Chernobyl: Coming to a Highway Near You

[bananas]

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20071015165115829

Chernobyl: Coming to a Highway Near You

Monday, October 15 2007 @ 04:51 PM PDT

<snip>

The same material that blew apart and burned during the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe in 1986 – highly radioactive, irradiated nuclear fuel – would be transported through countless communities across the U.S. if the nuclear establishment gets its way. The U.S. Department of Energy proposes shipping tens of thousands of trucks, trains and barges carrying irradiated nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste through 45 states and the District of Columbia. DOE wants to dump these highly radioactive wastes at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. A nuclear utility consortium called Private Fuel Storage, LLC proposes shipping 4,000 irradiated nuclear fuel railcars to Skull Valley, Utah for "temporary storage." Such proposals dwarf the 2,500 to 3,000 irradiated nuclear fuel shipments that have taken place in the U.S. since the beginning of the Nuclear Age well over 50 years ago.

As reported by the Nuclear Information and Resource Service each truck-sized container of nuclear material would hold up to 40 times the long-lasting radioactivity released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The much larger train/barge containers would each hold over 200 times Hiroshima’s long-lasting radioactivity.

<snip>

One might recall a fire in a tunnel near Baltimore, when a train burned for five days and the heat was estimated at more than 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, exceeding design limits for nuke waste transport casks. It's easy to forget, because it happened July 18-23, 2001, but we must not forget.

<snip>

In today's fire, chunks of concrete and steel fell from the ceiling -- a container of nuke waste could be crushed and breached. Today's pileup happened just thirty miles from Los Angeles and closed one of the most important escape routes out of the city. Nuke waste transport routes cover hundreds of thousands of miles of old, dilapidated roadways. Bridges thought to be safe are collapsing around us, yet still the plan moves forward, as if there is no danger. As if the containers will be made magically strong enough to survive anything that can happen. It's a pipe-dream. It's terrorism. Domestic terrorism by our own government against our own citizens.

<snip>

[One_Life_To_Give]

1. There are worse things

going over the highways now. Not to mention that not all materials are legal to transport over the road.

[losthills]

13. What's going over our highways

that's worse than nuclear waste?

[One_Life_To_Give]

14. Millions of tons of Methyl Ethyl Bad Shit

Pick up a DOT Hazardous Materials Guide Book.

But for starters how about 10,000 Gallons of Methyl Bromide. Not the insecticide but the concentrated agent that is dilluted to make insecticides. Or a truckload of White Phosphorous, the WMD that the Marines were accused of using in Falluja, Iraq. Both of those have already had accidents in the US.

[losthills]

15. And those accidents...

were worse than a nuclear accident?

[One_Life_To_Give]

16. Define Accident

Only in the case of Worst Case Nuclear accident Verses Typical Chemical accident does nuclear look bad. Worst case chemical accident possible while complying with all US Transportation Laws. Would yield a higher body count and more significant disruption of infrastructure for a Chemical accident than a spent nuclear fuel accident.

[losthills]

18. I don't think most people would agree with you.

And I don't think that many people would accept the logic that trucking nuclear waste through their communities is okay because there's already dangerous chemicals on the road...

[One_Life_To_Give]

19. That is by design

Let people think that Nuclear is the worst stuff out there. Put it in vault like containers, require strict routes with escorts etc. Gives the public a sense that they are being protected. And never let the masses know what the truly most dangerous chemicals are and where/how they are shipped. Not everything is legal to ship via truck.

[Bread and Circus]

2. Where's your brazillions of solar panels and exajoules of brazillions!!!

[Javaman]

20. I once kicked a brazillion in the exajoules, does that count? nt

[phantom power]

3. We can always leave it where it is.

"It's too dangerous to keep on site."
"It's too dangerous to recycle it."
"It's too dangerous to transport."
"It's too dangerous to put in Yucca Mtn."

I'm curious, what do you think we should do with it?

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. Oh, that's easy!

Not generate it in the first place!

[Systematic Chaos]

6. Can we ask China to do that with all their toxic and radioactive coal waste too?

:bounce::think::bounce:

On edit - I'll memorize all the emoticons eventually. :eyes:

[phantom power]

7. We *did* generate it. It exists.

So, what do you think we should do with it?

[OKIsItJustMe]

8. You've asked the question before

I've answered that question before:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x114262#114316

[phantom power]

10. Hah. So you did.

[zeaper]

5. Lies

From the First line:

“The same material that blew apart and burned during the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe in 1986 – highly radioactive, irradiated nuclear fuel…..bla bla bla”

Please anyone that knows anything should know that nuclear fuel does not burn, its metal.

The initial line of the article told me the rest of the article must be nonsense. I hate it when folks feel its OK to lie to get a point across.

[bananas]

9. nuclear fuel can burn - and this is another problem with storing it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_fuel_pool

<snip>

Without cooling, the fuel pool water will heat up and boil. If the water boils or drains away, the spent fuel assemblies will overheat and either melt or catch on fire. Fear has been expressed that sabotage, an accident, or an attack which partially or completely drains a plant's spent fuel pool or disables its cooling, might be capable of causing a high-temperature fire that could release large quantities of radioactive material into the environment. Since there is no standard design, most SFPs are housed in far less robust structures than reactor containment vessels and moreover, a SFP often contains much more radioactive material than the reactor core, this is not a misplaced concern.

<snip>

[OKIsItJustMe]

11. Metal burns

Here's a nice video of a blacksmith burning steel: http://geolit.org/rushranch/burn300K.htm

Uranium burns as well. For example, this is one of the nasty things about depleted uranium rounds:
http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2005/4.html

...

Uranium is preferred over all other "ballistic" metals (e.g. lead, iron, tungsten) because it offers a set of unique metallurgical properties: it is extremely dense yet ductile metal (not brittle); it is pyrophoric (uranium dust burns spontaneously at room temperature); and, solid metal uranium is autoigniting at 170° F. Uranium metal has a very unusual property not available in any other metal; it is "self-sharpening", meaning that when it hits a target at high velocities (1 km/sec) it erodes and breaks in such a way as to continuously re-sharpen its point — the leading points of all other warhead metals flatten or mushroom under these conditions. These properties give uranium a superior performance as a penetrating warhead alloy capable of breaching the hardest and thickest armor plating, retaining penetration capabilities at 15 % greater distances and lower speeds than the most common alternative metal, tungsten. Burning uranium is hard to extinguish, and if doused with water, it will explode. Uranium used in specially designed high velocity liquid metal penetrators can bore through 20 feet of super-reinforced concrete bunkers in classified weapons called "shaped charges" and "explosively formed penetrators". The hard (dense), resilient (ductile) and heavy (sustaining momentum) characteristics of uranium also make its optimal in the warhead of robust earth-penetrating bombs to carry them into buried targets and caves.

...

[bananas]

12. Two years ago, the National Academy of Scientists warned us nuclear fuel can burn

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2005/04/08/news/top_stories/23_27_084_7_05.txt

Last modified Thursday, April 7, 2005 11:36 PM PDT

Local anti-nuclear activists react to new report
By: PAUL SISSON - Staff Writer

SAN ONOFRE --- A new report from the National Academy of Sciences underlines concerns that local nuclear watchdog groups said they have held for years.

The report, released Wednesday, calls for regulators to examine each of the nation's 103 operating nuclear reactors, including the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station 18 miles north of Oceanside. The 130-page report states that special spent-fuel holding pools at each nuclear facility could be vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

According to the academy, storing highly radioactive nuclear waste in specially designed pools could leave plants like San Onofre open to a suicide airplane attack or ground assault, and that the only way to fully understand the risk of attack is by "examining spent fuel storage at each plant."

<snip>

Years of sustained nuclear fission leave spent nuclear fuel furiously hot when it is removed from a reactor core. The fuel is so hot that it must be submerged in chilled water for up to five years. Leaving hot spent fuel at room temperature would quickly cause it to catch fire, possibly releasing extremely radioactive smoke into the environment. Even worse, engineers speculate that, once a fire started, it would be difficult and perhaps impossible to extinguish.

<snip>

[jpak]

17. No - not lies. The Chernobyl reactor was graphite moderated - and graphite burns

http://www.nea.fr/html/rp/chernobyl/c01.html

<snip>

The accident
The accident occurred at 01:23 hr on Saturday, 26 April 1986, when the two explosions destroyed the core of Unit 4 and the roof of the reactor building.

In the IAEA Post-Accident Assessment Meeting in August 1986 (IA86), much was made of the operators' responsibility for the accident, and not much emphasis was placed on the design faults of the reactor. Later assessments (IA86a, UN00) suggest that the event was due to a combination of the two, with a little more emphasis on the design deficiencies and a little less on the operator actions.

The two explosions sent fuel, core components and structural items and produced a shower of hot and highly radioactive debris, including fuel, core components, structural items and graphite into the air and exposed the destroyed core to the atmosphere. The plume of smoke, radioactive fission products and debris from the core and the building rose up to about 1 km into the air. The heavier debris in the plume was deposited close to the site, but lighter components, including fission products and virtually all of the noble gas inventory were blown by the prevailing wind to the North-west of the plant.

Fires started in what remained of the Unit 4 building, giving rise to clouds of steam and dust, and fires also broke out on the adjacent turbine hall roof and in various stores of diesel fuel and inflammable materials. Over 100 fire-fighters from the site and called in from Pripyat were needed, and it was this group that received the highest radiation exposures and suffered the greatest losses in personnel. A first group of 14 firemen arrived on the scene of the accident at 1.28 a.m. Reinforcements were brought in until about 4 a.m., when 250 firemen were available and 69 firemen participated in fire control activities. By 2.10 a.m., the largest fires on the roof of the machine hall had been put out, while by 2.30 a.m., the largest fires on the roof of the reactor hall were under control. These fires were put out by 05:00 hr of the same day, but by then the graphite fire had started. Many firemen added to their considerable doses by staying on call on site. The intense graphite fire was responsible for the dispersion of radionuclides and fission fragments high into the atmosphere. The emissions continued for about twenty days, but were much lower after the tenth day when the graphite fire was finally extinguished.

<more>

Thermal reactions between fuel cladding and water in spent fuel from US reactors can produce hydrogen =- lots of it - which is highly flammable...

http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11263&page=38

The first two of these objectives could be compromised by a terrorist attack that partially or completely drains the spent fuel pool.2 The committee will refer to such scenarios as “loss-of-pool-coolant” events. Such events could have several deleterious consequences; Most immediately, ionizing radiation levels in the spent fuel building rise as the water level in the pool falls. Once the water level drops to within a few feet (a meter or so) of the tops of the fuel racks, elevated radiation fields could prevent direct access to the immediate areas around the lip of the spent fuel pool building by workers. This might hamper but would not necessarily prevent the application of mitigative measures, such as deployment of fire hoses to replenish the water in the pool.

The ability to remove decay heat from the spent fuel also would be reduced as the water level drops, especially when it drops below the tops of the fuel assemblies. This would cause temperatures in the fuel assemblies to rise, accelerating the oxidation of the zirconium alloy (zircaloy) cladding that encases the uranium oxide pellets. This oxidation reaction can occur in the presence of both air and steam and is strongly exothermic—that is, the reaction releases large quantities of heat, which can further raise cladding temperatures. The steam reaction also generates large quantities of hydrogen:

Reaction in air:

Zr+O2?ZrO2

heat released=1.2×107 joules/kilogram

Reaction in steam:

Zr+2H2O?ZrO2+2H2

heat released=5.8×106 joules/kilogram

<more>

[benEzra]

21. OK, show me which U.S. and Canadian commercial reactors use graphite moderators.

Can't have an intensely radioactive graphite moderator fire a la Chernobyl without graphite (U.S., Canadian, and French reactors use water as a moderator). Agree or disagree with nuclear power or road transport of spent fuel rods, the original post is a fantasy.