What if the Chernobyl accident wasn't contained?

Venom

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How much more contamination would occur had the damaged reactor been allowed to keep spewing radioactive isotopes for a month or more. From what I remember it was allowed to sit for about a week.

Would the radiation cover the entire Northern Hemisphere?
 
Radiation from Chernobyl already has spread around the entire world.

What levels of radiation are you asking about?
 
IIIClovisIII said:
How much more contamination would occur had the damaged reactor been allowed to keep spewing radioactive isotopes for a month or more. From what I remember it was allowed to sit for about a week.

Would the radiation cover the entire Northern Hemisphere?
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A high percentage of the volatile isotopes were released as it was. All the noble gasses and pretty high percentages of cesium and iodine exited to the environment. It would have been hard for much more damage to be done.
 
marting said:
A high percentage of the volatile isotopes were released as it was. All the noble gasses and pretty high percentages of cesium and iodine exited to the environment. It would have been hard for much more damage to be done.
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Agreed for the most part. It could have been worse, barely. The only thing that would have actually been much worse would have been if somehow the nuclear fuel would have detonated, which is really unlikely and hard to achieve.
 
IIIClovisIII said:
How much more contamination would occur had the damaged reactor been allowed to keep spewing radioactive isotopes for a month or more. From what I remember it was allowed to sit for about a week.

Would the radiation cover the entire Northern Hemisphere?
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As said the radiation already cover the whole hemisphere or the whole earth (water current, air current etc...). The question you probably ask, is is it enough to be dangerous ? Almost certainly not. Earth surface is 500 million km^2, so half that is 250 million km^2. Even if you counted only lands that would be IIRC 75-100 million km^2. even imagining there was 1000 tons of pure U235, or even pure cesium, that's 1 billion grams, that is 10 grams per square kilometer if it was evenly spread. 1 km^2=1000000 m^2. That's 10 micrograms per square meter.

So even if you spread a whole reactors being conservative evenly on only land surface , there is no way you could get the hemisphere lethally or even dangerously contaminated. it would not even be a blimp on background radiation.
 
jj said:
Agreed for the most part. It could have been worse, barely. The only thing that would have actually been much worse would have been if somehow the nuclear fuel would have detonated, which is really unlikely and hard to achieve.
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No it could not explode. A nuclear bomb needs a much higher percentage of U235 than for a nuclear reactor. As it was high levels of radiation was detected in Sweden.
 
IIIClovisIII said:
How much more contamination would occur had the damaged reactor been allowed to keep spewing radioactive isotopes for a month or more. From what I remember it was allowed to sit for about a week.

Would the radiation cover the entire Northern Hemisphere?
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I'd like to examine your intro here first.

You are aware that about twenty first responders among the firemen were irradiated enough in the early morning hours (the explosion happened at 1:34 AM) to loose their lives to Acute Radiation Sickness over the next months?

You are aware that the Red Army began dropping quantities of lead, sand and boron on the open reactor (to little avail, as it turned out; the reactor was already draining of contents) just about as fast as the materials could be located and the helicopters dispatched to the location?

You are aware that the pinko communists brought men and materials to the disaster to the tune of 600,000 people and billions of rubles to mine under the reactor, load concrete to fill room volumes by hand and push-cart, clear the area (and the roofs) of intensely radioactive fuel and carbon chunks, drain the basement areas of radioactive water, and build a containment structure to prevent weather from spreading the rest?

Why then do you blithely say it was allowed to sit for a week? Wikipedia (Chernobyl DisasterWP) could have told you that was in error.

Huuumm. That sort of makes your first question moot, doesn't it?

As for spreading across the world, of course it does, in the same sense that some proportion of the water in the glass on the table next to you contains some tiny amount of water that Julius Caesar left in the Rubicon on his way to Rome. You'll never notice it, of course. It is only because we made nuclear engineering a real profession for almost 50 years that it is even possible to measure the amount, but it was measured at the time. We're measuring Fukushima off San Francisco reliably, but also in amount far too small to have any impact on any but the fanatical.

jj said:
Agreed for the most part. It could have been worse, barely. The only thing that would have actually been much worse would have been if somehow the nuclear fuel would have detonated, which is really unlikely and hard to achieve.
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Worse than that it is impossible. About 2 billion years ago there was enough U-235 concentration to allow naturally concentrated uranium to become critical enough to boil water (see OkloWP), but that is no longer the case today. That's was about the same concentration as reactor fuel gets. Without moderation, you may get some small amount of heat, but certainly no explosion.

What could have been worse, though, is another steam explosion (the main explosion at Chernobyl was a steam explosion) which may have damaged one of more of the other three reactors on the site.
 
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rjh01 said:
No it could not explode.
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Actually, the possibility of neutrons from splitting atoms randomly hitting all the other splittable atoms, and not missing, exists. Thus, you face the risk of a nuclear reactor exploding violently when you start it up.


shadron said:
Worse than that it is impossible. About 2 billion years ago there was enough U-235 concentration to allow naturally concentrated uranium to become critical enough to boil water (see OkloWP), but that is no longer the case today. That's was about the same concentration as reactor fuel gets. Without moderation, you may get some small amount of heat, but certainly no explosion.
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Impossible is the wrong word. Improbable is the right one.

The idea of limiting what the Universe can do is strange one.
 
Solitaire said:
Actually, the possibility of neutrons from splitting atoms randomly hitting all the other splittable atoms, and not missing, exists. Thus, you face the risk of a nuclear reactor exploding violently when you start it up.





Impossible is the wrong word. Improbable is the right one.

The idea of limiting what the Universe can do is strange one.
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This post is a joke? Right? Because it is not serious.
 
r-j said:
A lot.
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Not true, actually. Chernobyl was about as bad as one could manage without actually doing a nuclear explosion to spread the heavy metals.

Also must point out (as others already have) that a reactor, in and of itself, can not have a nuclear explosion.

It can have a chemical explosion, and Chernobyl did. So it's about as bad as it could have been.
 
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rjh01 said:
This post is a joke? Right? Because it is not serious.
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Oh, it's serious, all right. It's even almost true. It just requires a really high level of improbability.

Consider a functioning nuclear reactor. Ignore things like fission of Pu239 produced by neutron absorption of neutrons by U238. Since it is self-sustaining, each U235 atom which fissions produces a neutron which causes another fission. However, the key here is that the average fission actually produces (on average) somewhat more than 2 neutrons. What solitaire is suggesting is that, if all the neutrons emitted in a reactor hit a fissionable nucleus, you'd get runaway fission on a weapons scale. And this is pretty hard to disagree with.

The reason nukes are hard to make is that they tend to tear themselves apart during operation, and the resulting reduction in density decreases the reaction rate. If you ignore the statistical nature of neutron absorption in a bulk material, and specify that all neutrons cause fission, then you get a bomb. And, since a reactor has a whole lot of U235, you get a really big bomb. Well, there are other factors, of course. The neutrons have to fail to interact with the moderators and the control rods, but if you're going to ignore statistics you might as well go whole hog.

So, yes, every time you bring a reactor up (actually, every time you assemble one) there is a finite chance that the whole thing will go up in a ball of plasma. Of course, every time you walk outside there is a finite chance that random motion of air molecules will create a vacuum which will suck you into space.

Really, you just have to take your chances.
 
jj said:
Not true, actually. Chernobyl was about as bad as one could manage without actually doing a nuclear explosion to spread the heavy metals.

Also must point out (as others already have) that a reactor, in and of itself, can not have a nuclear explosion.

It can have a chemical explosion, and Chernobyl did. So it's about as bad as it could have been.
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However, wouldn't it be true that if it had melted down to the groundwater, it would have contaminated the groundwater, causing a drinking water contamination problem over a very large area? Or would the water contamination have stayed localized?
 
mike3 said:
However, wouldn't it be true that if it had melted down to the groundwater, it would have contaminated the groundwater, causing a drinking water contamination problem over a very large area? Or would the water contamination have stayed localized?
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The surface water pollution made it down to groundwater, of course.

What was spared was heavy metals into the groundwater, for the most part.
 
rjh01 said:
This post is a joke? Right? Because it is not serious.
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jj said:
Sure hope it wasn't serious.
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The question is why?

I cannot logically place a threshold on what events occur in the universe.

Do I say one out of ten can happen but one out of thousand cannot?

As a practical matter, I don’t buy lottery tickets with one out of ten million
odds, but I do pick up scratchers that have much smaller odds. Yet some
argue, a buck spent on a lottery ticket greatly increases your chance of
winning the jackpot.

Anyway, WhatRoughBeast gets the essence of my thinking.
 
WhatRoughBeast said:
every time you walk outside there is a finite chance that random motion of air molecules will create a vacuum which will suck you into space.

Really, you just have to take your chances.
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Nobody actually believes that. Not even you.
 
WhatRoughBeast said:
...if all the neutrons emitted in a reactor hit a fissionable nucleus, you'd get runaway fission on a weapons scale. And this is pretty hard to disagree with....
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Except you completely left out the part where fuel rods have, along with a marked lack of U235 density, "poisons" that are neutron sinks making your suggestion about as likely as a spontaneous black hole forming at the center of the Earth.
 
Diogenes said:
Except you completely left out the part where fuel rods have, along with a marked lack of U235 density, "poisons" that are neutron sinks making your suggestion about as likely as a spontaneous black hole forming at the center of the Earth.
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Which is also, technically, a non-zero probability.

I wonder what the insurance rates would be for injuries sustained in a spontaneously formed black hole.
 
IIIClovisIII said:
How much more contamination would occur had the damaged reactor been allowed to keep spewing radioactive isotopes for a month or more. From what I remember it was allowed to sit for about a week.

Would the radiation cover the entire Northern Hemisphere?
Click to expand...

I have a better question: if the USSR had constructed an actual containment vessel around the reactor, and nothing had escaped it during and following the incident, would the world still be so anti-nuclear energy ?
 
Why would anyone think "the world" is against nuclear power? China is building a bunch of reactors, and Iran would love to have half a dozen.
 
I live right next to two working reactors, and nobody is protesting, much less against them. I'm sure there must be somebody out there against them, but you would never know it.
 
r-j said:
Nobody actually believes that. Not even you.
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Claiming that a statement you disagree with is a lie (and asserting that I do not believe my own statements is exactly such a claim) is not the best policy. As Horton said, "I meant what I said and I said what I meant." In addition to understanding science where you do not, I understand probability where you do not. The probability of all the neutrons in a reactor finding a U235 atom to split constitutes a pretty fair example of "vanishingly small" - but it is not, in principle, zero.

You and Jabba seem to share the same confusion about the reciprocals of large numbers.
 
WhatRoughBeast said:
Of course, every time you walk outside there is a finite chance that random motion of air molecules will create a vacuum which will suck you into space.
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100% pure pseudo-science. Nobody believes that, not even you.
 
Diogenes said:
Except you completely left out the part where fuel rods have, along with a marked lack of U235 density, "poisons" that are neutron sinks making your suggestion about as likely as a spontaneous black hole forming at the center of the Earth.
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Eh. After pointing out that

WhatRoughBeast said:
It just requires a really high level of improbability.

The neutrons have to fail to interact with the moderators and the control rods, but if you're going to ignore statistics you might as well go whole hog.
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it didn't seem worthwhile. What's one more titanic improbability, more or less?
 
r-j said:
100% pure pseudo-science. Nobody believes that, not even you.
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You're something of a Johnny One-Note, aren't you? Would you care to provide a little real science to prove the statement false?

And would you also do us the favor of letting us in on the secret of where marigolds came from?
 
WhatRoughBeast said:
You're something of a Johnny One-Note, aren't you? Would you care to provide a little real science to prove the statement false?
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Why would he need to?

Clearly at some point someone has gotten confused about the randomness of the Brownian motion of particles suspended in the air and taken it to mean that air molecules are free to move randomly in any direction without influence from the behavior of the air molecules surrounding them.

A few seconds thought makes it obvious that this is complete nonsense.

In order for all the molecules of the air to move horizontally away from a certain area, they'd all have to bounce off other air molecules in order to change direction. The molecules in the exact center can bounce off each-other, but what of the molecules a microscopic distance further out? The only molecules they could bounce off to send them away from that area is the molecules closer to the center, causing those molecules to head back to the center once again.

That's the problem, the transfer of momentum always cancels-out.

ETA: Another way to look at it is to think about the huge amount of energy represented by having a large column of vacuum adjacent to a vast quantity of air at one atmosphere of pressure. To claim that this could occur spontaneously is to claim that the law of conservation of energy can spontaneously cease to apply.
 
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Brian-M said:
Why would he need to?

Clearly at some point someone has gotten confused about the randomness of the Brownian motion of particles suspended in the air and taken it to mean that air molecules are free to move randomly in any direction without influence from the behavior of the air molecules surrounding them.

A few seconds thought makes it obvious that this is complete nonsense.

In order for all the molecules of the air to move horizontally away from a certain area, they'd all have to bounce off other air molecules in order to change direction. The molecules in the exact center can bounce off each-other, but what of the molecules a microscopic distance further out? The only molecules they could bounce off to send them away from that area is the molecules closer to the center, causing those molecules to head back to the center once again.

That's the problem, the transfer of momentum always cancels-out.

ETA: Another way to look at it is to think about the huge amount of energy represented by having a large column of vacuum adjacent to a vast quantity of air at one atmosphere of pressure. To claim that this could occur spontaneously is to claim that the law of conservation of energy can spontaneously cease to apply.
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Thanks for that. The part that really was stupid was the "every time you walk outside".
 
r-j said:
Not even close to true. If the melting core had reached the water before they drained it, the resulting steam/fuel explosion could have damaged and contaminated the other rectors, leading to much larger catastrophe.
http://chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/timeline/
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I visited Chernobyl (and much of Ukraine) back in October of last year. Picked a good time to do it too....

I found this link to be very informative. I wish I'd seen it before I went there, though I did read over much of what Wikipedia had on the place at one point.
 
One unforeseen consequence that could be a ticking time bomb is all the trees that have been killed and are dried out and not decomposing due to the high levels of contamination. They are the perfect kindling for a fire. In the event of a forest fire, the smoke would carry contaminated particulate matter for long distances.

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/chernobyl-trees-barely-decomposed-study-finds-n62826

"We were stepping over all these dead trees on the ground that had been killed by the initial blast," Tim Mousseau, a professor of biology at the University of South Carolina, said in a statement. "Years later, these tree trunks were in pretty good shape. If a tree had fallen in my backyard, it would be sawdust in 10 years or so."
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Brian-M said:
Clearly at some point someone has gotten confused about the randomness of the Brownian motion of particles suspended in the air and taken it to mean that air molecules are free to move randomly in any direction without influence from the behavior of the air molecules surrounding them.
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I'm gonna GUESS that you're not working at the same scale that Solitaire is. Your analysis is at the molecular level. I think Solitaire's idea is based at the atomic level. As is well known, the wave function shows that an atomic (or subatomic) particle can possibly be where it is unexpected. For example atomic tunneling. What Solitaire is saying is that given a column of atomic particles from the Earth's surface up to space, there is a finite probability that they will all appear somewhere else and thus leave a vacuum.

What he fails to note is that it would take a googolplex of universes existing for a googolplex years for the probability to make any sense.
 
Olowkow said:
One unforeseen consequence that could be a ticking time bomb is all the trees that have been killed and are dried out and not decomposing due to the high levels of contamination. They are the perfect kindling for a fire. In the event of a forest fire, the smoke would carry contaminated particulate matter for long distances.
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They buried a lot of the trees that were the most contaminated. Nothing says "nuclear is safe" like having to cover everything up and hope nothing ever happens for the next 20,000 years.
 
SezMe said:
What he fails to note is that it would take a googolplex of universes existing for a googolplex years for the probability to make any sense.
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Hm.

It's best not to make sense of such matters, but instead, just simply think about them.

The average density of hydrogen atoms in the universe is about one per
cubic centimeter. Assuming a random distribution, is it possible to find, say,
a row of 100 atoms in one cubic centimeter with 99 cubic centimeters empty
of any atoms along a one meter region of space?

If the visible universe is 100 billion light years across, then we'd find 1081cubic meters in that space. The probability is one out of 100100 or 100200 or so.

But then Guthian Inflation states that things expanded 1026 bigger.
We now have 1 out of 10159 as possible.

That's getting much closer... And that's just with one universe!
 
edd said:
I believe there is an extremely small but finite chance I will find myself in a spontaneously evacuated area.
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That isn't what he claimed.
WhatRoughBeast said:
Of course, every time you walk outside there is a finite chance that random motion of air molecules will create a vacuum which will suck you into space.

Really, you just have to take your chances.
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Do you believe that science can't say, with 100% certainty, that the scenario he describes will simply never happen? That it can not happen?

I do.
 
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