Hardly anything like on the same scale as Chernobyl. Three Mile Island caused 0 deaths.
It's like comparing a minor traffic collision that damages trim with a multiple pile up resulting in numerous deaths.
AHC/WI: American Chernobyl-style disaster
- Thread starter Shahanshah of Xsassa
- Start date
Hardly anything like on the same scale as Chernobyl. Three Mile Island caused 0 deaths.
It's like comparing a minor traffic collision that damages trim with a multiple pile up resulting in numerous deaths.
Three Mile Island was bad, but it was no Chernobyl. The meltdown destroyed the reactor, but there was only a limited release of radioactive material into the environment. At no point was there a real threat to human life.
One option for an American Chernobyl is a Fukushima-style disaster in the 1990s-2000s. Following deregulation and poor funding of the Department of Energy under Reagan, corporate cost-cutting measures in a privately owned nuclear plant lead to reduced maintenance and disaster preparedness. This runs fine until a natural disaster does hit, and the cooling is taken offline, because the power lines are down and the back-up generators haven't been fuelled or properly maintained - this would then cause one or more steam or hydrogen explosions that could breach the reactor containment. This probably won't be Chernobyl bad, because all American reactors have better containment than RBMK reactors did. If we assume that it's an older reactor, with weaker containment, combined with neglected maintenance, and possible unrepaired damage from the natural disaster, we might get a release of radioactive material somewhere between Fukushima and Chernobyl.
I forgot something about graphite. It won't really burn in air but at very high temperatures, I have heard it can react with water (probably as steam or supercritical steam) in extreme conditions. What exactly goes on, I do not know, but it seems pretty clear that a water cooled, graphite moderated reactor should generally be more dangerous than a gas cooled one. (Honestly, so should a water-moderated, water cooled reactor IMO).
Anyway, whatever happened at Chernobyl, those conditions make for rather exotic chemistry that is obviously quite difficult to replicate in a laboratory setting. Hmm, I wonder if there is a good paper on that...
Anyway, whatever happened at Chernobyl, those conditions make for rather exotic chemistry that is obviously quite difficult to replicate in a laboratory setting. Hmm, I wonder if there is a good paper on that...
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Well, an Earthquake wouldn't do it. The third strongest earthquake ever recorded didn't destroy even the old plants on the Fukushima coast. OK, yes, if the plant foundation was built directly astride a massive fault that slipped dramatically, then it might, but that kind of incompetence is way beyond the realm of plausibility. I could see a catastrophic flood doing it and maybe a particularly severe hurricane storm surge. More likely, it would just be some ordinary mishap like TMI but with a hydrogen explosion that blows the top off. Or, of course, a combination of a mechanical flaw, some operational error and a natural disaster to complicate the response.
But the worst possible release of radioactive material is not an accident at all but an attack. The worst would obviously be a nuclear strike on a power station but after that, I tend to worry most about a terrorist attack on a spent fuel pool. Reactor vessels are very hardened enough to withstand a plane impact; spent fuel pools are another matter. Before 9-11 and possibly even today, the security is not, in my openion, as good as it ought to be when considering the quantity of material stored in there. If, and it's a big if, some very evil person managed to fly a jet liner directly into such a structure, it is believed that they could breach its weak containment and flood the fuel rods with thousands of gallons blazing kerosene thwarting damage control, and igniting the fuel rods thus releasing far more cesium and strontium than Chernobyl ever could.
Fortunately, such an attack would require such precise pilot skills that it might not even be realistically possible. It would also, I think, be a bit too extreme an act even for your typical extremist.
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Shananshah of Xsassa wrote:
Technically we did have a similar accident, Three Mile Island. Ours was nowhere near as bad due to design and safety features that Chernobyl did not have. As noted even Fukushima wasn’t as bad and this was a pretty standard Western design. We’ve had several types and verities of Graphite Moderated reactors, a couple of our first commercial power reactors were of that type.
Accidents were actually pretty common during the Manhattan Project but having one of the graphite piles catch fire and burn was less than likely as they were specifically “Test” or low-power piles but later piles got to some very high power levels and even commercial operation. The key point however is the problems were known and safety measures put into place to prevent what happened at Chernobyl which wasn’t that the reactor caught fire but that by design there was no containment system in place to limit the spread of radioactive materials.
Keep in mind that Chernobyl and Fukushima were both MAJOR nuclear accidents, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale) but the containment allowed the Japanese to have only a temporary exclusion zone, (20km) while Chernobyl’s 30km exclusion zone is still in place and will be for a long time to come. Design matters.
Actually no, the disaster happened due to testing to find solutions to already known faults in the design and even the Soviets were well aware that any accident had little chance of containment due to the design and construction of the reactor building. It wasn’t even considered a low probability that “something” would happen and it was well understood the building would not contain the results.
“Security” wasn’t the reason we built them the way we did, safety was and that was because we’d been aware of radiation dangers since around 1918 and those dangers had only been reinforced over time.
We had several but again we had them in containment buildings where as the Soviets did not.
Three Mile Island the reactor melted down, Fukushima the reactor melted down, the difference is most Western powers have enough respect for nuclear power to design containment buildings to contain such materials so that the danger to the public is minimal. The Soviets did not for whatever reason and thus Chernobyl. Heck in the US probably the worst designed nuclear reactor every, SL1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1) had a building around it that was not in fact designed for containment but which did an adequate job despite that fact.
The building housing the Chernobyl reactor was not designed to be a containment, worse it wasn’t even very solidly constructed so the initial steam explosion blew open the roof and all containment was lost.
To get a US ‘corrupt’ enough, (and note the USSR wasn’t “corrupt” in this issue the rush to get the plant in operation simply meant the more robust reactor building kept being delayed) means the US has to never had experience or understanding of the hazards of nuclear energy AND not have any concern for public safety. The Soviets had BOTH and still choose in that instance to design and build a sub-par building to house an operational nuclear reactor. I don't know how that came about because it really shouldn't have and from all accounts that wasn't what was planned. Shortcuts were taken but doing so in the US is vastly more difficult because the US had the experience of the "Radium Girls" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls) which was etched into the US psyche. The problem is Chernobyl was the result of a series of specifics events that even in a very corrupt and uncaring US would be unlikely to happen.
Randy
Technically we did have a similar accident, Three Mile Island. Ours was nowhere near as bad due to design and safety features that Chernobyl did not have. As noted even Fukushima wasn’t as bad and this was a pretty standard Western design. We’ve had several types and verities of Graphite Moderated reactors, a couple of our first commercial power reactors were of that type.
Accidents were actually pretty common during the Manhattan Project but having one of the graphite piles catch fire and burn was less than likely as they were specifically “Test” or low-power piles but later piles got to some very high power levels and even commercial operation. The key point however is the problems were known and safety measures put into place to prevent what happened at Chernobyl which wasn’t that the reactor caught fire but that by design there was no containment system in place to limit the spread of radioactive materials.
Keep in mind that Chernobyl and Fukushima were both MAJOR nuclear accidents, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale) but the containment allowed the Japanese to have only a temporary exclusion zone, (20km) while Chernobyl’s 30km exclusion zone is still in place and will be for a long time to come. Design matters.
Actually no, the disaster happened due to testing to find solutions to already known faults in the design and even the Soviets were well aware that any accident had little chance of containment due to the design and construction of the reactor building. It wasn’t even considered a low probability that “something” would happen and it was well understood the building would not contain the results.
“Security” wasn’t the reason we built them the way we did, safety was and that was because we’d been aware of radiation dangers since around 1918 and those dangers had only been reinforced over time.
We had several but again we had them in containment buildings where as the Soviets did not.
Three Mile Island the reactor melted down, Fukushima the reactor melted down, the difference is most Western powers have enough respect for nuclear power to design containment buildings to contain such materials so that the danger to the public is minimal. The Soviets did not for whatever reason and thus Chernobyl. Heck in the US probably the worst designed nuclear reactor every, SL1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1) had a building around it that was not in fact designed for containment but which did an adequate job despite that fact.
The building housing the Chernobyl reactor was not designed to be a containment, worse it wasn’t even very solidly constructed so the initial steam explosion blew open the roof and all containment was lost.
To get a US ‘corrupt’ enough, (and note the USSR wasn’t “corrupt” in this issue the rush to get the plant in operation simply meant the more robust reactor building kept being delayed) means the US has to never had experience or understanding of the hazards of nuclear energy AND not have any concern for public safety. The Soviets had BOTH and still choose in that instance to design and build a sub-par building to house an operational nuclear reactor. I don't know how that came about because it really shouldn't have and from all accounts that wasn't what was planned. Shortcuts were taken but doing so in the US is vastly more difficult because the US had the experience of the "Radium Girls" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls) which was etched into the US psyche. The problem is Chernobyl was the result of a series of specifics events that even in a very corrupt and uncaring US would be unlikely to happen.
Randy