Nuclear Panic

At Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant the core containment vessels at reactors numbers 1, 2 and 3 are all intact, being cooled and experiencing pressures that are fluctuating within the safety zone. With nothing to worry about at those reactors everyone's attention has begun to focus on reactor number 4. Strictly speaking reactor number 4 doesn't actually have a functioning nuclear reactor within it but it does contain something called a cooling pond.

After nuclear fuel rods have been in the reactor core for a long time they run out of radioactive energy and need to be replaced. Once they've been removed from the reactor they are placed in something called a cooling casket which is basically just a metal box usually made up of a mixture of steel, aluminium, zinc and cadmium. The cooling casket is then placed into a large pool of water called a cooling pond to cool down from around 500C. As the cooling casket itself is more then capable of preventing any radiation leak these cooling ponds are often just deep pools of water in the grounds of the power plant that are left open to the air rather like an outdoor swimming pool. At Fukushima Daiichi though the cooling pond has been included inside the building that houses the reactor in order to protect the pool from the elements. According to some (American) reports the cooling pond at number 4 reactor has drained of water exposing the cooling caskets to the air causing them to heat up to a temperature of around 85C. Although cooling caskets are designed to deal with temperatures of around 500C and the ignition point of steel is around 800C the fact that the caskets are no longer being cooled by water creates a very slight risk that the fuel rods may cause the caskets to catch fire releasing radioactive smoke into the air. In order to calculate the exact risk you need to know the exact composition of both the fuel rods and the cooling caskets.

The exact composition of the fuel rods and the cooling caskets is something of a closely guarded trade secret. To some extent all nuclear power stations use something called Uranium as fuel. Much like coal uranium is basically just a rock that appears naturally in the earth's surface and needs to be mined and processed before it can be used to generate electricity. Also like coal uranium is a limited, non-renewable, resource meaning that eventually it will all be used up. However the processes that go on within a nuclear reactor create something called Plutonium as a by product. What the Japanese have managed to do is blend this plutonium with other substances to create a uranium substitute. This increases the Japan's energy security by reducing their dependency on foreign uranium imports by making the uranium they do import last longer.

So what appears to have happened at the number 4 reactor is that the Americans have called up the Japanese and told them that according to the American data there is no more water in the cooling pool so the Japanese need to tell the Americans the recipe of their plutonium blend so the Americans can calculate the risk of the situation.

The Japanese then responded by telling the Americans not to worry because if the cooling pond was empty they could always use Chinook helicopters to refill it. Before they attempt that though they wanted to know how the electrically charged ion cloud would affect the electronics on these American made helicopters.

The Americans then told the Japanese that they couldn't possibly assess the effect of the ion cloud on the aircraft electronics until the Japanese told them the recipe for the plutonium blend.

So the Japanese told the Americans that if the helicopters were going to have problems they could always refill the cooling pond with police water cannon much like the police water cannons that middle eastern governments could use to break up protests in their countries.

Then the Americans told the Japanese if that was going to be their attitude they should get on with it before warning them that they will continue monitoring the situation using one of their Unmanned Ariel Vehicles (UAV) just like the one's they're using in Pakistan and could use in Libya to enforce a no fly zone.

Meanwhile the Japanese have been working to hook the power plant up to the mains electricity supply so they can pump water into the cooling pond using an electric water pump.

So basically the situation at the Fukushima plant is so far away from a crisis the people whose job it is to deal with it have started mucking about and the Americans are trying to use the situation to provoke a discussion at today's (17/3/11) UN Security Council meeting about Iran's nuclear program with a with a view to getting permission for Israel to bomb it. So like I said nuclear power plants are designed to cope with a few explosions.