From: Matthew Hunt
On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 1:05 PM, John Sessoms <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'm wondering how the water got out of the storage pool. The ones I'm
> familiar with are massive reinforced concrete structures with walls many
> feet thick set below ground level.
These are said to be on a floor above the reactor, with no strong
ceiling or lid. There's a small diagram at:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/16/world/asia/reactors-status.html
Things might have turned out better if the spent fuel were in the
basement, and the diesel generators were on the upper levels.
The one I helped build back in the late 70's has a much more massive
containment structure. At the scale of the diagram, the spent fuel pool
structure would have been about as large as the reactor building shown
there and the spent fuel pool itself would have been about 1/3 of the
volume.
That looks like the GE boiling water reactor design is a bit smaller and
not as well protected. We've got two of those here in North Carolina
down at Southport on the Cape Fear River. The plant I worked on was for
a Westinghouse pressurized Water reactor design.
The top of the spent fuel pool would have been up where the spent fuel
pool is in the diagram, but the bottom of the pool would have been down
at the level of the "torus".
It was that way so the water level in the reactor building could be
raised up above the top of the open reactor vessel for fueling. The top
of the open vessel would be under about 30 feet of water during fueling
operations so that the 24 foot fuel bundle could be lifted in and out
without ever breaking the surface. Once the spent fuel was transferred
back into the spent fuel pool, the cap would be bolted back on the
reactor vessel and the reactor building would be pumped dry again.
One of the emergency cooling options for the reactor was to just pump
the containment building full of water and circulate that water through
the interchange with the cooling towers.
The diesel generators used for starting the system at Shearon Harris
here in Wake County were located in their own buildings outside of the
reactor complex (on the far side of the generator building from the
containment). Those diesel generators are massive, with the actual
generator portion itself being as big as a railroad locomotive.
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