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Dan · Joined: Dec 31, 1969 Posts: 290 Location: USA

Fukoshima updates from an experienced nuclear engineer.

It is their design. It is not that atomic power is intrinsically unsafe. A properly designed Thorium fuel cycle reactor eliminates this Boiling Water Reactor design flaw.

Nuclear reactors are not atomic bombs, the fuel is not enriched enough to really blow up. But a criticality accident not only can cause hydrogen and massive steam explosions, but also splatter an enormous deadly radiation cloud. Especially if our Boiling Water Reactor is burning plutonium with 6% of the fuel rods burning 9% plutonium MOX rods = .63% fuel load is plutonium plus normal fuel rod are 1% plutonium implying 1.63% of total fuel load is plutonium = 1.63 tons pf plutonium in one reactor with normal fuel load of 100 tons. It is reported there are 1743 tons of fuel rods on site = about 25 tons of plutonium on site.

The problem with the MOX rods(two reactor loads on site) is that when heated too much, then the plutonium becomes very volatile and can separate and presumably concentrate and given the right circumstances it makes makes a fission explosion possible

Plutonium is two million times as radioactive as uranium so any explosion that vaporizes these fuel rods will be 30,000 plus times deadlier than a uranium Radiation Cloud. It takes around 100 tons of uranium rods to fuel a big reactor, given 1% of fuel is plutonium, we have around a ton, but with MOX rods we have 7-9 tons of plutonium in reactor core. It takes about 40 plus kilograms of plutonium to make an atomic bomb.

Recipe for an atomic bomb by Israeli nuclear physicist posted in science magazine: 1. two 20 kg flat pieces of plutonium, 2. a two meter slippery pole, 3. put hole in center of pieces so one piece can slide down pole. 4. drop one piece down pole onto other = Kaboom 5 - 10 kiloton atomic explosion. Simple, want bigger explosion, use two meter pole.

Now envision some melted plutonium say a 20 kg plutonium drop dripping down onto sub basement floor, then another drop forms and see recipe above.

3-18-2011 To day it was reported by Prison Planet that 6% of the fuel rods in Fukushima's Unit 3 reactor are made of MOX plutonium.

So the question becomes, 'What Boiling Water Reactor design flaw would allow the conditions for a runaway chain reaction to be met = a criticality accident, e.g the Cecil Kelley criticality accident involved 3.27 kg of plutonium? Obvious answer, we want to avoid concentrating or putting fissionable uranium/plutonium atoms into direct physical contact with each other in "critical mass" amounts. Close enough to get hot as part of fuel, but not too close or in too much mass.

The uranium in a reactor is in rods whose size/shape means that each alone can not sustain a fission reaction without other rods close by, and that only when the control rods that dampen reactions are withdrawn.

Thus the only way enough uranium can come into direct contact is "melting and pooling around the control rods at bottom of reactor", thus ensuring a runaway reaction; or worse, have the control rods also melt and float on top of the melted uranium as their specific gravity must be less than uranium or plutonium the densest element of all.

Unless there is a drain mechanism to prevent such pooling, and there is not; given the reactor meltdowns reported as happening right now in Japan, there could be a large nuclear reaction or 'splatter explosion' at these reactors soon, and possibly more than one.

I strongly recommend an immediate evacuation of a large radius around these reactors now. Dan Alter n1cl-1