3 ms·
> it could have exploded making a huge portion of the continent uninhabitable Some details and references for this would be nice. I find it hard to believe, th
by gjm11 7y ago
> it could have exploded making a huge portion of the continent uninhabitable
Some details and references for this would be nice. I find it hard to believe, though of course sometimes things I find hard to believe turn out to be true :-).
- DuskStar 7y agoThe area under the reactor core was filled with water, and if the corium (molten core material) had contacted that water it would have caused a steam explosion and launched additional material outside of the reactor building. There's an interesting StackOverflow post relating to this here: [0] That just deals with the size of the steam explosion though, not the potential effects. (And for reference, I've seen the largest explosion that did occur listed as ~10T equivalent) 0: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/480113/how-large-would-the-steam-explosion-at-chernobyl-have-been https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/480113/how-large...
- gjm11 7y agoThe thing I'm skeptical about is the claim that this would have rendered a large part of the continent uninhabitable. The Stack Exchange discussion is interesting but (as you say) doesn't really bear on that.
- DuskStar 7y agoYeah - worst case was 20x more radioactive material (well, I suppose no-seriously-wtf case would be 80x, but that requires the other three active reactors to have gone up as well) since at least 5% of the reactor core was released.