I think that link was excellent. It's very hard to explain nuclear, chemical or physical things in "common language", at least for me.

It shouldn't take STUK too much time to do the translations, I translated today one analysesmethod from Danish to Finnish (and I don't speak Danish). So a translation to English shouldn't be too hard.

ps. Vibes to every PN in Japan!

I'm interested in the question where did the hydrogen come from that was the fuel of the fuel-air chemical explosion that threw the sheet metal weather shelter off the top of the actual containment building.

It is possible that the heat of the core did break water into hydrogen and oxygen - but it takes around +2000C temperature without any rational catalyst.
(Sanna knows this kind of things better - being an chemical engineer)
That kind of temparature would mean exposed fuel rods and the gas - along the filtered steam - would have been vented from primarycircuit to the containment building and after that vented again out of the containment building and have accumulated enough to the upper hall to cause the FAE.

Personally I'd guess that it's more likely that the hydrogen injection system for the primary circuit (It's function is to get rid of the gaseous 02 to keep the corrosion (oxydation) of the primary circuit in check) had it's storage tanks leaking into the non containment part of the building that got it's wall linings blown off the steel beam frame structure.

TEPCO (propably wisely) noted that it was chemical explosion of hydrogen and didn' t speculate the source of the gas.

The journos spreading the panic should be castrated - I allready read about an incident whereas an elderly japanese man had sealed his house very carefully being scared stiff of the non existent nuclear fallout and then died of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by the gas heater running inside the house.

Hmm hard to say, since no facts are given. Water can dissociate into hydrogen and oxygen in many ways, but it requires a lot of energy, lot of heat or other reactions which lead into this.

That pro nuclear energy site is full of BS. We are talking about BS the magnitude of the tsunami that hit Japan last week.
Hopefully, this catastrophic event will put Japan to the way of denouncing nuclear energy as a power source in the form of fission.
Its time to put their asset to fusion, instead of wasting money and risk human lives on new fission reactors.

I suppose You have more extensive knowledge of the subject - but to my furthes knowledge the ITER (tokamak type) is supposed to be the first fusion facility to actually produce more energy than it consumes, and by doing so actually prove - first time ever - that it can be done on an actual industrial scale.

The design output of ITER should be 500MW, and it's power consumption varies between 120 MW to up to 620 MW at start up.
This means that for example Fukushima Daiichi-1 at 460MW could not even fire up a 500MW Fusion reactor.
Basically a quite hefty fission reactor is pretty much unevidable companion of a fusion reactor.

Even more so as pure fusion as means of industrial power production is unfortunately very distant future.
Instead fusion-fission hybrid reactors might prove to be not only closer future but allso a way of disposing current stockpiles of spent fissile fuel to a safer form and consume fertile material such as Thorium and depleted uranium.

I allso fail to see what good it would do to general safety to keep running the aging and less safe units, such as the first Fukushima relic from 1971, to the last possible moment allowed by authorities - instead of replacement with new and way safer units. [unevidably necessary for the powerup phase of the fusion plants in any case.]

Attemp to force a fusion technology breakthrough in this way appears to me approximately as rational as hastening the HI-virus medication research by fencing up the whole of Africa and infecting the population with HIV - leaving them with choice of either to find a cure or to die.

I have no problem of shutting up on the subject.
Feel free to enlighten Us with an accurate analyzis of the events that took place at the units of the Fukushima plant area.

"Yo fission is crap, this is all conspiracy and lobbying, CNN knows the best!"- ad nauseum - is not an analyzis.

I just need the 1.21 jigawats to get my Dalorean up to 88 MPH.

Fairly lengthly post that could have been summed up in 4 sentences.

A) Fusion reactors have finally reached the point of producing more energy than they consume.
B) You need a great deal of energy to maintain hydrogen in plasma form to get the reaction going.
C) I believe that you still need fission reactors to provide that energy.
D) Japans reactors need replacement or relocation for safety reasons.

Aids in Africa and how millions of lives could be saved is another can of worms so dont open it, and dont use mockery to make straw arguments. In fact thats a matter I would gladly say STFU.

Now Japan produces only 30% of its energy from fission. They have sufficient energy without having to turn into new fission reactors to support fusion reactors. You pretty much understand that once you get one fusion reactor going, then the rest can be fired up in sequence. The total output will obviously be smaller than what you would get from hybrids and you would probably need to build triple the time of fusion reactors to reach it. Still you save a great deal of money for not having to deal with mining enriching and later cleaning up fission fuel.
Since you are that knowledgeable, can you enlighten us whats the net production of spent fuel waste in metric tons by the reactors currently on-line world wide. Also whats the cost to deal with them properly and the amounts of energy that takes. Dealing with them properly does not include the Italian mafia tactics, I am sure you know what I mean.

One word: Fluxcapacitor

Was the FluxCapacitor fission or fusion?

That would actually be "cold fusion"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeLorean_time_machine#Equipment

First of all construction work of ITER should finish by 2016 and only then we even have the change to see wether it actually works at all.
And even if it does it will take decades to implement to industrial production.

Mmmm, no I don't - a single ITER like tokamak fusion reactor is incapable of energizing the fireup of an other fusion reactor of equal capacity.
This given that the ITER will start at all in the first place.
unevidably the limits of the grid capacity mean that there has to be at least a single fission reactor per fusion site.
It would be advisable that these fission reactors were as safe as reasonably achieveable - ruling out the eldest facilities.
Not only will it take atleast decades to have rational production by fusion in any case but allso unevidably the operating licences of the elder fission facilities in japan will expire in the meantime and the officials are very unlikely to grant extensions. Instead in the light of the recent events the licences for the construction of replacing safer, more tsunami and seismologically resistent units is very likely.

A few years back the annual global nuclear energy production was aprox. 2560TWh and global uranium production in 2009 was 50 772tons, a bit less than 15 full railroad box cars.
Demand was around 65 500tons, roughly 19 box cars - the difference being drawn from dissambled nuclear weapons and various stockpiles bought while the market price was low.
Typically only 20% of fuel rods in a fission reactor core are replaced annually, but a rough estimation is that around 19 box car fulls of spent fuel was produced globally.
Naturally the spent fuel is located in fuel pools nearby the RPV itself for a few years.

[For IFR reactors similiar scenario fuel consuption and spent fuel total would be aprox. 284,5tons, equaling 14,9cubic meters, or roughly a little less than one tenth of the volume of a railroad boxcar. And this is the technology I'd like to see being developed for fusion support reactors.]

I didn't bother to look up the current numbers from WANO, but at present day the demand and consuption of uranium is few percent less.

[As a sidenote production of the same energy with the only practical option - coal would take 905532000ton of coal fuel equaling 9 055 320 railroad boxcars - yep that Nine million fiftyfive thousand plus railroad cars - and produce 90 553 200tons of ashes, or 905 532 railroad carfulls. And neat amount of 2 589 821 520 tons of CO2.
The ashes themselves would contain 1811tons of natural uranium, by average 2ppm content. Including 12,7ton of U-235 isotope by 0,7% content.]

It so happens that the most advanced spent fuel repository site is located aprox. two miles from my office. [I do not work for them thou, so forget the lobbyist thing.]
Once finished it can be calculated how much it actually does costs to reposit say a cubic metre of spent fuel.
Volume of the material is of importance regarding the capacity of the cave - not the mass of the material to be contained.
U-235 etc. are very space efficient in this sense, being of high density.

Construction of these facilities is unevidable due to the allready existing spent fuel and the future waste from the fission reactors that support the fusion ones.
At the moment there isn't yet a single deep geological repository facility operational in the world - all the spent fuel is stored at the power- or reprocessing plants.
The volume of the cave has quite a small impact on the total cost.

And having driven home from the mountains south of Murmansk only two days ago I'm very aware of the methodology that for Soviet union has implemented with low and intermediate active waste.

But I'm still waiting for more accurate information and analyzis of the Fukushima events other than note that the linked content was BS or atleast some proof of the BSness.
Allso I would like to learn what good it would do for safety to stubbornly keep runing the existing eldest fission units - given that by some miracle the Japanese radiation authority would extend the operating licences.

The safety engineers estimated that the heat from the rods cause a water-zirconium reaction on the outer surfaces of the rods that dissociated some water into hydrogen and oxygen. Thus it's likely that oxydation / corrosion control is done with hydratzine injection and there are no hydrogen tanks.
The nitrogen gas filling of the BWR containment building during the full power operation prevented the FAE since there war no oxygen present to allow the combustion.
Allso the steam release to the containment from the primary circuit made the atmosphere inside inert preventing further hydrogen combustion inside containment.

Once there was more than 10% consentration of accumulated hydrogen under the weather shelter the fuel air explosion took place outside the containment building.

Since very few people can understand what we are talking about, before I make a reply to your last post, I would like to know what your major is.
After seeing how you wrote it originally and what inaccuracies you changed overnight, I would bet you dont have a major in any of the earth and planetary science fields. Probably BA in engineering.

My degree is in AtomicAeroSpaceMacroNomics so I am clearly the athority on all things. I think Teppo is a nuclear physicist and tsondaboy's background is that of young boys and goats.

I thought you were an ethanologist

He is a Chemist and deserves to be nominated for the Nobel price in Chemistry.
Allegedly he has turned Whiskey and other high spirits to water.

If he could turn Water into Whiskey he might actually take the prize.

I would like to be a space engineer working for NASA.

Unfortunately, I'm M.Sc in chemical engineering and working in an environmental laboratory as a research engineer. I love to say that, since it tells nothing to the people who ask it

I'm a mechanical engineer.
But I have to confess that I do work for the nuclear power industry.

I admit that estimating annual amount of spent fuel by IFR fuel consumption was an obvious brainfart that needed to be corrected immediatly once I noticed the ballpark figure was obviously off.
Fuel market total figures are more reliable than fuel consumption in any case as latter varies by reactor unit and core load optimization.
The company I work for does radiation protection and nuclear new build related consulting services - not fuel cycle.

Furthermore regarding the economical price of fuel enrichment and spent fuel repository I question what is the ethical price of the other option for the decades before functional fusion ?
The option typically being coal if fission is not allowed.

Markandaya A. and Wilkinson P. suggest in the article Energy and Health 2: Electricity Generation. (Lancet 2007; 370:979–990.)
The following figures for small particle and other fossil fuel emission related death and sickeness per one produced Terawatt hour.

Common coal:
24,5 dead
225 seriously ill
13 288 ill.

or
Brown coal: (lignite, typically used in germany)
32,6 dead
298 seriously ill
17676 ill.

That was the estimation for ONE terawatthour, given that annual production via fission is around 2560TWh - how high percentage one is willing to replace with coal untill industrial fusion is available?
This pretty much translates into How many people the same parties are willing to kill per year for "No nuclear energy - at any cost" approach.
And for how many decades - untill possible replacement of production capacity with fusion plants.

Offcourse it's possible to declare any content published by Lancet as BS - without any proof of things being otherwise.
Or question my ability to judge anything at all.

But still I wait for the more accurate explanation of events at Fukushima. Ability to judge one take of the situation as BS pretty much means that the arbiter must have better knowledge of the situation. I'd imagine it would relief the worried people to state the source of more accurate information?

And the explanation of the merit of running 60's cost efficient workhorse design BWR's absolutely as long as the authorities grant the permit extensions.
Merit being other than economical gain.

I fail to see the informative value of "Yo fission sucks and if You dont fly with that You suck too - everything I don't agree on is conspiracy and coverup" approach to the subject.

Everyone is free to make up their own minds.

I will keep this sentence from your last post and this is where I drop out of this thread.

Nononononono, Please enlighten us. I find this topic very interesting due to recent events and the fact they are handing out iodine pills at my office. Don't bow out, educate us please.

Why does an AtomicAeroSpaceMacroNomicist need to be educated?!