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ttp://www.knoxnews.com/news/2011/mar/16/battle-is-just-beginning-says-nuclear-reactor/
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If workers are unable to get additional cooling water into the reactor vessel, the molten fuel core will collapse into the water in the bottom of the vessel. Eventually the heat from the decaying fuel would boil away the water that's left, leaving the core sitting on the vessel's lower head made of steel.
Should that happen, "It'll melt through it like butter," Allen said. That, in turn, would cause a "high-pressure melt injection" into the water-filled concrete cavity below the reactor. Because the concrete would likely be unheated, the reaction created by the sudden injection of the reactor's ultra-hot content would be immense, he said. "It'll be like somebody dropped a bomb, and there'll be a big cloud of very, very radioactive material above the ground," Allen said.
Should these events happen, the best outcome would be if the winds are blowing east and push the radioactive plume over the ocean, he said.
"It (the radioactivity) will fall out in the ocean and everything will be fine," he said. The worst case, Allen said, would be if winds pushed a radioactive cloud south toward Tokyo and Japan's highly populated cities. If that were to happen, he said, the consequences would likely be greater than the 1986 accident at Chernobyl, where about an entire area of Ukraine had to be evacuated because of the radioactive conditions that increased the risk of developing cancer.
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