Scratx-chan wrote:What I was afraid of. We got a Three Mile Island in course right now.
I really hope they get that under control fast.
It's really, really not an absolutely critical problem. I mean, look, there's been what appears to be a hydrogen explosion at the affected reactor now. That's bad, but it's not 'OMG, CHERNOBYL WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!' If anything, it's an indication that even thirty year old safety measures in first world nuke plant designs make a repeat of Chernobyl impossible.
You scoff? Well, just look at what happened at Chernobyl. The reactor melted down and caused a steam explosion. So far, things are similar here; the reactor appears to have partially melted down and caused a hydrogen explosion, but a boom is a boom. Then things go differently. Chernobyl blew the roof off of the reactor building, spewed a huge cloud of fallout across the Ukraine, and deposited bits of reactor vessel and fuel around the area of the plant. By this point, there were Russian firemen from Pripyat handling bits of metal so radioactive that they'd just killed themselves without knowing it. In Japan, we've got... nothing. The sum total of the explosion has been a small radiation leak that doesn't make the plant unsafe to work in if a little bit of care is taken, whereas the people responding to Chernobyl basically killed themselves.
This is basically an absolute
worst case scenario playing out before our eyes, and there's no fallout cloud, it hasn't made the local area uninhabitable, and other than the unfortunate people killed in the explosion itself, it hasn't been a death sentence for anybody. It's absolute proof that containment vessels and other safety systems work, and work well, because it's so much less apocalyptic than Chernobyl despite similar starting events. That's in a plant that's basically obsolete; if it was a modern design, there wouldn't have been a meltdown
at all, because the vast majority of modern reactors are designed to be essentially automatically self cooling for precisely this reason.
If it had breached the containment vessel,
that would be a problem, but it would be obvious if it had. It would be pretty hard to miss the giant plume of radioactive debris, after all.