The Carnival of Nuclear Energy 193 is up at he Hiroshima Syndrome
Hiroshima Syndrome summarized all the issues around the Fukukshim unit 4 spent fuel pools
As said earlier, the typical worst-case scenario was the notion that decay heat could have built up enough to boil off all the water, dry out the fuel bundles and burst them into flame. To begin, we have real-world, Fukushima-specific evidence to show that the pools would not get hot enough to boil. The power to all SFP cooling systems was lost on 3/11/11. Recovering power to any SFP cooling system at the station was not possible until the temporary power cable from the 1km-distant transmission system was spliced together and energized on 3/17/11. Several days of inefficient water drops from helicopters provided some help with units 1, 3 and 4 SFPs… very little help. For all intents and purposes, SFP cooling was lost for six days! The level of heat generation in all the pools was at their peak. But, none of the pools boiled. The waters in the unit #3 and 4 pools were heated to about 90 OC and evaporated rapidly enough to produce the “white smoke” reported world-wide, but there was no boiling. AREVA and MIT pointed out that it would have taken at least ten days before the tops of the fuel bundles in any of the pools would have become uncovered. It would have taken 5-7 more days for any of the pools to have evaporated to dryness. But by the time of the SFP power loss in 2013, decay heat had dropped constantly for two years. The rate of heat-up was but a small fraction of the original case. It would have taken three or more weeks - not 10 days – to uncover the tops of stored fuel bundles, if-and-only-if no-one did anything to mitigate the problem.
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Hiroshima Syndrome summarized all the issues around the Fukukshim unit 4 spent fuel pools
As said earlier, the typical worst-case scenario was the notion that decay heat could have built up enough to boil off all the water, dry out the fuel bundles and burst them into flame. To begin, we have real-world, Fukushima-specific evidence to show that the pools would not get hot enough to boil. The power to all SFP cooling systems was lost on 3/11/11. Recovering power to any SFP cooling system at the station was not possible until the temporary power cable from the 1km-distant transmission system was spliced together and energized on 3/17/11. Several days of inefficient water drops from helicopters provided some help with units 1, 3 and 4 SFPs… very little help. For all intents and purposes, SFP cooling was lost for six days! The level of heat generation in all the pools was at their peak. But, none of the pools boiled. The waters in the unit #3 and 4 pools were heated to about 90 OC and evaporated rapidly enough to produce the “white smoke” reported world-wide, but there was no boiling. AREVA and MIT pointed out that it would have taken at least ten days before the tops of the fuel bundles in any of the pools would have become uncovered. It would have taken 5-7 more days for any of the pools to have evaporated to dryness. But by the time of the SFP power loss in 2013, decay heat had dropped constantly for two years. The rate of heat-up was but a small fraction of the original case. It would have taken three or more weeks - not 10 days – to uncover the tops of stored fuel bundles, if-and-only-if no-one did anything to mitigate the problem.
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