A 1997 study by the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island described a worst-case disaster from uncovered spent fuel in a reactor cooling pool. It estimated 100 quick deaths would occur within a range of 500 miles and 138,000 eventual deaths.
The study also found that land over 2,170 miles would be contaminated and damages would hit $546 billion.
Brookhaven isn’t some left wing anti-nuke group. It’s the government run nuclear research facility on Long Island who think about things like risk mitigation.
What happens when 4 (or 6?) leak their contents?
For Reactor 4 to have dissociated hydrogen leaking suggests the rods are up to around 2200C…. which means the rods are melting. The storage facility is not inside the reactor pressure vessel, so won’t be isolated from the environment outside. The IAEA has been notified that radiation is leaking now directly into the atmosphere.
There has been no cooling of the pools since the event started. TEPCO confirms that uncooled spent fuel ponds will generate “a little heat”.
Looking around for info on that study. It’s important to know that the study was specific to their facility. Brookhaven is close to New York City (and Connecticut) so the economic and health impact is larger than if the storage facility was in a rural area with little population nearby.
Fortunately the spent fuel pools (unlike the reactors) ARE designed to be cooled with a fire hose if necessary. As long as the earthquake didn’t break the bottom of the spent fuel pools to where all the water leaks out they’ll be okay.
I’m still worried about the reactors…
Does anyone besides me find it incredibly stupid to keep spent fuel near active reactors? So if the reactors go and explode, then there is more material to be blasted around? I understand the spent fuel won’t explode, but wouldn’t it be like adding more radioactive material to a dirty bomb?
The spent fuel pool is a necessary part of the design. Only one-third of the core is replaced each refueling, but the entire core is reshuffled. So there has to be a place to put those fuel assemblies while they are being swapped around.
In the 1970s the nuclear fuel cycle was built around the reprocessing concept. Utilities would store used fuel until it had thermally cooled 3-5 years, then it would go to the reprocessing plant to be made into fresh fuel. Remember that about 95% of the uranium and plutonium in that used fuel is still good. It just has to be chemically purified to remove fission product poisons before it can be burned again.
But then governments became concerned that terrorists would attack the reprocessing cycle. Governments told utilities to temporarily store ALL the fuel on-site until a permanent storage facility could be built. Governments taxed the utilities for construction of the storage facility. In the U.S. it was Yucca Mountain. Problem was, like most government projects, the permanent storage facility never opened. The utilities then had to sue the government to try to get their money back so that THEY could build dry-rack permanent storage facilities since the government broke their promise.
What, the government creates a mess and then blames private industry when it melts down? Like sub-prime mortgages? Like education? If you think radioactive waste storage and finance are disasters, wait until our friendly government “helps” us with our health care.
Who will they blame then?
Well, they blame parents for our education system being passed up by 33 other nations, and surely they’ll blame us for our “poor lifestyle choices” when we can’t find a hospital bed like in England. Instead of open heart surgery, we’ll just get the pain pill.
Maybe by that time we will have learned to just smile like those poor sheeple over in Japan.
Back when I a n00b programmer at Duke Power, one of the other programmers who was always picking up printouts and using the plotters was supporting the application where they tracked each fuel rod, when it was made, where it had been used, and planned the arrangement in the reactor to get the maximum results. It appeared to have a lot of science behind it.
Do you know if Japan has been doing the same thing of storing all the spent fuel at the reactor? That would be 30+ years worth of fuel if it was.
Would the fact the 3 offline plants are down for maintenance mean the fuel in their storage pool is thermally hotter than they might otherwise be? I believe I heard that reactor #4 has no fuel inside the reactor vessel at the moment. They are keeping an eye on #5 and #6 as well, which are in a different area of the plant and a few years newer.
What are the consequences if they end up putting salt water into the fuel storage tank?