Motorway driving in the fog

It isn't, but you knew that.

Radiation is good for you.

 

ISTR that it *may* be good for you in small doses, possibly. This info
brought to you by the Wind^h^h^h^hCalder^h^h^h^h^h^hSellafield Office
Of Honest Information. Which doesn't glow at all. Not even a tiny bit.

 

<secret handshake>

 

See that black helicopter circling silently above your house....

 

The first site I looked at giving details of fatalities stated that as
of May 1987 there were 31 fatalities, all from the plant and most of
them firemen.

So if we exclude longer term health risks we can conclude that it's
not a good idea to try fire fighting when someone's cooked a nuclear
reactor.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene/cherno2.html



Various safety courses I've had to endure before I could work on
reactors have told me that the final figure is likely to run into
thousands if you blame long term effects of radiation poisoning. Now I
accept that lecturers will always use scare tactics to make us more
safety conscious but I'd believe them before the Russian media.

 

I'll bet I make more money out of nuclear power over the next 5 years
than you do and even I know that they're dodgy places.

I'm in line to supervise a job on a refueling machine at one of our
nuclear power stations and we've been told that the equipment will be
junk after the job because of contamination. That's not exactly an
encouraging thought even though I'll be booted and suited before we go
into the work area.

 

I saw an interesting program about this - our radiation exposure models
are patchworks of theory and fact - we have solid bits for the centre
of the graph but the lower and upper secions are extrapolations of the
central region.

Someone else may remember the program more clearly - it was on one of
the terrestrial channels.

It may all be nonsense of course..

Phil.

 

sorry, but that's been disproven now.

 

Yeah - I just saw that.

So not a cable-channel junk science prog then.

Indeed. Judging by the predictions made after the disaster there should
have been a whole slew of mutations going on but there seems to have
been precious little effect. And no-one has seen any two-headed sheep
in Cumbria yet - just 6-fingered locals.

Phil.

 

IAEA figures in 2006 attribute 50 dearths directly to the accident. They
estimate 4000 more deaths directly to the accident over time. Many thousands
of women did aborted their pregnancies however and infant mortality did
rise, giving rise to the Green party scare story predictions of 500,000
deaths.

That has to be flawed.
The fuel caught fire and when the top came off the reactor (superheated
steam) it did so with a bang. Remember all the pics of the engineers
shovelling fuel shards back over the edge. It became hot enough to melt
uranium, 1405K.
The Hiroshima device had 64kg of enriched Uranium of which less than a gram
converted to energy and under a kilo fused. Chernoble had some 115kg of
Uranium oxide, molten and in a fire/steam explosion.


Chernoble RBMK design had no containment vessel!! and it was graphite
moderated (1). Graphite burns at high reactor temperatures if exposed to
air. As the moderator burns the neutron flux rises and things get hotter
still....
I don't know if people generally realise what happened to the reactor core.
It was sitting on bedrock but with man made structures running underneath.
The molten core burned some 4 feet under the water pond until it reached
escape voids. It fused with sand and formed something like lava. This ran
through corridors and filled spaces. Decay heat maintained the liquidity
for some time. Many thousands of people worked until they had their lifetime
dose to build a concrete cap over the entire site. If it had been in the
western world it would still be on the daily news more than Diana.

When the molten fuel poured into the water pond the superheated steam *must*
have carried large quantities into the atmosphere as the pressure breached
the roof.

It *is* however probably safe to say that no appreciable volume of
contamination will escape from the reactor now.

Interesting foot note to look at the PFR design at Dounreay. Sodium cooling
and boron carbide control rods gave it a self moderating and cooling
capability, but just in case the containment vessel was suspended over a
lined pit carved in the bedrock. A plug of material at the base of the
vessel was designed to rupture before the main containment could melt. The
fuel/sodium load would run into the pit and eventually solidify. There it
could have been sealed by poured concrete. Scientists now know that the
design makes a core meltdown functionally impossible.

(1) as in the Windscale accident

 

Was this where the figure of 4 or 5 fatalities came from?

 

I'm sure you will. I'm earning from Nuclear Medicine. It is utterly
inconceivable that I would work in the UK nuclear power industry again.

Working in airline suits is a ****! They should pay you well for that. Not
so bad if it is an airline suit. Depending on the reactor design the
refueling block could be quite heavily contaminated with fission byproducts.
The most common problem was people piercing their gloves on contaminated
sharps. BNFL never did anything right and Windscale was a festering shithole
where AEA people did not want to tread.

 

Sadly so, it turned out to be quite a complex situation overall.

 

My tried and tested rule of thumb is you can take quite a lot of external
ionising (gamma) radiation over short periods and be ok. Eyes are vulnerable
though.
Strong external Beta gets worse.
Ingest the Beta emitter and it gets much worse.
Ingest alpha emitters and you should start counting the days off.
Inhale them into the lungs and it's goodnight Vienna.

 

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v389/n6651/abs/389593a0.html

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/04/0426_060426_chernobyl.html


Basically, the animal population is being adversely affected by the
radiation, but at the same time appears to be doing well because there
are very few humans in the area to hunt the animals/compete for food
etc.

 

That's a funny way to spell "bitter".

 

In West Cumbria it's the ones with the right number of fingers you
want to look out for, the gene pool isn't that big to start with...

 

I only drink the stuff. I do still think this country is far too
biased towards the South.

 

Actually, forget that - IIRC, 50% of the population of England live
south of a horizontal line approximately level with Watford. This is
entirely okay with me.

 

Can't we just stick with the IAEA stats perhaps?