Anybody watching Meltdown?

[R3dD0g]

It's on a Fox affiliate but it's mighty liberal sounding.

Bunch of terrorists take over a nuke plant. The US is fixing to nuke some aarab country and it turns out the 'terrorists' are USA vets who got cancer from depleted uranium.

A mighty fine movie so far.

[name not needed]

1. I'm watching it right now

[R3dD0g]

2. Wasn't the identity a kick in the pants

[Rick Myers]

3. That SUPRISED me!!!

It's pretty good...

[amerikat]

4. I keep thinking that Bruce Willis should be in this movie

[R3dD0g]

5. He should've been the gung ho colonel.

[benburch]

6. I have been a nuclear power station safety engineer...

And, this is a stupid scenario!

If you wanted to cause mass destruction with a nuclear power station;

1. Steal, or buy a mid-sized business jet, like a Gulfstream.

2. Load it to the point where you can barely get off the ground with steel rebar.

3. Crash it squarely into the spent fuel pool at an older nuclear power station where the cores have not yet been removed to dry cask storage.

You will shatter the spent fuel pool so that the borated water will leak out. You will shatter the "spent" core cool-down assemblies and destroy the separation vital to preventing a chain reaction. Once the borated water is gone, the chain reaction that will result will be totally uncontained.

Whereas, even if you melt down a commercial power reactor, the core will melt through the reactor vessel and fall into the suppression pool beneath the reactor, where the borated water will shut down the reaction, and cool the core to the point where a "China Syndrome" cannot occur.

The worse you will have a a release of steam contaminated with Iodine-131 and a plume of Noble-gas radionuclide effluents. This could kill people within 10km downwind, and cause an elevated cancer risk for those further downwind. Not a Chernobyl-style disaster at all. Chernobyl was a graphite moderated reactor, and the disaster was because the graphite burned and the radioactive smoke dispersed over a wide area.

[amerikat]

7. maybe you shouldn't post such info

[benburch]

8. This has been published all over...

Even in "Scientific American"

[Throckmorton]

15. suppression pool beneath the reactor

Do tell. I'm dying to find out when this "suppression pool beneath the reactor" was install in PWR's. You know, like all of the Nuclear Stations in California. Funny, I must have slept through that design mod.

So, your saying that spent fuel will obtain a criticality without moderation?

[benburch]

16. Suppression pool

All of the BWRs here in Illinois have them. That much I know for sure. I assumed that all nuclear power stations had them, except possibly some of the "tiny" 50 MW and smaller plants like the long-closed Dresden-1 plant here. I am aware of some other plant designs that have a "core catcher" instead of the suppression pool. I am not an expert on PWRs.

The fuel cooling racks in the spent fuel pool are moderated by gap, that is the space between rods in the rack, physical moderation material built into the rack, and by the borated water, which also serves to remove heat from them. (They are quite physically hot when removed from the reactor, and remain so doe some time due to decay of the short half-life byproducts.)

Hitting the spent fuel pool as I described could remove all three sorts of moderation from the equation; by destroying the racks and by draining the moderating fluid. This would most likely result in criticality.

[R3dD0g]

9. Work play snf SHOP

the 'murican way.

[Rick Myers]

10. Good freaky ending

Not bad, considering it's a Fox Production...

[R3dD0g]

11. Surprised me.

But, then Fox has a lot of liberal stuff on sometimes. Simpsons is always poking fun at conservatives, that old Family Guy was liberal.

[Sporadicus]

12. The 'Domestic Terrorist' Plot is Part of a Trend

I don't watch much network TV, but I've read that most of the newer US intelligence shows (Threat Matrix, Alias, 24) have story lines involving domestic terrorists. I realize that I tend toward cynicism where the media are concerned, but it seems more than coincidental that the networks see fit to push these stories instead of the more obvious choice of 'Islamicist' plots. Could it be that intelligence-agency operatives are exerting influence within the networks to push these stories? Is this in anticipation of martial law and the likelihood of militia groups that would spring up in its wake?

I know, I should don my tinfoil hat, right?

[Kool Kitty]

13. No, don't don that tinfoil hat!

Your theory is plausible. I liked the news report at the end-they identified the men as Islamic terrorists from a group in Indonesia or the Phillipines, and the tag line was that the President wanted the American people to go about their daily business, work and SHOP.

[RoyGBiv]

14. DAMNIT!!!!

I heard a commercial for this on the radio the other day, and from the way it was marketed I thought it was going to be freeper-type, stereotypical garbage about Arabs being inherently evil...sort of a "keep 'em scared of terra" type thing.

Hmmm...wonder if that was the point ... sucked in a lot of freepers I bet.