The big news right now is the nuclear meltdown that isn't a meltdown
and the nuclear explosion that isn't nuclear at a Japanese nuclear power plant.
First, the explosion. It wasn't a nuclear explosion,
it was an explosion of hydrogen gas outside the containment building.
The housing itself did not explode, it wasn't even damaged, and the core is completely intact.
What happened is this: when the reactor overheated, a valve opened to vent off steam,
which draws heat away from the reactor and cools it down.
But this isn't just steam; there are contaminants in it
that are the process of the nuclear reactions. One of these is zirconium.
Zirconium when it gets hot is highly reactive with oxygen--
so much that it can actually rip out the O part of a water molecule, which of course is H2O.
That leaves the H2--hydrogen gas, and it's this gas that exploded.
Now, there is cause for concern here;
this steam does contain radioactive material and it's vented into the atmosphere.
But while measurements showed the steam cloud to have elevated levels of radiation,
the levels themselves were within safe limits.
Evacuation was still a good precaution, since of course
you can't measure every single part of the cloud and these levels are going to vary.
Still, neither this explosion nor the ensuing cloud appears to be a cause of much concern.
But that's not what a graphic going around the internet says!
It draws a very scary region over the Pacific to the west coast,
claiming that within 10 days people from Washington to Texas,
as well as parts of Canada and Alaska,
will get 750 rads of radiation--enough to leave no survivors!
As Snopes.com reported, this is completely false.
According to radiation experts, not even a nuclear ATTACK on Japan
would give these levels in California!
The reality is, not even the servicemen on the USS Ronald Reagan,
an aircraft carrier near Japan at the time, got anywhere near a dangerous dose.
The amount they got sounds scary: they got a month's worth of radiation in a single day.
But as Phil Plait pointed out at BadAstronomy.com,
the Apollo astronauts received ten times that amount of radiation with no ill effects.
Still, there may be cause for alarm: if even a tiny amount gets into the ocean,
it may have a very strong homeopathic dilution by the time it gets to California.
Oops--there I go giving the homeopaths ideas. Sorry about that.
Okay, let's talk meltdown: A nuclear reactor, like all fuel-based power plants,
works by boiling water and using the steam to turn a turbine.
The nuclear reactions provide the heat. So it needs a lot of cooling down,
but the earthquake knocked out the primary cooling systems.
No problem, just pump in water to cool it off,
but a valve malfunctioned and two of the reactors started overheating.
There hasn't actually been a meltdown at the plant, although it's been touch-and-go.
A meltdown is when you actually get melting of the reactor core.
There's no indication that this has happened, or is going to happen.
The problem is that this is a very old plant,
and the emergency system was to pump in water to cool off the reactors.
Unfortunately, when the electricity went out, so did the pumps! Can anyone say, design flaw?
This won't be an issue with more recent nuclear reactors
which rely on gravity to pump the water in. Just try to turn off gravity!
But workers at the Japanese plant have had to hand-pump in seawater mixed with boron
to cool the reactors. This will destroy them, but it should prevent a meltdown.
In fact, one of the two problematic reactors has now cooled down completely,
and the diesel generators have been at least partially restored
so that the cooling pumps can work again.
Now, many politicians and pundits are saying
this proves we need to stop nuclear power plants from being built.
In particular, Senator and Idiot Joe Lieberman of of Connecticut
said that we have to, quote, "quietly, quickly put the brakes on nuclear power."
He also said we need to re-evaluate building codes as a result!
Personally, I'm more worried about all of the bogons coming from Washington
than I am the radioactive particles from Japan.
Although thousands of people have died as a result of the earthquake and tsunami,
there's only been one reported death due to the nuclear accident,
and that was a plant worker, and he was killed by a crane!
If you ask me, far from being proof that we need to abandon nuclear power,
it clearly shows how brilliantly safe it is--
even at an older plant with fewer safety features, there still was minimal damage
after one of the BIGGEST EARTHQUAKES ON RECORD
followed by one of the BIGGEST TSUNAMIS IN HISTORY!
The truth is, we've got much more to worry about
from the radiation from coal plants than nuclear plants!
Even if we ignore all the problems mining coal,
the smog, the acid rain, and the CO2 emissions,
the fly ash emitted by a coal plant contains 100 times more radiation
than a nuclear plant of the same size! Now, there's no need to panic about that, either,
but it does show that the radiation from nuclear plants
is pretty much a non-starter as far as criticisms go.
However, if we're willing to re-evaluate how we approach nuclear power,
maybe it's time to give thorium reactors a try.
Unlike fusion, which always seems to be 20 years away,
there have been functional thorium reactors since the 1960s.
Thorium is cheap--they basically dig it out of the ground for free,
since it comes with rare earth metals such as neodymium when they're mined.
The reactors don't melt down, it doesn't make weapons-grade materials,
there's enough of it to last for the next 1000 years,
and it leaves behind hardly any pollution--far less waste, in fact, than uranium.
Do you hear the politicians advocating that? No? Gee, I wonder why.
Bogosity brickbats should also be flung at members of the news media,
who have not only tried to blow this thing way out of proportion,
but are doing such a lackluster job in informing the people
that they can't even get a picture of the right kind of reactor to show people!
The pictures most of them showed were of pressurized reactors, not boiling reactors.
The news media fails again.