(25 April 2013, 14:08)Tartar Horde Wrote: (25 April 2013, 13:13)bigpaul Wrote: (25 April 2013, 10:01)Tartar Horde Wrote: To be honest BP there won't be anyone around to see this happen in UK, all the Nuclear power stations will melt down in a serious crash and flood britain with levels of radiation that will kill most of the life here, leaving it an irradiated wasteland for the next twenty thousand years. any total collapse of the infrastructure is a death sentence for us here as we can't escape the contamination. Chernobyl was bad enough with one reactor going critical, imagine what it would be like with all the uk reactors going critical, we are talking an extinction event for the british Isles that will take eons to heal.
yeah but that is a nuclear accident, what happens if its just no one around to work them-do they just shut down or do they melt down?
They will all melt down BP. If the electric goes off they will run on back up generators that will keep the Fuel Rod coolant tank water cold and moving. Once the back up stops the water will stop being cooled surrounding the fuel rods, and it will boil off exposing the fuel rods to the air, the fuel rods will burn at thousands of degrees spewing out lethal doses of radiation into surrounding area and atmosphere. This will happen at all nuclear power plants if the power stops the cooling pumps.
You just have to look at the distribution of them, and use the Chernobyl model to plot the area of effect one nuclear plant can have, and do that for a map of the UK for every nuclear plant. The results will frighten the FCK out of you mate.
not sure about this .... surely if the power went out to a nuclear reactor the back up generator will power the safety systems to make the reactor safe until the power comes back on such as lowering the control rods to halt the nuclear chain reaction.
And the new reactors that will be coming online in a few years are designed to have passive safety features that can cope if a total melt down too