![]() This failure event causes an immediate depression for lots of reasons. Managing one containment failure is nightmare fuel. Trained technicians are too few and knowledge about radiation and nuclear materials too slow to teach to quickly train more technicians. Its a reasonable assumption that containment failures at every nuclear reactor in the world would vastly exceed the ability of any nuclear regulation agency to handle. While this perhaps isn't very realistic because of the considerable differences in reactor designs, the Chernobyl incident does offer a more complete picture of the manpower required to address such an incident. Let's assume that all 443 reactors failed at the same time and with the same results as Chernobyl. Reports indicate that the heavier dust returned to earth fairly quickly but the lighter radioactive material stayed aloft and spread over a huge area covering much of Europe and Russia. Assuming that stockpiled waste, which is an even greater quantity of material, isn't released as well as the material in the reactor, that's still a lot of waste to put in the environment.Ĭhernobyl 4 released about 8 tons or 5% of its radioactive fuel and machinery into the atmosphere from an initial fuel load of 192 tons. People just don't understand radiation, or how much you are already dosed withĪ nuclear reactor creates about 20,000 kg of waste per year for a total of 8.8M kg per year. That is a a lot of land, but it is nowhere near close to making the planet unlivable. you end up making an area roughly the size of Alaska unlivable. ![]() ![]() if you pretend none of their exclusions zones overlap and even include some addition area for secondary zone overlap. Lets try the impossible hypothetical scenario, all 433 reactors pull a chernobyl, Most can't but let's ignore that. The sudden failure of global power grids and evacuation effects would be a bigger problem. You would see death in the immediate area for some sure but on a global scale all you might see a slight global uptick in cancer rates and that's about it. Others like breeders and gas cooled reactors don't have the issue to begin with. Many reactors have a negative void coefficient of reactivity and thus lose reactivity without coolant unlike the Chernobyl design. most reactors aren't designed to be be giant pressure bombs/cannons which spread radioactive material over a wide area like the early russian designs. There just is not enough of them and even in the worst case breakdown they don't release that much radiation. ![]() Over time the Earth would be reclaimed by other species, but not a for a long time. Horrible mutations would likely become common place for those unlikely to survive the initial cataclysm. A majority of surface dwelling species would die off. Would there be any adverse affects of the radiation? Of course. How long would it be before the earth was safe to live on again? Safe for who? For the radiation to fade to current levels it would probably take tens of thousands of years, and I don't think humanity would last that long, except maybe off-planet, somewhere. Might some places be very minimally affected? It would depend entirely on the weather patterns. That much radiation would stay up in the air for a very long time, and would eventually make its way to pretty much every corner of the planet. Would any place be safe? I don't think anyone can say for sure, but I don't think any place would be safe in the long run. This radiation would travel with the weather patterns, and spread along much of world, killing off most surface dwelling life. If many of the 400+ nuclear reactors in the world were to all fail simultaneously (or within a very narrow window of time), an enormous amount of radiation would be released into our atmosphere. In fact, that (most likely explosive) failure would simply cause the nuclear fuel to be thrown up into the atmosphere, causing huge clouds of deadly radioactive debris to spread for hundreds of kilometers around. However, if one were to fail catastrophically (and there are many, many safeguards in place to make sure that it won't), there are no features in place to make the resulting explosion "clean". That might sound like a silly statement, so allow to explain: all the contingencies around a nuclear reactor focus on stopping it from failing catastrophically (exploding - no, not in the same way as a nuclear bomb, they wouldn't do that). The difference here is nuclear reactors are not ever meant to explode. ![]() Hence, older bombs are considered "dirty", whereas new ones are presumably much "cleaner". They are not really meant to permanently irradiate an area. Nuclear weapons are meant to inflict massive damage due to the energies they release. ![]()
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