Re: [Phys-l] recriticality at Fukushima

[Paul Nord <Paul.Nord@valpo.edu>]

There may not be too much of a mystery there if one presumes that they were reacting to a new measurement with an abundance of caution.

"Hey, today's measurement shows an abundance of xenon.  Did we see that before?"

The scientist in me says: "You should collect more data and see if you can reanalyze previous results and determine if this represents a real change."

Around the board room I'm sure someone said, "This could be a measurement anomaly that we don't understand.  But it might be recriticality.  Should we sit on this for a week and do nothing?  Or should we...."

Paul


On Nov 3, 2011, at 12:39 PM, John Denker wrote:

> 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.
>
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