Metal Reviews

Did Dead1 just suggest nuking a power station in meltdown?

No no, he suggested some kind of reverse prolapse where you suck the power plant back into the earth

Atomizing the reactor would prevent it from sending off radiation. It's just crazy enough to work, like that film, Armageddon.

Except isn't the whole point trying to avoid coating the area in harmful radiation which, y'know, nuking it would do?

The radiation would cancel each other out, bro. It's like Armageddon, get it?

I'm probably talking out of my butt here, but I read somehwere that the quickest method of disposing of nuclear radiation is to expend it in an atomic blast.

Nuclear weapons come in various yields, from low level tactical systems designed to take out a bridge or bunker to megaton city killers.

So my completely non-scientific theory was maybe to use up the radiation in a low yield nuke drop.

Of course I know as much about nuclear physics as I do about Mongolian mythology.


By the way in the past, bombers have been used to destroy stricken oil tankers (e.g. Torrey Canyon in 1967). The plan is to use the bombing to burn the oil before it spreads.

Y'know it's still not as extreme as the most extreme solution to this problem and the one likely to be done if things get any worse: Skateboarders performing grinds and other stunts on the nuclear plants to Beastie Boys "Sabotage."


Is that a path we truly want to go down?

This would not help at all.

All explosions are exothermic reactions, which means that they RELEASE energy. In the case of nuclear bombs, they release GIGA-SHIT tons of energy. The problem they are having with the reactors is that the rods are not being cooled

which means they are getting hotter

which means that the temperature is increasing

which means that the average kinetic energy of the particles in the rod is increasing (temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of bagillions of molecules)

which means these radioactive isotopes, which are already unstable, are moving faster and colliding with each other with more force, so that the system as a whole releases more particles. These particles are traveling at relativistic speeds, which means they are moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.

Dropping an atomic bomb on the plants would make things so much worse. It would be like trying to get huge mosh pit of guys holding live bombs to come to a stop by dropping napalm on them.

Hypothetically if it looked like the radiation was to get bad enough, the best thing to do would be to cover the area in lead that is miles thick, or to bring the atmospheric temperature of Japan far, far, far below the freezing point of water. In the former scenario, these high energy particles would lose a lot of their energy as they collide with such thick solid material. In the latter, some serious-ass cooling would be going on, which means a big-ass reduction in the number of collisions of isotopes, and less particles would be released.

The reason that oil burning trick may have worked is a different situation. The oil that was such a necessary fuel for the fire was moving through the ocean. They wanted to use up all the fuel before it could travel farther and pollute more stuff. Nuclear reactors don't really have "fuel" in the familiar sense of the word and high energy particles emitted from the isotopes themselves can travel through anything (or nothing at all, in the case of a vacuum).

I don't know if helicopters would be able to transport enough concrete... the solution in chernobyl was to get tons of regular people to go into the power plant and shovel concrete over the nuclear waste.. which ovbiously can't be done in this case. There's a real possibility of this turning into an international crisis, if the plants explode and the radiation get's into the atmosphere.

Suits won't cut it? Could they drop quikrete on it then drop water on it? Maybe we just need to sacrifice the poor.

Send some Americans over. Their increased body mass will absorb all the radiation right?

Oi! We Australians are now the fattest country on the planet. Don't go taking that away from us.

It can be a joint task-force type thing

Just like in the Pacific 1941-45! The old vets would be proud.

All i can say is, i hope a meltdown never happens to the poor Japanese, i love those guys with there awesome food, anime and there video games...they've been through enough

Fascinating article from Greeny-lefty-commie George Monbiot in the Graun yesterday:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... -fukushima