![]() "If coolant is lost from the ponds, either by a direct hit which breaches containment structures or by a meltdown of the core due to losses of power, the stored fuel will heat up. They noted, however, that radioactive material at Zaporizhzhia is also stored in the spent fuel pools (or ponds), where used fuel is kept underwater to cool and to allow radiation levels to fall before being moved to a final store. "However, it is unclear as to how effective they would be against attacks as the thickness of the containment wall in this design of reactor is traditionally 1.2 metres thick, and a thickness of around two metres is required for new construction projects," they said. Modern reactors in Ukraine, like Zaporizhzhia, are also surrounded by a secondary containment system - a hard concrete shell designed to withstand explosions and a crashed airplane, they noted. "Zaporizhzhia uses enriched uranium, its current VVER reactors are not moderated by graphite, but by water, which means they are safer and will not burn in the way of Chernobyl," they said. However, they noted that Zaporizhzhia's reactors are different to those that were in Chornobyl but that, nonetheless, an accident at the plant could have significant consequences for Ukraine. think tank Chatham House, said in research last week looking at what is at stake in Zaporizhzhia's case. "Probably more than any country in the world, Ukraine is aware of the consequences of an explosion and fire at a nuclear power plant," Antony Froggatt and Patricia Lewis, environment and security experts from U.K. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.The possibility of an accident at Europe's largest nuclear power plant is a terrifying prospect for Ukraine, a country that still lives with the scars of the 1986 Chornobyl disaster, which remains the world's worst nuclear accident and one which led to radioactive material spreading across Europe. This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. From Animals Rule Chernobyl Three Decades After Nuclear Disaster ![]() Remove most of the humans and even if you add a substantial amount of radiation, Nature thrives.Ī resident of Pripyat, 30 years after the disaster. That is because while radioactive contamination takes its toll, it’s nothing compared to what humans do. ![]() Having said all that, let us not forget that the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone became possibly the biggest accidental wildlife sanctuary in Europe, if not the world. For instance, one of the biggest concerns after the Fukushima accident was due to spent fuel pools located near the meltdown sites. And because all of it sits on the ground, there is the chance of leakage, e.g., into the water table, contaminating the water supply of a large region.Ī nuclear reactor site may also contain other sources of radiation. So this represents a concentration of radioactive materials that just does not occur in case of a bomb. In case of a reactor accident, some of the fuel is dispersed, but a lot of it remains in place, at the reactor site. When a nuclear bomb explodes, it is dispersed over a large area. Then there are also all the irradiated parts of the reactor that have been continuously exposed to radiation, resulting in secondary radioactivity and more nasty byproducts. Depending on the reactor design, these may, in fact, include materials a lot worse than the uranium fuel, such as weapons grade plutonium. And whereas a nuclear bomb uses its fuel rather inefficiently (the explosive fission process takes place in milliseconds), a reactor does a more thorough job consuming its fuel over the course of several months before a fuel assembly is replaced.įurthermore, the fission byproducts remain in the fuel assembly. So right there, the amount of fuel in the reactor is several hundred times more than the amount of fission fuel in a nuclear bomb. In contrast, an RBMK reactor like the one that blew up in Chernobyl contains 100–150 fuel assemblies, each with over 100 kg of partially enriched uranium. Of this, less than a kilogram actually underwent nuclear fission, producing fission products including short-lived but dangerous isotopes, and also producing the neutron radiation “flash” that induced secondary radioactivity in some materials that absorbed those neutrons. ![]() ![]() Little Boy (the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) contained 64 kilograms of highly enriched (weapons grade) uranium. ![]()
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