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Niagara in a box
Tuesday, March 15 2011
I can't tear myself away from the endless coverage of the ongoing Japanese nuclear crisis. Everything in the universe is provisional on some level, though some things are a lot more provisional than others. And then there are the cases of things going from being less provisional to more provisional overnight. One of things we're learning is that one of the more provisional things, at least in relation to the timespan of modern humanity, is the solidity of the coast around the Pacific Ocean (Pacific timezonians take note!). It's looking increasingly like the siting of nuclear power plants on the Pacific shoreline was never a good idea. Sure, the chance of any one nuke plant being hit by a seawall-topping tsunami is low, but the consequences if that were to happen outweigh any possible utility any such plant could ever provide over an incident-free lifetime. Given the lack of alternatives, it's likely that nuclear power plants will continue to be constructed, though hopefully in parts of the world that Earth the Dog cannot easily scratch.
Think, for a moment, about what a nuclear plant actually is on the inside, apart from how exactly it operates. With a minimum of inputs and refuelings, it somehow produces roughly the energy equivalent of Niagara Falls. A nuclear reactor is Niagara in a box. Such a force seems like it would be a tricky thing to control, especially once it's hit by a powerful earthquake and then drowned beneath a 30 foot tsunami. Those sort of conditions sound like the fantasies of a screenplay writer, not something that could actually happen. And so here we are, with all that power and few options to contain it.
Of course, even in its present state, the Fukushima power plant's nuclear mechanisms are nowhere near their peak output. Control rods have been slammed in place and, where containers aren't leaking, neutron-absorbing boron-rich water has been poured around the fuel rods (both usable ones in the core and spent ones in on-site storage). But there are still a lot of ways this thing can fail still further, and there are a lot of options that are unavailable due to the buzzsaw of radiation near the troubled reactors. The problem is the sheer amount of radioactive material both in the cores and in onsite storage. Enriched radioactive material can go "critical" when lots of it finds itself in one place, and this becomes a real possibility when there is serious damage to the framework holding the materials. They can slump to the bottom of some container and reach criticality, producing savage amounts of heat and radiation, and without water (or even a place for water to go), nothing can be done about it. It becomes a force unto itself. If you want to read some terrifying stuff about criticality and how easy it is to accidentally achieve, look no further than the Wikipedia entry on criticality accidents.
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