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Corium is absolutely dangerous - it take heavy equipment and time to break it apart and use it, and the stuff tends to be so massively radioactive it'll kill mo
by azernik 5y ago
Corium is absolutely dangerous - it take heavy equipment and time to break it apart and use it, and the stuff tends to be so massively radioactive it'll kill most gear and people who try to do the job.
The shielding, in this case, serves to protect innocent bystanders who aren't trying to pull the thing apart. Though I would still not want to live close by - intentional "safe" meltdowns are not a well-explored technology.
- idontwantthis 5y agoWould there be corium though? Isn't that caused by destruction of the container? Seems like there would just be melted Uranium very slowly cooling off.
- azernik 5y agoCorium is "everything in the reactor melted together". It doesn't have to include the containment vessel. For example, in Chernobyl, the corium didn't include any of the containment vessel, because RBMKs funny have containment vessels. For something this small the proportion of uranium would probably be higher, but it'd still be a radioactive slurry of fuel, decay products, control systems, cooling loop, and internal structural materials.
- azernik 5y ago*because RBMKs don't have containment vessels