Talk:The China Syndrome

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BetacommandBot (talk) 21:29, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

security people
"implication that the company's security people" - should be clarified - the movie implicates the construction company's security, not the power company's security. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Feldercarb (talk • contribs) 15:08, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

Not "main water pump"
I quote from the Plot section, "to delay restarting the reactor until the main water pump can be disassembled and inspected." That is incorrect. There is no such thing as a "main water pump" in a nuclear power plant. You either have a main feedwater pump (MFP) or a reactor coolant pump (RCP) (I'm talking about PWRs). A MFP is part of the secondary side located in the turbine building and takes suction off the main condenser and pumps water into the steam generators (secondary loop). A RCP is used to provide forced cooling to the reactor core by circulating reactor coolant water through the reactor vessel and steam generators (primary loop). In the movie, he was investigating the RCP as he was inside containment. I will leave this discussion up for a while to give others time to comment, then I will edit the article. Gilawson (talk) 16:29, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Get a life. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.153.254.33 (talk) 03:58, 16 March 2011 (UTC)
 * "Get a life"?...pffft! I welcome an engineering critique of the film. 184.45.3.233 (talk) 16:11, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

WELL SAID: an Engineering discussion is mandatory; just see the evolving situation in the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant after the March 2011 Earthquake and Tsunami caused initial accident. It is the usual stupid people believing "Nothing Happens" which makes serious accidents more frequent than ever. Who were the "brilliant" design team engineers that took the Tsunami Wave prediction data and believed (quite innocently) that the Emergency Diesel Generators were safely located in the basement of the installation, ready to be inundated with a larger Tsunami wave, risking a core meltdown and the release of radiation we have seen in the news. The ignorant person that wrote "get-a-life" clearly does not understand a thing about Nuclear accidents. Regarding the movie, "The China Syndrome" film was not perfectly written or completely accurate, but the timing and purpose were an extremely well aimed shot. As finantial and economic pressures of the actual ultracapitalist world are more and more irrational, the possibility of a money-saving malpractice conducting to an accident is even more probable than in 1979, regardless of so called "Technology Advances". I agree a better depiction of the cooling system failure was in order, few films are truly correct from a technical stanpoint, but they serve the purpose of informing and sometimes, educating the public. amclaussen. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.100.180.19 (talk) 20:22, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Incorrect/misleading information in lede
The last paragraph of the lede says:

"The title is a shorthand for a nuclear meltdown in which reactor components melt through their containment structures (and then 'melt through the Earth until reaching China' (see China Syndrome), though this is not intended to be taken literally)."

However, this is incorrect. The term is a fanciful phrase coined in the early 1970s to describe one possible result of a severe loss of coolant accident in a nuclear reactor.

It was never proposed that material from such an event would get very far into the ground, much less penetrate the crust of the planet, and saying anything to the contrary is a disservice to our readers.

I'll fix it but I wanted to toss it out here first to see if anyone wanted to say anything before I do. Thanks! &mdash; UncleBubba ( T @ C ) 17:53, 31 March 2011 (UTC)


 * From my recollection, the theory then, promulgated by the ill informed, was that a complete nuclear reactor core meltdown would melt through the Earth until it hit the water table and generated a massive steam explosion that would then spread the corium over a vast area. I say ill informed because key concepts were that the curium would manage to stay fissioning AND not explosively disassemble AND it would have to also manage to melt through concrete and steel and stone without diluting itself. As was evidenced in Fukushima and Chernobyl, no such event did occur. The corium was diluted by the control rods and structure of the core itself, the pressure vessel components that melted with it, the concrete and criticality never occurred or would occur. One only assumes the worst possible scenario to ensure it could not occur when designing the facility.Wzrd1 (talk) 18:47, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

The density of nuclear fuel is so high it wouldn't mix with, and be diluted by the concrete, and steel structure. In Cernobyl The hot fuel, described by responders as like lava, was working its way through the ground toward some large water tanks which if it reached them was predicted by the responders to have resulted in an 8 megaton steam explosion. Several men sacrificed their lives to open critical valves to drain the water tanks preventing an even more massive disaster. 98.164.64.26 (talk) 17:06, 11 March 2020 (UTC)