Here is a good article about why the reactor incidents now unfolding in Japan are unlikely to be as serious as Three Mile Island or Chernobyl.

Basically, the Japanese were on top of the coolant problem from the very beginning and they have taken steps to cool the reactors and prevent extensive melting of the core.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2688108/posts

i think the bigger ? is if this had happened in the U.S would we have been as on the spot as them.

testing

Good post. Some of the reporting by ABC was just absurd. Sensationalism at it's absolute worse.

Chernobyl was as large a problem as it became because of the type of coolant used. The Japanise are using water. The Russians used graphite...

Three Mile had a breach of contianment. Much more serious than a simple cooling problem.

Actually Chernobyl had NO containment vessel and they also had water coolant but when they lost coolant in their accident they misinterpreted the situation and did things which made it worse until the core melted catastrophically and blew apart. About 2/3 of it blew or burned into the atmosphere and the rest melted into radioactive "corium" lava and burned all the way through the rest of the building. All the ejected radioactive material from Chernobyl rained down as fallout all over Belarus, Europe and in fact all over the world.

In Three Mile Island, they also had a coolant accident when a valve stuck open and allowed a large amount of the coolant to leak out of the core and get pumped completely out of the containment area. They also misinterpreted or failed to understand their readings in the control room and a large fraction about half of the core melted down but it was contained otherwise and the main radioactive pollution was from the cooling water which was mistakenly pumped out. This was a much much much less severe accident than Chernobyl and very little radiation was released.

The Japanese reactors are a GE design and have excellent containment. The Japanese certainly understood that theirs was a cooling failure from the start and have always been trying to keep the rods in the core covered. Although they almost certainly have some rod damage in the core, they are cooling the damaged reactors well now and it is very unlikely that they will even experience as much meltdown as TMI. So far they have been very lucky and no serious radiation leakage has occurred nor will it likely occur. Unfortunately Dai-ichi 1 and 3 have been seriously damaged and have had to be cooled with seawater but at least they have been successfully cooled and there will probably be no more additional core damage in those two worst affected reactors.

Hopefully no more bad quakes or tsunamis there for a while. The Japanese crews manning these reactors should be commended for their heroic efforts all successful so far at limiting the scope of the reactor accidents due to the quakes and tsunami.

All the Chernobyl reactors were of a design that the Russians call the RBMK--natural uranium-fueled, water-cooled, graphite-moderated--a design that American physicist and Nobel laureate Hans Bethe has called "fundamentally faulty, having a built-in instability."

Comparing Chernobyl to Japan is apples and oranges...

Graphite was used to 'moderate' the coolant in those types of reactors that the old Soviet block used.

Once a coolant problem occure the graphite 'steams' out and creates a radio active cloud.

I know this as I took radiation readings for several weeks after the disaster for the US Army. (a small part of the 'cloud' still circulates in our atmosphere).

I am familiar with the reactor and the event. The graphite moderator
rods got stuck only partially inserted in the core and burned.

The reactors are not comparable. But if we are talking about the
worlds worst nuclear reactor accidents they are now Chernobyl, TMI and Fukushima.

I think it is time to start worrying..

I been sayin', a chunk of Japan is gonna' become a wasteland.
Maybe, they will put up low rent housing there.

Agreed

the latest report says if it does happen, it will all blow out to sea, towards Hawaii and the US...

Would that be the same thing as Karma? (payback for Hiroshima and Nagasaki)

lol... i would call it something like poetic justice... nothing planned, but what the hell anyway...

What the heck did Hawaii ever do to anyone Cali I understand......oh yeah Obamas birth certificate

Guilty by association?
A part of the US.

It was always time to be worried and it has now surpassed Three Mile Island in scope for certain.

Hopefully they will be able to avoid further contamination.

Not to be critical, but that wasn't your opinion in the OP..

BUmp!

That's OK - it was an article that I found interesting and measured.
Clearly the event has now surpassed TMI although it is very unlikely
to get as bad as Chernobyl and the reactors can't have the same type
of problem as the RBMK reactor did at Chernobyl.

But the situation is very serious in Japan now and we should all hope
and pray it does not get much worse. It has certainly gotten worse
than I thought it would be from the initial reports.