Be glad you don't live in Japan Friday

[Linkster]

So far what has been found by the American teams that are on-site there is that NO reactors have been damaged - most of them didnt have fuel in them anyway at the two sites the news has been covering.

The real issue is that the fuel they took out of those reactors some time ago has to sit in pools called spent fuel pools to keep them covered.

At one plant the spent fuel pool was damaged and all water is gone out of the pool (including the boron that is normally in the pool dissolved in the water) and they have no way to get any water back into it right now - there is no fire associated with that.
A second spent fuel pool is looking like it also was damaged and lost its water - but that is not certain yet.

The explosions and fires that have reduced the other buildings to rubble are not the reactor buildings - they are called auxiliary buildings and house the backup equipment on the outside of the reactor building.
All reactor buildings are intact with the exception of the one above that has no water in the spent fuel pool - that building has lost its last boundary and the dose rates from direct radiation from the fuel is very high.

The US NRC did take the precautionary step of evacuating all US citizens for 50 miles outside the confirmed damaged aux building today.

Remember also that the news is talking about nuclear plants without even telling anyone that this is actually two different sites in different cities

The fires after the hydrogen explosions (gas explosions which are non-radioactive) have been caused by the flammable oil storage tanks and the oil in the pumps being used to try to get water to the spent fuel pools.

[Bill]

Why does the sciam page say that the seawater/boron mix damages the reactors?

What happens to the seawater pumped into the reactors? Presumably afterwards it contains some amount of contaminant, possibly at dangerous levels.

[Linkster]

The stainless steel used to line the reactors will be destroyed by the chlorides (salt) in the seawater which will make the reactors unusable in the future = with the temperatures and pressures that a reactor operates at, the corrosion levels from salt can eat through stainless in a matter of hours

[Linkster]

Bill - also as far as I know, no one has even come close to pumping boron or seawater into any of the reactors - the seawater cooling approach was only going to be used for the spent fuel pools (storage for old fuel) - I have not been able to find any reliable sources that say that there was ever a lack of water in any of the reactors and it would have surprised me if they had lost any water in those designs

[Linkster]

Just an update - the spent fuel pools I was mentioning earlier have been confirmed to have water in them (which is great news) and while the temperature is a little higher than normal its not anything that cant be controlled easily.

All of the other reactors are doing fine and are shutdown and cooled down - at both plant sites in Japan - with the exception of one unit (#3) at the Daiichi site that is currently being sprayed from copters with cooling water to control the temperature and avoid damage to the reactor.