FUKUSHIMA: HYDROGEN EXPLOSION IN THE REACTOR 4 SPENT-FUEL POOL.

Destaque para a coluna "What's New" do físico Robert Park (na imagem o reactor 4 de Fukushima):

"It may be months before events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant are sorted out following the massive earthquake on 11 Mar 2011 at 14:46 JST and the huge tsunami it caused. The major concern involves the fuel storage pool for reactor #4 which held the entire complement of fuel rods from the reactor coreand may yet melt down. The rods had been removed just three months earlier. Reactors 4, 5 and 6 had been shut down prior to the earthquake for scheduled maintenance. The remaining reactors shut down automatically during the earthquake, but the 14 meter tsunami flooded the plant, knocking out emergency generators needed to run the pumps that cool and control the reactors; damage to transportation blocked help from elsewhere. It gets worse. Four days later, 15 March at about 06:00 JST, a hydrogen bubble that had collected above the spent fuel pond exploded, heavily damaging the rooftop area of the Unit 4 reactor. At 09:40, the Unit 4 spent-fuel pool caught fire. It was extinguished by 12:00, but not before huge amounts of radioactive contaminants had been released. That should not have happened. A hydrogen bubble is explosive only when mixed with a critical level of oxygen. During the 1979 Three-Mile Island accident, it was feared that a large hydrogen bubble in the containment dome would explode rupturing the building. It did not happen, but I have repeatedly urged that a tuft of "platinum wool" always be attached at the high points of nuclear containment buildings where hydrogen bubbles would be expected to collect. The platinum would catalyze the oxidation of hydrogen back to water before the mixture reaches an explosive level. The one-time cost would be trivial."

Robert Park