'Very interesting reply to my posting...
----------------------------------------------------------
|Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1998
|From: [an anonymous insider with a government agency
involved with nuclear energy]
|Re: STORM SPARKS MAJOR NUCLEAR ALERT AT PLANT
At 09:03 PM 12/29/98 -0600, you wrote:
>>>>
Nothing will happen like this in 2000, right???
<<<<
<grin> Not if the NIRS gets the NRC to shut down nukes in July . . . .
This is a scary event. It gives *me* shivers. I do want to
complain about one tiny thing, though. The reporter who wrote
this up doesn't know from nukes, or so I guess. This bit:
>>>>
...
They couldn't restart the back-up generators, vital to keep the
reactors' two cores from overheating.
Frightened staff were called from their homes and battled for
five hours to manually try to reset the safety systems before the
cores went "critical".
...
<<<<
When a core goes "critical," that simply means that it has
started doing what it's supposed to do. Analogy: turning the
key in the ignition of your car causes a spark that starts the
internal-combustion process going. The moment you can let go of
the key, your car has "gone critical," if cars used the same
jargon as nukes. It's an unfortunate term with a lot of baggage
from the medical usage (a person in "critical condition" is close
to personal "meltdown," you might say), but it came out of
engineers figuring out just how much activity they needed in the
core to get the chain reaction into a self-sustaining condition
-- too little activity, and the process shuts *itself* down (too
much and it goes too fast! Not a bomb-type boom, but enough to
vaporize the water into a steam explosion). There is a "critical
point" at which you can take the "key" out of the reactor's
"ignition" and its "motor" can then "idle" -- at least for as
long as it has fuel -- without you needing to constantly send
sparks from the starter coil.
In the old TV show, "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea," nearly every
show had some poor ensign charging onto the bridge (at a
"critical" moment in the plot . . . ) crying, "Admiral! Admiral!
The reactor's critical!"
The Admiral's reply should have been, "Well, I certainly hope
so!" ;-)
At any rate, in Scotland they had *shut down* the reactor --
turned the thing off. They were *not* racing to do stuff before
the reactor "went critical" -- that's like saying you've turned
off your car and now have to worry that it will turn itself back
on before you've changed the oil or something.
They *were* racing to get that core cooled before it overheated!
That certainly qualifies as a "critical condition" in the
ordinary sense of the word "critical," as with an accident victim
-- the core overheats and melts down into a pile of radioactive
slag ("The China Syndrome") which is a *very* bad thing to
happen.
It would not have been Chernobyl-like, however; it would have
been like Three Mile Island, where they lost coolant water (and
yes, the reactor *did* slag, but of course it didn't melt through
the earth, or even through the floor). I suppose it's possible
that the Scottish reactor could have heated to the point of
causing a steam explosion (and it was exploding *steam* that blew
Chernobyl's guts all over Europe), but I imagine they could just
have drained the water out, before it came to that. A Three Mile
Island is nobody's picnic either, but at least it's all
contained.
Back to Y2K -- I do think this event makes a good argument for
NIRS's position. If the grid goes down, how *do* the reactors
cool their cores? How many have backup generators with *four
months* of fuel on hand? How many would have four months' worth
of dedicated employees coming in despite what's going on in their
own homes and communities? Do the reactor operators all have
reserve tanks of gasoline at home so they can GET to work?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Roleigh Martin ourworld.compuserve.com
( easy to remember alias is: webalias.com )
(A Web Site that focuses on Y2k threat to Utilities, Banks & more)
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