Marina the quote I provided is from the quarterly report the British HSE maintains but it was the closest I could find so the actual document itself which the Guardian quotes may not be publicly accesible at this time. The only thing noted, as eslewhere, in that quarterly report (and the ones prior) held that it would have been another 10 hours until the next security inspection patrol during which time the water level COULD have dropped further.The Duchess of Zeon wrote:Too many variables. We don't know if the pond in question was storing very fresh fuel (which would more quickly combust because it's releasing more radiation, more rapidly) or old fuel that had already substantially decayed, in which time it might never combust ever. We don't know the concentrations, though I could at least look up what the isotopes would be and some of the actinide products from that kind of reactor. If there's some kind of online incident on the report released under the British equivalent of the Freedom of Information Act, I could tell you a lot more, so I'll look for one.Surlethe wrote: Decay generates heat. If there's no cooling agent like the water to take the heat away, how long would it be until the heat released by the decay raised the temperature enough to do something Bad, like set the fuel on fire or melt the casks? (Or even, if the water is not being circulated, until the water boils away?) Or will it eventually reach a thermal equilibrium radiating the heat away without actually causing any problems?
The point for our consideration is that the report fragment we do have suggests uncertainty as to the rate of coolant loss to the point that the entire scenario is very speculative. There is very little certainty on the report's part that coolant would have drained sufficiently to allow for airborne ignition prior to the next inspection sweep.
