RE: Anatomy of a nuclear woops.
12-20-2017, 07:19 PM (This post was last modified: 06-26-2019, 05:14 PM by Dartz.)
12-20-2017, 07:19 PM (This post was last modified: 06-26-2019, 05:14 PM by Dartz.)
From: Split-Personality
To: "The Glow in the Dark Brigade"
Subj: An anatomy of an atomic fuckup Part 3
@Luminairian. All fair points I'm getting to that. In the end, when all is done I'll let everyone make their own judgements who or what's at fault.
Anyway, on with the show.
--
On Frigga, the question of what to do next is discussed. Beneath the reactor proper is a maze of feedwater pipes to supply coolant to the core. Surrounding the pipes is a suppression pool filled with water, designed to quench any steam leak from a burst pipe, before the pipe itself could be isolated. The reactor operators, not realising the core had been destroyed, attempted to pump fresh water into the core through these broken pipes. The effect, was to completely fill the suppression pools, which then overflowed to flood the drywell beneath the reactor core proper.
The remains of the core continue to burn. The heat and pressure generated by the fire is repeatedly opening emergency ventilation valves in the roof of the containment building, exhausting the plant to vacuum, and drawing more water up from the suppression pool and drywell to feed the fire with oxygen.
If nothing is done, the cycle will continue until the remnants of the core burn through the concrete containment, and drop into the pool, resulting in a massive explosion that would likely destroy the remaining three reactors, and kill every living thing on the asteroid.
The only alternative, is to vent the compartment to space to extinguish the fire. Drawing the water out of the suppression pools and onto the burning core - leading to a thermal explosion with potentially catastrophic consequences.
Disaster it seems is now inevitable. The reactor crew, disagreed.
"This Thing, terrifying as it was, was still contained. We'd had the worst possible accident - beyond anything anybody had thought was possible, but all of our safety equipment was still working. Nobody wanted to make the call too early, when the situation could still be saved." - Keisuke Morita, statement to ARSC investigation.
"We don't have a disaster yet. If we evacuate now, and that whole thing goes up while we're evacuating - then we just get a lot more people killed. We need a better plan." Jet Jaguar, Control room VDR
"We were told to rig charges on the main gate, and on any access shafts between the accommodation block and the hangar, and then open all gates to the mines, open chambers - anywhere with atmosphere that isn't inhabited," - Bao Chang, Frigga Third-Shift Engineering Team Lead, Statement to ARSC Investigation.
"Keisuke and I had to get Units one and two shut down, depressurised, and running on the isolation condensers. Three was already cold, so we started pumping the core down. With the reactors stopped and the emergency generators running, we could start draining the suppression pools. I remember saying it was too bad we couldn't just open the drain gates for four - the first blast had knocked out the power - and the manual valves were underwater." - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, statement to ARSC investigation.
"I stood on top of the radiation shield of a shut-down nuclear reactor, still hot under my feet even through my rad-boots, manually opening valves to the isolation condensers because the auto-sequence wouldn't let us do it. It sounds insane, but we knew what we were doing. " Marco Ricci, - Second-Shift Engineering Team, Statement to ARSC Investigation.
"We had this accident. We needed to accept that. We bore some responsibility for it. It didn't matter. Now, we needed to save lives. If that meant doing in hours what normally took days, so be it. We wrote new procedures minutes before we needed them. The operators knew their own system well. We knew the physics behind the reactor well. We would argue with the operating team about what the system could do, and they argued with us about how to do it, but we could always figure out ways to make old machinery do new things." - Kurt Meier - Nuclear Commissioning Engineer. Lensherr Power Systems GmbH, statement to ARSC investigation
Their plan is to shut the remaining reactors down, drain as much water out of the system as possible, in the hope of minimising the damage caused by the fourth reactor's explosion. When the reactor explodes, charges will block the main tunnels, then blow the main gate, and hope the depressurisation would eject the majority of the debris into open space at escape velocity. The asteroid's residents would bunker down in the accommodation areas and wait for the station's natural orbit to carry them away from the radiation.
"It does sound crazy, but the logic was sound. The fastest way to evacuate Frigga would have been to use a Gagarin-class ship, boarding from the main landing bay - close to the reactor chambers. If the second explosion had occurred while the evacuation ship was in orbit, or boarding, everyone on the ship, and everyone on the station would be killed pretty much instantly. A long evacuation from the habitation blocks further from the core, would increase the time exposure to danger for all involved. Shutting the other reactors down would likely be of little benefit, but the distance between the habitation blocks and the reactors would be enough to protect the inhabitants from the initial blast, while Frigga's orbit would carry them away from debris. The eventual evacuation would then be slower, but could happen at leisure after the worst of the radiation had subsided. In Theory." James Floyd, ARSC lead investigator
In theory, it's impossible to blow up a nuclear fusion reactor, but here we are.
"About six hours after we got the shout, a call comes down from above and it's Jet, saying she needs to know what the levels are in the Suppression pool. I answered her half with a joke thinking she couldn't be serious, Bloody Lethal is what they are. And then, she asks me back How lethal? She says to me, I need to know if two people would live long enough to get down to the drain valves, and open them. And my body goes cold because she's fuckin' serious." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.
It's a simple truth. No machine on Frigga could do it.
The equation is as simple as it is cold. After the accident, analysts suggested that, even sheltering in place, the inhabitants of Frigga would each have a 1 in 10 chance of death. That left a total of 47.2 dead by cold probability, assuming everything went as expected. Two people, sent to open the drain valves, would certainly die. But the explosion would be prevented, and therefore, the math said 45.2 would be saved.
But only if it is possible for two people to make it in the first place. So. A hole is drilled and sealed. A probe is inserted and the readings are taken.
"The first meter pegged, as far to the right as it could go. It stopped at a thousand. The second settled at Eight Thousand. Eight Thousand roentgens an hour. From just the reactor feedwater." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, tatement to ARSC investigation.
A thousand roentgen approximates 10 Sieverts per hour. 5 in 5 hours means certain death. 10, is beyond the ability of even Handwavium to save. 50 means almost immediate incapacitation.
"I told them up there what we were facing down here. and I remember her calmly asking me just how long it'd take me to get to the valves. I remembered how we'd taken the whole 'go to our deaths' resolution on the trip down and now there I was staring it in the face and - it scared me. Really, I didn't know. I didn't know what was under the reactor, in the dark. I guessed an hour or so - I couldn't tell you if that's an honest guess or a coward's. She told us not to try - we'd be toast before we made it." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.
The Fire continued to burn, flaring off a new burst of radiation like hell's own geyser every five minutes. By now, the reactor on Frigga had been on fire for 24 hours. It had been burning its way through meters of solid concrete and metallic asteroid for an entire day.
"We needed to think outside the box. If we couldn't open the valves by hand, we'd have to use something a little more mechanical. It was time for the engineers to take over." - Bao Chang, Frigga Third-Shift Engineering Team Lead, Statement to ARSC Investigation.
--
The first people outside of the asteroid of Frigga to realise something 'major' had happened, were the crew of the SCSS Challenger, six months ago. Three months after the accident happened.
"Naturally it raised eyebrows. Radiation fields like this just don't happen naturally away from planets. My first thought was that somebody had been testing something they shouldn't have been but that didn't really fit either. It wasn't until we analysed the radiation that we found out it was potentially something far more innocent, or far more deadly. The shuttle's hull protected us of course - and I didn't need to worry too much. My curiosity had been piqued, so we moved along to investigate.
We found evidence of multiple short releases of intense radiation. It did not take much to determine they followed an orbital path, and were released by a rotating object, such as an asteroid. It took five minutes for the navigator to pinpoint Frigga as the origin of the radiation. The time and orbit and rotational periods matched perfectly.
After an hour, we reached the largest and final radiation field. Inside, we found actual debris - hot fragments emitting lethal levels of radiation. Some where hot enough to be physically glowing. Others were more substantial - pieces of equipment, wreckage.
We found a single motoroid, so intensely radioactive we determined it must have been placed inside, or near, the core of a deuterium fusion reactor. Grappling it with the arm pegged the radiation monitors in the payload bay. We left it drift until someone more qualified could pick it up.
Finally we found four contaminated fire engines. Also, intensely radioactive - but not to near the same degree. The radiation seemed more to concentrate in the engine's pump units.
What sort of problem would involve pumping highly radioactive water, result in an irradiated motoroid, and leave such a debris trail? Something that damaged the reactor, and created a situation dire enough that required a motoroid to be used inside a nuclear reactor, which meant somebody had to pilot it in there. Which meant a situation dire enough for someone to take that risk and probably die in the process. A situation which continued for days.
A loss of coolant, or a pump failure? They must've had to use the trucks to pump the reactor coolant. If it'd failed, they might've used the motoroid to make a running repair. Which didn't explain the intensity of the debris. I thought maybe the cooling pumps had failed at first - or maybe a broken coolant line inside the reactor that had to be repaired. Serious, but nowhere near a Chernobyl.
But, given how serious that could've become, why wasn't there an alert put out? Or an evacuation request? None of the things you'd normally expect.
None of the pieces really fit right.
We sent a quick message, looking for an explanation since nothing was reported, and we get one back from one of the operators - Toptunov. "There has been an incident. One of our reactors was damaged. The situation was resolved."
The channel closed. I remember thinking, I love a good mystery." -Shizuka Hayama, Engineer, SCSS Challenger.
--
"Your bravery and quick thinking have turned a potential Chernobyl into a mere Three Mile Island," - Charles Montgomery Burns, Springfield Nuclear Power Plant
To compare this to Chernobyl, is to compare a breeze to a hurricane. In truth, the stakes and scale are infinitesimally lower. Hundreds of lives are at stake, but not millions. Even in the absolute worst case scenario, with Frigga a poisoned tomb, there will be no great effect on civilisation. No vast tracts of land will be abandoned. No governments will fall. No consequences would linger for decades beneath the soil. The dust and debris from the reactor will dissipate to the void of space where it will harm no-one.
So far, the only injury has been to a single firefighter.
But that's not what's important here.
To: "The Glow in the Dark Brigade"
Subj: An anatomy of an atomic fuckup Part 3
@Luminairian. All fair points I'm getting to that. In the end, when all is done I'll let everyone make their own judgements who or what's at fault.
Anyway, on with the show.
--
On Frigga, the question of what to do next is discussed. Beneath the reactor proper is a maze of feedwater pipes to supply coolant to the core. Surrounding the pipes is a suppression pool filled with water, designed to quench any steam leak from a burst pipe, before the pipe itself could be isolated. The reactor operators, not realising the core had been destroyed, attempted to pump fresh water into the core through these broken pipes. The effect, was to completely fill the suppression pools, which then overflowed to flood the drywell beneath the reactor core proper.
The remains of the core continue to burn. The heat and pressure generated by the fire is repeatedly opening emergency ventilation valves in the roof of the containment building, exhausting the plant to vacuum, and drawing more water up from the suppression pool and drywell to feed the fire with oxygen.
If nothing is done, the cycle will continue until the remnants of the core burn through the concrete containment, and drop into the pool, resulting in a massive explosion that would likely destroy the remaining three reactors, and kill every living thing on the asteroid.
The only alternative, is to vent the compartment to space to extinguish the fire. Drawing the water out of the suppression pools and onto the burning core - leading to a thermal explosion with potentially catastrophic consequences.
Disaster it seems is now inevitable. The reactor crew, disagreed.
"This Thing, terrifying as it was, was still contained. We'd had the worst possible accident - beyond anything anybody had thought was possible, but all of our safety equipment was still working. Nobody wanted to make the call too early, when the situation could still be saved." - Keisuke Morita, statement to ARSC investigation.
"We don't have a disaster yet. If we evacuate now, and that whole thing goes up while we're evacuating - then we just get a lot more people killed. We need a better plan." Jet Jaguar, Control room VDR
"We were told to rig charges on the main gate, and on any access shafts between the accommodation block and the hangar, and then open all gates to the mines, open chambers - anywhere with atmosphere that isn't inhabited," - Bao Chang, Frigga Third-Shift Engineering Team Lead, Statement to ARSC Investigation.
"Keisuke and I had to get Units one and two shut down, depressurised, and running on the isolation condensers. Three was already cold, so we started pumping the core down. With the reactors stopped and the emergency generators running, we could start draining the suppression pools. I remember saying it was too bad we couldn't just open the drain gates for four - the first blast had knocked out the power - and the manual valves were underwater." - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, statement to ARSC investigation.
"I stood on top of the radiation shield of a shut-down nuclear reactor, still hot under my feet even through my rad-boots, manually opening valves to the isolation condensers because the auto-sequence wouldn't let us do it. It sounds insane, but we knew what we were doing. " Marco Ricci, - Second-Shift Engineering Team, Statement to ARSC Investigation.
"We had this accident. We needed to accept that. We bore some responsibility for it. It didn't matter. Now, we needed to save lives. If that meant doing in hours what normally took days, so be it. We wrote new procedures minutes before we needed them. The operators knew their own system well. We knew the physics behind the reactor well. We would argue with the operating team about what the system could do, and they argued with us about how to do it, but we could always figure out ways to make old machinery do new things." - Kurt Meier - Nuclear Commissioning Engineer. Lensherr Power Systems GmbH, statement to ARSC investigation
Their plan is to shut the remaining reactors down, drain as much water out of the system as possible, in the hope of minimising the damage caused by the fourth reactor's explosion. When the reactor explodes, charges will block the main tunnels, then blow the main gate, and hope the depressurisation would eject the majority of the debris into open space at escape velocity. The asteroid's residents would bunker down in the accommodation areas and wait for the station's natural orbit to carry them away from the radiation.
"It does sound crazy, but the logic was sound. The fastest way to evacuate Frigga would have been to use a Gagarin-class ship, boarding from the main landing bay - close to the reactor chambers. If the second explosion had occurred while the evacuation ship was in orbit, or boarding, everyone on the ship, and everyone on the station would be killed pretty much instantly. A long evacuation from the habitation blocks further from the core, would increase the time exposure to danger for all involved. Shutting the other reactors down would likely be of little benefit, but the distance between the habitation blocks and the reactors would be enough to protect the inhabitants from the initial blast, while Frigga's orbit would carry them away from debris. The eventual evacuation would then be slower, but could happen at leisure after the worst of the radiation had subsided. In Theory." James Floyd, ARSC lead investigator
In theory, it's impossible to blow up a nuclear fusion reactor, but here we are.
"About six hours after we got the shout, a call comes down from above and it's Jet, saying she needs to know what the levels are in the Suppression pool. I answered her half with a joke thinking she couldn't be serious, Bloody Lethal is what they are. And then, she asks me back How lethal? She says to me, I need to know if two people would live long enough to get down to the drain valves, and open them. And my body goes cold because she's fuckin' serious." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.
It's a simple truth. No machine on Frigga could do it.
The equation is as simple as it is cold. After the accident, analysts suggested that, even sheltering in place, the inhabitants of Frigga would each have a 1 in 10 chance of death. That left a total of 47.2 dead by cold probability, assuming everything went as expected. Two people, sent to open the drain valves, would certainly die. But the explosion would be prevented, and therefore, the math said 45.2 would be saved.
But only if it is possible for two people to make it in the first place. So. A hole is drilled and sealed. A probe is inserted and the readings are taken.
"The first meter pegged, as far to the right as it could go. It stopped at a thousand. The second settled at Eight Thousand. Eight Thousand roentgens an hour. From just the reactor feedwater." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, tatement to ARSC investigation.
A thousand roentgen approximates 10 Sieverts per hour. 5 in 5 hours means certain death. 10, is beyond the ability of even Handwavium to save. 50 means almost immediate incapacitation.
"I told them up there what we were facing down here. and I remember her calmly asking me just how long it'd take me to get to the valves. I remembered how we'd taken the whole 'go to our deaths' resolution on the trip down and now there I was staring it in the face and - it scared me. Really, I didn't know. I didn't know what was under the reactor, in the dark. I guessed an hour or so - I couldn't tell you if that's an honest guess or a coward's. She told us not to try - we'd be toast before we made it." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.
The Fire continued to burn, flaring off a new burst of radiation like hell's own geyser every five minutes. By now, the reactor on Frigga had been on fire for 24 hours. It had been burning its way through meters of solid concrete and metallic asteroid for an entire day.
"We needed to think outside the box. If we couldn't open the valves by hand, we'd have to use something a little more mechanical. It was time for the engineers to take over." - Bao Chang, Frigga Third-Shift Engineering Team Lead, Statement to ARSC Investigation.
--
The first people outside of the asteroid of Frigga to realise something 'major' had happened, were the crew of the SCSS Challenger, six months ago. Three months after the accident happened.
"Naturally it raised eyebrows. Radiation fields like this just don't happen naturally away from planets. My first thought was that somebody had been testing something they shouldn't have been but that didn't really fit either. It wasn't until we analysed the radiation that we found out it was potentially something far more innocent, or far more deadly. The shuttle's hull protected us of course - and I didn't need to worry too much. My curiosity had been piqued, so we moved along to investigate.
We found evidence of multiple short releases of intense radiation. It did not take much to determine they followed an orbital path, and were released by a rotating object, such as an asteroid. It took five minutes for the navigator to pinpoint Frigga as the origin of the radiation. The time and orbit and rotational periods matched perfectly.
After an hour, we reached the largest and final radiation field. Inside, we found actual debris - hot fragments emitting lethal levels of radiation. Some where hot enough to be physically glowing. Others were more substantial - pieces of equipment, wreckage.
We found a single motoroid, so intensely radioactive we determined it must have been placed inside, or near, the core of a deuterium fusion reactor. Grappling it with the arm pegged the radiation monitors in the payload bay. We left it drift until someone more qualified could pick it up.
Finally we found four contaminated fire engines. Also, intensely radioactive - but not to near the same degree. The radiation seemed more to concentrate in the engine's pump units.
What sort of problem would involve pumping highly radioactive water, result in an irradiated motoroid, and leave such a debris trail? Something that damaged the reactor, and created a situation dire enough that required a motoroid to be used inside a nuclear reactor, which meant somebody had to pilot it in there. Which meant a situation dire enough for someone to take that risk and probably die in the process. A situation which continued for days.
A loss of coolant, or a pump failure? They must've had to use the trucks to pump the reactor coolant. If it'd failed, they might've used the motoroid to make a running repair. Which didn't explain the intensity of the debris. I thought maybe the cooling pumps had failed at first - or maybe a broken coolant line inside the reactor that had to be repaired. Serious, but nowhere near a Chernobyl.
But, given how serious that could've become, why wasn't there an alert put out? Or an evacuation request? None of the things you'd normally expect.
None of the pieces really fit right.
We sent a quick message, looking for an explanation since nothing was reported, and we get one back from one of the operators - Toptunov. "There has been an incident. One of our reactors was damaged. The situation was resolved."
The channel closed. I remember thinking, I love a good mystery." -Shizuka Hayama, Engineer, SCSS Challenger.
--
"Your bravery and quick thinking have turned a potential Chernobyl into a mere Three Mile Island," - Charles Montgomery Burns, Springfield Nuclear Power Plant
To compare this to Chernobyl, is to compare a breeze to a hurricane. In truth, the stakes and scale are infinitesimally lower. Hundreds of lives are at stake, but not millions. Even in the absolute worst case scenario, with Frigga a poisoned tomb, there will be no great effect on civilisation. No vast tracts of land will be abandoned. No governments will fall. No consequences would linger for decades beneath the soil. The dust and debris from the reactor will dissipate to the void of space where it will harm no-one.
So far, the only injury has been to a single firefighter.
But that's not what's important here.
I love the smell of rotaries in the morning. You know one time, I got to work early, before the rush hour. I walked through the empty carpark, I didn't see one bloody Prius or Golf. And that smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole carpark, smelled like.... ....speed.
One day they're going to ban them.