or insane to do this! No, wait!
I think you have something there. This may be what the nuke industry has been trying to keep from the public. Fuel rods with their Zircaloy covers are quite simply bombs waiting for the right conditions to blow. Spectro, I wonder if spent fuel in dry casks is at all safe if left unattended?
I agree with you that an explosion in one part of SFP4 may not blow up ALL the other materials in various states, but may blow them up into the air to drop back down onto the site relatively intact. Most of the material will not be volatilized. We may be able to clean up such material.
If the entire building were to collapse into a heap of rubble, what do you think will happen?
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Thank you kindly Philipupnorth for following my anthroponuclear permutations and deliberations..
You have said all the rest for me.
If it collapses into a pile of rubble, conditions for similar Cesium/Zirc explosion may not be possible anymore, but hot spots may slowly vapourise until the hot spot diminishes in size enough to merely slowly fume radionuclides.
The bit that makes the biggest impression on me tonight here in the south, is that upon thinking about the entire question again since posting the reference to an explosive cesium/zirc mixture in January of this year (approx), it occurred to me, like a revelation, that the steam would have expanded immediately prior to previous explosions, the result of which would have been to displace any explosive mixtures of hydrogen/oxygen present in the buildings as the reactor or fuel pools were heating/boiling.
That rules out Hydrogen explosion, after revisiting my anthroponuclear way of thinking about it again….hmmmm
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Just to summarize the preceeding:
Hydrogen and air (oxygen) were displaced by steam in Reactors 1 & 3, prior to the explosions.
Neither hydrogen nor steam played much of a role in the explosions at Fuku 1 & 3.
The Fuku explosions, which followed 311, were a result of a mixture of zirconium and cesium vapor.
A mixture of zirconium and cesium vapor is explosive even in the absence of oxygen.
We examined what might happen if SFP4 runs dry, as it may if another massive earthquake strikes nearby, causing a leak in SFP4:
Fuel rods would heat up and vaporize cesium and zirconium.
A cesium/zirconium explosion would expell much of the contents of SFP4.
Much of the contents of SFP4 would remain fairly intact, and would rain back down on the site and nearby Pacific Ocean. This material would be recoverble.
Such an explosion would create plenty of volatilized materials, that would disperse across the world in the wind.
About right, Spectro?
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Sounds right Philip. Most of the fuel will not volatilize into smaller and more dangerous fractions if a similar explosion occurs that results in a dispersal of fuel pellets/rods/assemblies in a more or less intact form. raining down as you describe. Agreed.
Scratching the sandbox of new data that has hitherto not been considered, it would seem cesium and zirconium are a known explosive mixture and worthy of much further consideration.
One thing seems more certain to me for now, after revisiting the burning question, is that i am more convinced that steam will displace/dilute hydrogen and oxygen and thus diminish possibility of hydrogen explosion et all.
I will sleep on it, and again revisit this new anthroponuclear morphism of mass deduction with fresh eyes from Au
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lastly, i believe the absence of a hydrogen/oxygen mixture, a result of the completely unenclosed structure, will not do very much to diminish the explosion. That is because i do not believe the hydrogen explosion was the major contributor to the the other explosions, and instead had always been the Zirconium/cesium explosion in the main.
The nuclear industry can offer solace if everyone believes it is as simple as "injecting" nitrogen, but it can not offer solace if people find out that nuclear reactors around the globe are an explosion waiting to happen that cannot be stopped.
Further to consider and of utmost importance. here is the acid to dissolve any trace of the "hydrogen" explanation.
If steam is created,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,vast quantities of both oxygen and hydrogen are displaced, and so these levels would have been very low in the buildings prior to both previous explosions.
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Spectro: We agree, with respect to hydrogen playing only a secondary role in the Fuku explosions. I don't see to where the hydrogen generated by melting Zircaloy could be "displaced" within a reactor or containment. But I'll take your point that steam displaces air and hydrogen. Nor were Fuku buildings destroyed by steam explosions. Were these nuclear explosions, as has been speculated? Or, were the explosions of Building 1, 3, and 4 caused by a mixture of zirconium/cesium vapor, as you suggest? Spectro, I haven't heard anyone else voice this theory since 311. You may have hit on the real cause for the explosions! Congratulations! Good work!
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Philipupnorth: Maybe leave the questions as a suspension. They might just be salient enough. Your critical commentary is priceless.
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And as a summary, based on these astute observations,
A: steam displaces Hydrogen and oxygen in enclosed buildings.
B: Cesium and Zirconium are able to form explosive mixtures.
References:
In "Reactivity Profile"……"and cesium will react violently, even explosively, with an excess of zirconium powder [Ellern 1968. p. 249]."
http://cameochemicals.noaa.gov/chemical/8183
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Spectro: "Astute observations" indeed. Agree 100%
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And just to make this one point clear:
Nuclear plants around the world use fuel rods of identical design: Zircaloy cladding tubes house uranium or MOX fuel pellets. Zircronium vapor from Zircaloy cladding, and cesium vapor from melted fuel, create an explosive combination.
http://cameochemicals.noaa.gov/chemical/8183
Zirconium and cesium vapor may have caused the explosions at Fukushuma after the earthquake of 3/11/2011.
Use of Zircaloy cladding is a fatal design flaw at the heart of nuclear power plants. Nuclear power plants using zirconium fuel cladding must be shut down now. Their continued operation with fatally flawed Zircaloy cladded fuel rods is highly irresponsible. All fuel rods containing zirconium must be removed from spent fuel pools adjacent to, or above, nuclear reactors.
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Wow, Spectro and PhillipUp, for what it's worth (being that I have zero expertise in this area), I am impressed at the depth of your analysis here. Good work! These theories all sound valid to me.
May I suggest you contact Arne Gunderson or Robert Alvarez and ask them for their evaluation of said theory? It would be most fascinating to hear their input on whether they agree this could be possible. If you do contact them, and get a response, please let us know! Good luck!
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WhatAboutTheKids: Many thanks. This back and forth with Spectro was an example of exactly the kind of collaborative effort and info sharing that I came to ENEnews to find. Thanks to ENEnews for the forum!
I expect Arnie Gundersen reads ENEnews daily, and I hope he picks up on this thread. I hope he does respond, as I believe Spectro has this right.
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I just sent Arnie that email. Thanks WhatAboutTheKids!
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Excellent! I await his response with baited breath!
I am sure you also know about physicsforum? They are nuclear physicists and other engineering students and professionals discussing the technical aspects of Fuku. I used to read their discussions last year, but have no time these days. But read a lot of fascinating discussions and learned a lot (despite the presence of some obvious pro-nukers trying to sway the conversation, at least at that time.)
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I too have to thank Spectrometising & philipupnorth for not only your analysis but how you each spoke in layman's terms so that people without any expertise can easily grasp it. I too await a response from Arnie & will hope that you will also analyze & breakdown it down.
Your input is extremely important becasue soo many simply skim over reports with glazed eyes, never really absorbing the facts. By understanding the true dangers more people will want to fight against nuclear power.
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