![]() ![]() "Hydrogen combustion would not occur necessarily in the containment building," Bergeron pointed out, "which is inert-it doesn't have any oxygen-but they have had to vent the containment, because this pressure is building up from all this steam. And hydrogen at the right concentration in an atmosphere is either flammable or explosive." It's essentially a high-speed rusting, where the zirconium becomes zirconium oxide and the hydrogen is set free. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) member Peter Bradford added, "The other thing that happens is that the cladding, which is just the outside of the tube, at a high enough temperature interacts with the water. Quite a bit of this happened in TMI, but the pressure vessel did not fail."įormer U.S. And eventually the core just starts slumping and melting. If the water descends below the level of the fuel, then the temperature starts going up and the cladding bursts, releasing a lot of fission products. They're held in a cylindrical-shaped array. "The fuel rods are long uranium rods clad in a. And we're hoping that all of the barriers to release of radioactivity will not fail."īergeron explained the basics of overheating at a nuclear fission plant. So we're in uncharted territory, we're in a land where probability says we shouldn't be. In this case it was the earthquake and tsunami. "The probability of this occurring is hard to calculate, primarily because of the possibility of what are called common-cause accidents, where the loss of off-site power and of on-site power are caused by the same thing. It is considered to be extremely unlikely, but the station blackout has been one of the great concerns for decades. It means loss of off-site AC power-power lines are down-and then a subsequent failure of emergency power on-site-the diesel generators. "And the type of accident that is occurring in Japan is known as a station blackout. "Reactor analysts like to categorize potential reactor accidents into groups," said Bergeron, who did research on nuclear reactor accident simulation at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. Whereas various participants discussed the policy ramifications of the crisis, physicist Ken Bergeron provided most of the information regarding the actual damage to the reactor. Eastern Standard Time on March 12, American nuclear experts gathered for a call-in media briefing. Now the world waits as emergency crews attempt to stop a core meltdown from occurring at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear reactor, already the site of an explosion of the reactor's housing structure.Īt 1:30 P.M. The added horror of the tsunami quickly followed. First came the earthquake, centered just off Japan's east coast, near Honshu. ![]()
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