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Re: [Phys-l] recriticality at Fukushima



On 11/03/2011 09:45 AM, Jeff Radtke wrote:
Cf-252 has a half life of 2.6 years, and 3% of these decay events are spontaneous fissions.

Right.

As of today, Tepco has figured this out, and has retracted the
announcement about recriticality.

As of yesterday, they had definitely not figured it out. They
were dumping boron onto the reactor, in an effort to stop the
"reaction". This proves they were taking the recriticality
issue seriously.

This leaves us with a couple of minor mysteries, such as why
they observed xenon recently but not earlier ... and why they
didn't know how to interpret the xenon observation when they
did get it.