what exactly is a nuclear meltdown?

Question

What takes place when there is a nuclear meltdown at a nuclear powerplant? How long does it take for the raw materials to decay and why does it take that long?

Answer 1

a melt down occurs when the core gets too hot.
the core literaly melts thru the containment chamber.
the half life of uranium, as i remember is 50000 years.
this means that in 50000 years half of what you started with will be left. in 100,000 years 1/4th will be left.
decay rates are physical constants determined by the laws of physics. man cannot alter this.

Answer 2

nuclear power plants use a lot of technology to keep the heat from the radioactive materials they use in and away from people. A meltdown is when they cannot contain the heat and radioactive materials. It can take hundreds if not thousands of years for a place to recover, we don't know how long yet since no one can still get anywhere near the plant that meltdown inf Russia. Radioactive materials can take a very long time to decay, because the more there is the longer it will take and a power plant has a lot of radioactive materials.

Answer 3

When the core reactor temperature gets too hot and becomes unstable as fuel assemblies overheat and melt that is a nuclear meltdown. Nuclear radiation has a half life of anywhere from 3 days to 4.5 billion years.

Half life is how long it takes for disintegration of one-half of the radioactive atoms that are present when measurement starts. Uranium-238 has the longest half-life, 4 and a half billion years, and radon-222 the shortest, about 3 days.

Answer 4

My basic understanding is that when operating normally, a nuclear reactor uses a sustained, controlled fission process to heat up water that turns turbines and generates electricity. The key word in that sentence is "controlled" in the sense that if not controlled, the reaction can start going too fast and producing too much heat. To control the reaction, they use graphite rods (yep, the same thing in your pencils) which absorbs the radiation. If the control processes aren't working properly, enough radiation/energy doesn't get absorbed and instead starts consuming the nuclear fuel more and more quickly. If a critical mass of fissionable material is present (enough to sustain a reaction by itself without additional fuel) you get a meltdown: the reaction gets out of hand and then the investors understand why the designers told them they needed 20 foot concrete walls around the reactor.

A little complicated, but who said nuclear physics was easy?

Answer 5

the pro-nuke spin are already attempting to shrink this, a genuine worst case state of affairs that the those in prefer of Nukes mentioned ought to in no way take place. to this point as radiation from a center meltdown explosion, it rather is merely adverse because of the fact the radiation WILL go up into the ambience and the triumphing winds from Japan finally end up at Vancouver Island, Seattle and northern California, of and Hawaii alongside the way. If a radioactive cloud has been released then that's going to finally end up inflicting cancers and radiation ailment in a great style of folk. it rather is what became discovered from the reactor middle explosion at Chernobyl. could human beings start to go away the Pacific coast? i think that relies upon on the quantity and sweetness of radiation released. If that's a Chernobyl sized even then....you paintings it out. check out satellite tv for pc wind varieties, NOAA. the federal government is in charge for this cyber web internet site and the records on it. And that's a medical enterprise, their wind direction satellite tv for pc info is maximum in all probability perfect. it incredibly is why why not greater nukes could be outfitted in any respect, everywhere contained in the international. except you're making a six determine earnings as a company propagandist/shill. that's a probably gigantic disaster and a reasonable disaster plan could be carried out and complete if all and sundry is in possibility of being hit by a widespread radioactive cloud. Our elected officers could desire to take this heavily devoid of inflicting a panic exodus from the tainted (or probably quickly to be contaminated) Pacific coast of the united states.

Answer 6

When a nuculear power plant gets too old it basically explodes creating a major ecological disaster.