Timeline for Can Average Joe reboot the nuclear power plant?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 9, 2015 at 12:04 | comment | added | Nzall | @DevSolar As I said, any nuclear disaster since we started using nuclear power has been mitigated in some way or another by human intervention. I don't think there has been any disaster so far where humans just abandoned the site completely as the question states. It might be possible that there are research papers that discuss this angle. | |
| Nov 9, 2015 at 9:34 | comment | added | DevSolar | @NateKerkhofs: I take reactor research papers and case studies of Three Mile Island, Sellafield, Chernobyl, and Fukushima over a NatGeo documentary any time. ;-) | |
| Nov 2, 2015 at 18:33 | comment | added | Nzall | @DevSolar My answer is based on the contents of the video I linked in it. In case you want to find the full episode, check out Life After People S2E02. This is a documentary released 5, nearly 6 years ago, so there might be inaccuracies when compared to our current understanding of nuclear power plants. | |
| Nov 2, 2015 at 14:54 | comment | added | DevSolar | While I agree with this answer on general terms, I find the wording to be dubious. The spent rods will not "ignite and burn the entire plant", they will melt down, releasing copious amounts of radioactive material -- but there will be no fireblaze since the fuel pools are not build from flammable materials. Also, this is not just a matter of the fuel pools -- the reactor itself will need cooling after a SCRAM or suffer the same fate. And while Fukushima is a good, even a perfect example, Chernobyl isn't -- Chernobyl was a completely different affair, a criticality excursion. But overall, +1. | |
| Nov 2, 2015 at 7:07 | comment | added | Nzall | @LorenPechtel stop comparing the events I'm talking about to Fukushima or Chernobyl. Fukushima and Chernobyl both were mitigated disasters: the radioactive fallout from the event was reduced significantly because of human intervention during and after the event, both on the nuclear site itself and besides that. There won't be human intervention in this case. Again, this would be far wore than Fukushima OR Chernobyl. You're grasping at single lines from my comments to get your opinion in. Also, Fukushima was literally a meltdown: 3 of the reactors melted down and exploded. | |
| Nov 2, 2015 at 1:04 | comment | added | Loren Pechtel | Other than the site itself there wasn't really anything to clean up and even at it's worst the radiation wasn't bad--the evacuation was more a panic reaction than based on the numbers. | |
| Nov 1, 2015 at 22:07 | comment | added | Nzall | @LorenPechtel it is nearly safe because of CLEANUP. Japan invested billions into cleaning up all the radioactive fallout from the area. If 99% of the population died before the nuclear incident, there will be no cleanup. Watch the video, because it shows the exact situation which the question asks about: a nuclear powerplant after Humanity is gone (or mostly gone). Or do you think those 500 people from the question will spend their time mitigating the disaster and cleaning up the remains, 400 times over? | |
| Nov 1, 2015 at 21:59 | comment | added | Loren Pechtel | The exclusion zone around Fukushima has very little hazard anymore. A lot more elderly died in the evacuation than if they had stayed put. | |
| Nov 1, 2015 at 21:01 | comment | added | Nzall | @LorenPechtel Fukushima required a 20 km exclusion zone and irradiated areas for 50 miles beyond that. In addition, Fukushima had a massive mitigation effort from the very start that prevented a lot of misery. Without humans to mitigate a cooling station meltdown and protect the surrounding areas, it would be far worse. And even Fukushima and Chernobyl had large exclusion zones and irradiated areas from fallout. An event with no mitigation at all would probably be worse than Chernobyl, which had areas up to 500 KM away irradiated. | |
| Nov 1, 2015 at 20:34 | comment | added | Loren Pechtel | While I do agree there will be problems with the fuel rods boiling dry it won't be so catastrophic. We have already seen it in practice: Fukushima. The successfully shot down the reactors, everything that happened there was due to a lack of power for cooling the fuel rods. | |
| Nov 1, 2015 at 16:44 | history | answered | Nzall | CC BY-SA 3.0 |