Earthquake in Japan....9.0...ouch!

Theres two sets of things in a Nuclear reactor, afaik, you've got essentially two separated systems, the internal one has rods exposed to water, this turns to steam, goes up, turns the turbine, the goes through a cooling system to bring it back down to liquid, drop and get turned back to steam. Thats basically completed sealed system to contain the radiation.

The cooling system is, its like having a pc watercooling, but instead of using air to cool the radiator, you use coolant(which I gather isn't "just" water) but its cooling pipes that are sealed and presumably radiation proof so big lead pipes. But the inside water stays inside.

When the cooling system stops working, you just get the hot water continue to increase in temps and more and more gas is produced, thats where the pressure build up comes from, they have backup containment buildings to vent the gas into to reduce the pressure in the actual reactor, and when the pressure in those buildings gets dangerous its better to vent some of it, than to have a full on explosion from the pressure as after that there would be no way to seal it.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-power3.htm

at a guess yes, that would be just about right.

THe cooling system is on the right in that little diagram, basically it pumps cool water/coolant through pipes into a sealed building to help cool the gas. Theres no pressure on the cooling side basicallly, it pumps water in then it gets cooled itself in huge cooling towers, or in an ocean based cooler as in several of these plants.

The pressure build up is inside that sealed area on the left, thats all radiactive. Reading more, there are two types of plants, some have the intermediate system so its got essentially an extra level of radiation prevention, I'm not sure which type the Japanese have.
 
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I see so they only use the water to cool the coolant to cool the rods, but the water and coolant doesn't touch eachother
thank you makes sense now.
 
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GJ02 said:
its all going off today
Indonesia volcano erupts





im talking about the frequency of stuff happening, within the past 8 years we have had 2 major tsunami events, loads of deadly earth quakes, and volcanoes waking up
the earth i feel is changing

Have a look at this site, disaster and alert map RSOE EDIS
RSOE EDIS
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Sorry, got to comment on this...

Eh... I think the apparent increase is more likely to be down to the increase in global communications. Tsunamis happen all the time, just we usually don't hear about them, they become more damaging as we increase our population and start reforming the coastline.

What is this increase in deadly earthquakes and volcanoes waking up. There isn't an increase in either, the only difference is last year we were actually affected by one.

I'll have to see if I can find an article I was reading recently about this very subject. In essence it said it was rubbish.:p

First I heard about this earthquake was this morning when I went into our department. It made it quite hectic it seems because they had media ringing looking for "experts" on earthquakes. At least one of our lecturers was on sky news today, with I think another also on it.
 
Everyone thinks theres been an increase but as you said, its just in terms of communication, also though there has been a lot of footage today, 90% of it is 3-4 clips from I think a fairly small area shown over and over and over.

It doesn't help that places like the BBC constantly get stuff wrong, nor that they make it sound worse than it is in some situations, if they do that on purpose, for entertainment value I really don't know, some of the stuff they got wrong was so ruddy basic.

But it all started what, hmm, on checking bbc news 24 kicked off a lot earlier than I thought it did, 97 which is surprising. Thing is more people have been watching it over time, it got added to freeview, more people got sky/other services that had it, then it was only a few years ago you started to be able to watch it online.

Suddenly you had people seeing things as they happened all day because someone would hear about a disaster, open up something like bbc news online and watch 24/7 live coverage at work, and they'd tell everyone at work about it.

Every few years we seem to get a sudden surge in the speed and amount of coverage that these disasters get, but they aren't actually increasing in frequency really at all.

Yes, there will be the biggest earthquake ON RECORD now and then, and the worst this or that, but thats natural, everything goes through cycles, slightly worse times, slightly better times, its like global warming people, or global cooling people, grr, before we ever even invented fire the climate went through massive and drastic changes in weather and smaller far more frequent changes like we tend to see over our lifetimes.
 
BBC states that officials are checking if a meltdown has occured at Fukushima plant. Scary times if so!
 
Atrox Moris said:
Chernobyl all over again. Radioactive material thrown into the atmosphere and carried by the winds irradiating everything it floats over. You'd have to abandon the area for miles around the plant. Increased risk of cancers. Birth defects including mutation and retardation and various other physical and mental abnormalities. And other stuff.
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And to put into context, the affects of a "Chernobyl" on Japan and the world would be insignificant compared to what the physical damage of the earthquake and tsunami have already done.
 
From NHK:

The government's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency says 2 radioactive substances, cesium and radioactive iodine, have been detected near the Number One reactor at the Fukushima Number One nuclear power station.

The agency says this indicates that some of the metal containers of uranium fuel may have started melting.
The substances are produced by fuel fission.

University of Tokyo Professor Naoto Sekimura says only a small part of the fuel may have melted and leaked outside.

He called on residents near the power station to stay calm, saying that most of the fuel remains inside the reactor, which has stopped operation and is being cooled.

Saturday, March 12, 2011 15:26 +0900 (JST)
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Japan officials are apparently saying meltdown is now a possibility and have began evacuation of 50k people. It's escalating fast by the looks of it.
 
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