Reply #47: more on spent fuel pools

[divvy]

I think my real point, that I wasn't making very well, about the sent fuel pools is that the situation is too serious to walk away from. That isn't an option... they have to get water into that pool and keep it there or the situation will get much worse, as if it isn't bad enough already. The pool will not hold molten fuel for long. A dry spent fuel pool will have fuel rods breaking open with no containment. The barriers are now just the cladding... then there would be none. I can't say for certain there will be no explosion. You are closer to a nuclear engineer than I am... what I know about the neclear reactions is pretty much just what operator's are taught. Will all those rods and bundles stay sub critical? Without water, they wouldn't have moderation... but I am not sure about having water and losing configuration control due to all that has happened to those bundles... and the elevated temperatures. If there is a nuclear reaction in the pool, what would that mean in terms of dose and the spread of contamination? If you fail the fuel pool liner, I don't know what the end game would look like. Dose rates would be "permanently" too high to ever remove the fuel. You would have to erect some shielding around 6 pools. The technology doesn't exist today. The really scary part of the situation is that it is getting worse as time goes on... not very much done so far has changed the ultimate outcome. It has been like swimming upstream against a strong current. Better strategies are needed... somebody needs to be looking at the big picture and determining everything that needs to be done to safely stabilize those plants... just walking away will never be an option. I don't know if we know how bad it will get. What will be the permanent exclusion zone? The Dept of Energy has people that can probably figure that out. As I said early in this tread, I can't imagine how bad it would be. I can imagine Chernobyl, because I have seen it. I can't imagine what those fuel pools will be like if we let them go dry or the liner bottom is lost. The unknown may not be as bad as Chernobyl. I hope not, but I don't know... this is the worst scenario I could ever imgine while working a nuke plant for 25 years. I never dreamed that it would happen x6. If we just walked away now, all 6 plants would eventually have melted cores and fuel pools. The only difference in any of these plants is the time line for the failures. You can't stay in cold shutdown with no AC power. These plants cannot be controlled with no operators present. You can't cool the fuel pool with no power or alternative intervention. You could scuttle a sub, but that unfortunately isn't an option here.