Question for the smart guys: The nuke physicist lady said that when the core hits the 7000 cubic meters of water that it would immediately vaporize every bit of it to steam, generating an explosion equivalent to between 2 & 4 megatons. How? 7000 cubic meters of water is 1,850,000 gallons... even at 50C°, as the miners mentioned, that's 122F°, leaving 80F° plus latent heat of vaporization of a little over 15.4 million pounds of water.A cub of water 62' 8" on a side. What's the mass and heat content of this core?
Way too many variables here for those of us who haven't seen the show. If the core is shut down the decay heat is many orders of magnitude too low to do anything like that. In a water moderated core, steam will shut the fission process down as well, even if it is previously critical. For very nominal numbers a typical large reactor operates at something like 3600 mega watts. 3.6X10e9 watts. There's no such thing as instantaneously so lets assume 1 second. That's only 10 KWH or about 3.4x10e7 BTU's. 1.85x10e6 gallons of water weighs about 1.5x10e7 lbs so the temperature would go up about 2 F degrees. You metric folks got to do your own math...
Thanks for the numbers there. I didn't know those formulae. Chernobyl was a 1000 MW plant, but in this configuration, design parameters are being exceeded. Shot of what the guys who went to look at the core saw. They lived a few minutes after seeing this. Perspective is hard to get, but this is on a walkway over the core, maybe 40-50 feet. Supposedly the core is headed for full on China Syndrome. RBMK so it's a big-ass stack of graphite with channels for rods & coolant. It's all ablaze at the bottom of the containment vessel. I would think the graphite would burn off. They're finding zirconium in the smoke cloud as they fly over in helicopters, so it's pretty damn hot. I guess it would boil down to (heheh) the thermal content of the core components that wouldn't burn off at ~3000° This show is NOT painting the nuke industry in a very good light, BTW. I know it's Soviet, and RBMK, and 33 years ago, but the public doesn't much distinguish WRT nukuler stuff.
People fear that which they don’t understand. eg. you can physically hold an ingot of plutonium, admire its warmth and show it to your friends without coming down with the cancer. I want one of those buried-in-the-backyard reactors that were designed back in the fifties!
A 1000 MW(e) plant is actually about 3600 MW (thermal) allowing for inefficiencies in converting thermal power to electrical power. I don't know enough about graphite moderated reactors in full failure mode. Obviously the fire was the major contributor to the scale of the accident. No fire and most of that fission product would have stayed put as happened in TMI and Fuchishima. In the case of the F plant in Japan the H2 explosion was certainly dramatic but in itself didn't contribute to distribution of fission products the way the C fire did in Ukraine.
per the wiki page: "Unlike western light-water reactors, the RBMK had a positive void coefficient of reactivity, meaning when water began to boil and produce voids in the coolant, the nuclear chain reaction increased instead of decreasing. With this feature at low reactor power levels, the No. 4 RBMK reactor was now primed to embark on a positive feedback loop, in which the formation of steam voids reduced the ability of the liquid water coolant to absorb neutrons, which in turn increased the reactor's power output." Power when it blew is estimated to have been 30,000mw.
There was a time not that long ago when people thought that sitting in radium mines would cure migraine headaches.
I guess it depends on your definition of "cure".....Headaches would certainly be the least of your worries.
As I understand the issue you're talking about, it boils down to Soviet mindset. The State signed off on the design of the Chernobyl reactors. The State is a perfect, infallible entity. Since the state signed off on the reactor design, then the reactor is an infallible entity by proxy. Even if the designers knew about the possibility of a positive void coefficient, that would be an example of fallibility, which is not possible. Therefore there was nothing in the training manuals dealing with positive void coefficients. Spooky...
