(no subject)
Last I heard the Japanese government was dropping water from helicopters onto reactor buildings. I can't see how this would help matters, no usable amount of water can be dropped from the air into a reactor building, even if it was in bits, so I think they're actually referring to the spent fuel pond at Reactor 4, which seems to be running dry and igniting spontaneously.
More worrying is these releases of radioactivity at the other reactors, from the reactors proper. I don't know what's been detected in the air, but a criticality accident resulting from a fuel mass undergoing an unregulated chain reaction would certainly produce enough radiation in a short time to cause staff to evacuate. If there's many very short lived radioisotopes detected in the area in the next few hours, this is possibly what's going on.
Actually the level has fallen again, so either it's some other source, or it's ceased producing a chain reaction from loss of a suitable configuration of the mass. Either is entirely possible.
Reactor 4 from what I understand was shut down for maintainance before the quake struck, so it should not be behaving in the same way as the other installations, but there's also the fear of a criticality accident there from the spent fuel in the cooling ponds beside it. As some guy on the BBC observes, a criticality accident shouldn't happen if they're stored in the correct configuration, but if there's been fires close by or actually on the assemblies or if they've become dislodged by water being dropped from several hundred feet, who can say if that's the case.
More worrying is these releases of radioactivity at the other reactors, from the reactors proper. I don't know what's been detected in the air, but a criticality accident resulting from a fuel mass undergoing an unregulated chain reaction would certainly produce enough radiation in a short time to cause staff to evacuate. If there's many very short lived radioisotopes detected in the area in the next few hours, this is possibly what's going on.
Actually the level has fallen again, so either it's some other source, or it's ceased producing a chain reaction from loss of a suitable configuration of the mass. Either is entirely possible.
Reactor 4 from what I understand was shut down for maintainance before the quake struck, so it should not be behaving in the same way as the other installations, but there's also the fear of a criticality accident there from the spent fuel in the cooling ponds beside it. As some guy on the BBC observes, a criticality accident shouldn't happen if they're stored in the correct configuration, but if there's been fires close by or actually on the assemblies or if they've become dislodged by water being dropped from several hundred feet, who can say if that's the case.