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Originally posted by Phage
reply to post by Bakatono
They would all melt down uncontrollably. Every single last one. Without the electricity to pump water to cool them or drop in control rods or whatever they would all go critical pretty quickly. It would be the end of us all
Some would, if they run out of fuel for their emergency generators. But there are reactors which use the heat from the core to drive pumps.
Originally posted by happykat39
Originally posted by Phage
reply to post by Bakatono
They would all melt down uncontrollably. Every single last one. Without the electricity to pump water to cool them or drop in control rods or whatever they would all go critical pretty quickly. It would be the end of us all
Some would, if they run out of fuel for their emergency generators. But there are reactors which use the heat from the core to drive pumps.
The inherently safe reactors, those that don't need outside power to avoid a meltdown, are vastly in the minority worldwide. If we have an event, either from the sun or from an EMP bombing, that takes out the power in any country that has a large number of reactors it won't matter where they are.
Consider that just the four reactors and their spent fuel pools at Fukushima Daichi contain enough fuel that if it all melted down and caught fire it would make the northern hemisphere and much of the southern hemisphere uninhabitable for two to three hundred years or more.
What do you think it would do to the earth if a country or region with 20 or more reactors that would melt down in such a power failure event got hit? It wouldn't make any difference where they were you could stick a fork in the entire planet because it would be done, well done at that. And it wouldn't make any difference how many inherently safe reactors they had alongside the ones that melted down.
The petitioner requests that the NRC amend its regulations in 10 CFR Part 50 to require licensees to provide reliable emergency systems to assure long-term cooling and water makeup for spent fuel pools using only onsite power sources. Specifically, the petitioner proposes
amending 10 CFR Part 50 to require that the emergency systems be able to operate for a period of 2 years without human operator intervention and without offsite fuel resupply and that backup power systems for spent fuel pools be electrically isolated from other plant electrical systems during normal and emergency operation.
Originally posted by Phage
reply to post by lightmeup04
What makes you think the Sun is interacting with anything?
Originally posted by Phage
reply to post by Sagitaris
There is no photon belt. Photons are massless particles which travel at the speed of light. They are light.
edit on 12/16/2012 by Phage because: (no reason given)
Originally posted by ManjushriPrajna
Originally posted by GhostyMew
reply to post by Evildead
You can't actually be serious.
brb calling child protective services. you seem mentally unstable
He may be overreacting a bit, but it's better to be safe than sorry, especially when he has a son. The fact that you're implying CPS should be called on a father who's genuinely worried about his son's life bothers me greatly. I'm assuming you don't have a son or daughter, otherwise you'd be a little more understanding.
Because it isn't connecting with the Sun. It's connecting with the magnetic field of the Sun which is carried by the particles of the solar wind to the edge of the heliosphere, far, far from the Sun. That is where the connection occurs.
If its connected to the sun why haven't we seen this stream CONNECTING with the sun. why is it flowing just beyond out solar system.
Photons cannot exist as a cloud. They are electromagnetic radiation. They are traveling at the speed of light through the universe. There are clouds of interstellar matter though and we are passing through one now and have been for thousands of years. What effect does it have on the Sun? Probably none, it is much less dense than the solar wind, it doesn't reach the Sun.
If there was a cloud of massless photons consuming the space we drift in what would its affect be on the Sun?
"The heliosphere is essentially the balance between outward-moving solar wind and the compression from the gas and dust that surround it, so if you're in a different interstellar medium environment, you're going to create a different heliospheric structure," said astronomer Seth Redfield with Wesleyan University
"As the sun moves through space and moves in and out of interstellar clouds, the flux of galactic cosmic rays at the Earth really changes. Someday maybe we'll be able to link the sun's motion through interstellar clouds with the geologic history of Earth. I think that would be really exciting," added University of Chicago senior scientist Priscilla Frisch.
Originally posted by k21968
I always feel so much better when Phage shows up and posts. He removes the panic in an instant and states the facts and moves on. Much like Superman.
Originally posted by Phage
reply to post by happykat39
I know that in the US reactors are required to be able to shutdown in an emergency. I presume this would mean having enough fuel (if required) for emergency generators. This does leave the problem of dealing with spent fuel storage. The NRC submitted a petition last year which requested that this situation be addressed.
The petitioner requests that the NRC amend its regulations in 10 CFR Part 50 to require licensees to provide reliable emergency systems to assure long-term cooling and water makeup for spent fuel pools using only onsite power sources. Specifically, the petitioner proposes
amending 10 CFR Part 50 to require that the emergency systems be able to operate for a period of 2 years without human operator intervention and without offsite fuel resupply and that backup power systems for spent fuel pools be electrically isolated from other plant electrical systems during normal and emergency operation.
www.gpo.gov...
As of yet there doesn't seem to be much action on the PRM but at least it's under consideration.
Can't do much about what other nations do and I don't know about their regulation and mitigation strategies but I'm not sure they are as vulnerable as the US is with its extensive, integrated power grid system.
An EMP attack (not so much a geomagnetic event) can affect electronics but I'm not sure electronics are required to shutdown a reactor.
Such an event would leave all the delicate electronics needed to control a long term cooling system fried. Without the computer "brains" to control it the rest of the system would be little more than an expensive pile of scrap metal.
Better now than later. Better now than never.
And therein lies the rub. They are just now talking about long term shutdown safety.
"We believe the ribbon is a reflection," says Jacob Heerikhuisen, a NASA Heliophysics Guest Investigator from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. "It is where solar wind particles heading out into interstellar space are reflected back into the solar system by a galactic magnetic field."