ROTFLMAO… Mr. PhD physicist has clearly and indisputably nether ever been inside a light water reactor, nor even seen the blueprints for one.

Likewise he has even less of a clue about how they work then Penn State’s Micheal Mann has about ethics.

What happened in the Fukushima Nuclear power plants was quite complicated, very very very bad, but nothing even remotely close to what this imbecile describes.

Like all Light Water Reactors the Japanese reactors use fuel rods that are coated with Zircon, a Zinc alloy. It is used because it is extremely resistant to pure H2O’s tendency to dissolve metal halides.

Unfortunately it also has the tendency around 2500 degree’s Centigrade to have a endothermic reaction with water which produces hydrogen gas.

Light Water Reactor’s commonly have hydraulic actuated high pressure relief valves that once a certain pressure level is reached kick open and release excess steam pressure to prevent the reactor vessel from exploding from steam pressure.

As soon as the pressure reaches a safe level the valve closes again automatically.

What happened at the Fukushima reactor was that emergency relief valve kicked open and released an enormous amount of high hydrogen content steam. That high hydrogen content steam exploded, probably because the steam release shatter a number of florescent lights.

Light Water Reactor’s like those at Fukushima are not even remotely similar in design to Russia’s Fukushima. For one they employ a two phase cooling system.

In other words without electricity they cant get the water to circulate through the cooling tower. If the core gets hot enough the water turns to steam, and when the pressure gets high enough that steam forces open the emergency relief valve. When the pressure drops enough, the gravity feed system refills the reactor core and the cycle starts all over again.

That is the primary cooling phase. The secondary cooling phase involves a water jacket built into the outside of the reactor core vessel. It works almost identical to the primary cooling phase except that the water in the secondary cooling phase never interacts with the fuel rods.

When they talk about using sea water to cool the reactor they are most certainly talking about using it in the secondary cooling phase, not the primary cooling phase.

More importantly, the way the fuel rod’s are placed in a light water reactor make a

The core itself is submerged in water, that water is circulated through a cooling tower and returned to the reactor core via gravity fed. They require a pumping system to pull the water out and circulate through the cooling tower, but as a redundant safety measure the return feed is gravity fed.