I know it's easy to get wrapped up in the hysteria of the moment. I know its easy to let your worst fears take hold. What's more, you think you're trying to stay informed by watching the nightly news and listening to the danger of a nuclear meltdown taking shape.
The problem is, you're not listening to anyone who knows anything about the most basic elements of physics. They are there to keep you scared and glued to the television for as long as possible for more of the same. If they cite "experts", they aren't nuclear physicists, and they next to nothing about how these particular nuclear reactors are actually constructed.
What's more, it's becoming increasingly clear that there is a political agenda at play in all the fear mongering, like here, when a "famed naturalist" is quoted as a factual source about a meltdown. The fact is, that there has been little more radiation exposure leaked from the Fukushima plant than one would get on a transatlantic flight, and that the reactors have performed EXACTLY as they should have. This is a SUCCESS story ladies and gentlemen. A triumph of engineering against a natural catastrophe so great one has not been recorded like it in its area before.
Consider.
The nuclear reactors in question are Boiling Water Reactors. The nuclear fuel heats water, water creates steam to run turbines to create electricity, and the steam is recondensed into water and sent back to be reheated. What happened to the Japanese plants was that first the main systems were knocked down by the 9.0 earthquake, and then the backup generators were flooded out in the ensuing tsunami.
Yet, because the fuel rods were first placed in a Zircaloy casing, isolated from the rest of the world, basically creating a pressure cooker that needs to be vented (explanation coming), then this is all encased in a ceramic pot that is basically designed to restore the cooling if it overheats, the containment worked and there was no core breach. This is all then encased in air tight hardened steel designed for one thing... to indefinitely store nuclear material in the event of a meltdown. It is built so that, if the material actually breaches any of its first two containments, it will spread out and cool down. At this point, the reactor is lost, of course.
Now, some killjoys are saying "didn't they vent radiation into the air?"
Well, the short answer is yes, but not how they think.There are two types of radioactive material. That in the fuel rods, and that created outside. The radiation created outside the fuel rods has a very short half life. By the time you've read this paragraph, its harmless. The original explosion came from a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen outside the third containment wall, but inside the reactor system. That means the reactor fuel itself was not damaged, has cooled, and can eventually be removed. So to avoid a second explosion, they vented the radioactive particles. Which at the end of this sentence, means absolutely nothing.
This is how you build a reactor. This is how a reactor works to avoid the catastrophe of Chernobyl.
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