14.000 times the Hiroshima bomb capacity

[the_big_m_in_ok]

@hartiberlin
       Yes!   This is real crap!!!    I told the Neo-Nazi, "Dr." (No)wak, there's a great deal more radioactive waste at Fukushima, than at Chernobyl.    But, my question is, why would spent fuel rods detonate if their depleted of U-235?      Plutonium?      That can be made into an atom bomb.   Is that it?   That's all I can think of.
      Even so, if the rods catch fire in the atmosphere---or, worse than that and just as likely!!---a chemical fire on or around them forces them to catch fire from being "French-fried" to to point they melt, they can cause a 'China Syndrome' scenario and that would probably leak radiation and waste products into the ocean at some point.

As you said (yes?),  "Goodnight Maria."

Either the meltdown or the outright explosive detonation of fuel rods would put the world at peril for slow, radioactive death.   Japan would be dead a lot quicker.

--Lee

[TinselKoala]

There is no way that a real "nuclear" explosion could result from the fuel rods. A "prompt criticality" event would be a kind of "dirty bomb" that would be bad enough, though; it would be like a small TNT explosion but all the debris and smoke would be highly radioactive and would be literally impossible to clean up, the whole area would have to be quarantined for hundreds of years at least, and the entire island of Honshu would probably be uninhabitable, and the radioactive Cesium would eventually spread all over the northern hemisphere with bad consequences for everybody.
For a real atom-bomb type explosion to happen, the fissile material has to be confined in a very strong container so it doesn't "fizzle", blowing itself apart before much fission happens,  instead of blowing up like a Hiroshima bomb. The "14000 Hiroshimas" refers not to the possible explosive power but rather to the release of radionuclides as fallout and contamination.... which, in the long run, would be much worse than even a large nuclear bomb would produce.

It's a big mess, and Tepco should not be in charge of the affair at all, considering their history of lies and incompetence.

[lancaIV]

Tchernobyl/Chernobyl: the "Sarkophag"- several times reerrected since 1987 .
Sincerely
              OCL

[TinselKoala]

I sure am glad that you aren't in charge of things. Don't you realize that this is a serious problem, in need of a _real_ solution, not your silly fantasies?

Why not just give John Hutchison a call and have him heal Fukushima with his frequencies?

Utter facepalm.

[TinselKoala]

The photograph shows a large electric motor with a pump bolted onto it. It has nothing whatever to do with nuclear power, other than perhaps being a component of a water-circulation system.

People criticize me very strongly, complete with the worst insults imaginable, because of my skeptical insistence on DATA which supports CLAIMS.

But it is really people like YOU, who do nothing constructive and post nonsense and garbage, who really damage the field's credibility in the eyes of the rest of the world.