Monday, March 7, 2011

Donlan of Barron's, 2/28/2011, "It's a corrupting relationship, ..."

A quote from Donlan of Barron’s, February 28, 2011: “It’s a corrupting relationship, even when the partners stay within the law.” Of course, Donlan was not talking about nuclear power regulation.

In the game of regulation by myth we have corrupting relationships, and the participants survive by bending the law as they see fit.

1 comment:

Aladar said...

„It is a much overdue duty of NRC and IAEA to evaluate the evidence provided by the TMI-2 accident, Chernobyl-4 accident, Paks-2 incident, and related experiments. Evaluating this evidence, one can see that the ignition of the zirconium fire in the steam occurs at a local temperature of the fuel cladding of around 1000-1200'C, [[and that a self-feeding with steam due to the precipitation of eroded fuel pellets and zirconia reaction product from the hydrogen stream into the water pool, causes intense evaporation.]]
There are insignificant differences in the progression of the firestorms that occurred in the TMI-2 reactor severe accident, Paks washing vessel incident, and Chernobyl-4 reactor accident; the later defined only by the amount of zirconium available for the reaction. At the mean time, there are significant similarities in the processes leading to the ignition of the firestorm. In all three of the compared cases, it took several hours of ill-fated actions or in-actions of the operators to cause the ignition condition. Also, there are similarities in the end result of the firestorm; namely, that the extent of the fuel damage is much less than it was predicted from any other severe fuel damage causing scenarios, introduced for explanations. Therefore the fraction of released fission products is significantly less than was anticipated from the fuel melting or a so called "steam explosion" scenario. Also, the fiery steam-zirconium reaction results in a much higher than anticipated (from any other scenarios) rate of Hydrogen production, which in turn requires a review of containment designs.”
http://pbadupws.nrc.gov/docs/ML1033/ML103340250.pdf

In light of the Fukushima Daiichi...