[AtLast]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

I remember both of them. I grew up in a town with a nuclear reactor. One of the things I considered when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do in the military was as a nuclear technician. As I thought about the field I read everything I could get my hands on and grasp on Three Mile Island. (This was the early 80s so a number of post-mortems had been written.) As it turned out, cryptography sounded more interesting.

I remember Chernobyl because I was on duty when we started getting all of this traffic about an emergency in Pripyat. I remember, as it became clear what was happening, this feeling of us going into terra incognita.

Once again we're in unknown territory. That said, the model is closer to TMI than Chernobyl. For one, the Chernobyl reactor wasn't mediated with water it was mediated with graphite. Graphite burns and once it starts burning you pretty much can't put it out. Because this is a liquid mediated reactor, they have the option of just pumping sea water into the reactor. Water will not *stop* the reaction but it slows things down. It buys time. The other difference is that Chernobyl was not in a containment building. Containment buildings are those big cement buildings that, in the United States, look like cans. They are designed to keep the reactor safely encased so that even in a serious event, there should be a minimal release of radiation. Japanese reactors are encased in containment buildings. Now the explosion was not *in* the reactor is was in the out wall.

Cheers
Aj

There seems to be conflicting reports about exactly how much radiation is being released. And not much by experts weighing in. My guess is that this will change and hopefully some factual information will come out instead of speculation.