What happens if you fall into a nuclear reactor pool?

Not only does the water spend several decades cooling the fuel rods, but it also affects their radiation. The water essentially acts as a biological shield with hydrogen absorbing and deflecting the radiation bouncing against it. This makes it completely safe for you to stand near the pool with no ill effects.
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Can you swim in the nuclear reactor pool?

If there's corrosion in the spent fuel rod casings, there may be some fission products in the water. They do a pretty good job of keeping the water clean, and it wouldn't hurt you to swim in it, but it's radioactive enough that it wouldn't be legal to sell it as bottled water.
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How deep is a nuclear reactor pool?

They are typically 40 or more feet (12 m) deep, with the bottom 14 feet (4.3 m) equipped with storage racks designed to hold fuel assemblies removed from reactors. A reactor's local pool is specially designed for the reactor in which the fuel was used and is situated at the reactor site.
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How hot is the water in a nuclear reactor?

Light water is used as the primary coolant in a PWR. Water enters through the bottom of the reactor's core at about 548 K (275 °C; 527 °F) and is heated as it flows upwards through the reactor core to a temperature of about 588 K (315 °C; 599 °F).
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Why are nuclear reactor pools blue?

Caused by particles traveling faster than light through a medium, Cherenkov Radiation is what gives nuclear reactors their eerie blue glow. In the miniseries "Chernobyl" when the reactor first explodes, there's an eerie blue light emanating from it.
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What If You Fell Into a Spent Nuclear Fuel Pool?



Do nuclear reactors really glow?

Often, these beta particles are emitted with such high kinetic energies that their velocities exceed the speed of light (3.0x108 meters per second) in water. When this occurs, photons, seen to the eye as blue light, are emitted and the reactor core "glows" blue.
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What color is nuclear?

Normally when people think nuclear reactors the first color that comes to mind is a ghastly almost sickly green color, however nuclear reactors glow a bright blue instead.
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How hot did Chernobyl get?

The Chernobyl corium is composed of the reactor uranium dioxide fuel, its zircaloy cladding, molten concrete, and decomposed and molten serpentinite packed around the reactor as its thermal insulation. Analysis has shown that the corium was heated to at most 2,255 °C, and remained above 1,660 °C for at least 4 days.
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Can you use salt water to cool a nuclear reactor?

Under what circumstances would a nuclear power plant use seawater to cool its reactors? Using unpurified water is not a normal practice—it's never done. Plants don't take water from the river or the sea to supplement their own internal water, which is in completely closed-loop systems.
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How hot are uranium rods?

The nuclear fuel rods feed the nuclear reactor. There are lots of different variables here, but, in at least one situation, they get to about twenty-eight-hundred-and-eleven-degrees celsius (2811C). This is about fifty-one-hundred degrees fahrenheit (5100F).
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Why are spent fuel pools blue?

In a pool-type reactor, the amount of blue glow can be used to gauge the radioactivity of spent fuel rods. The radiation is used in particle physics experiments to help identify the nature of the particles being examined.
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Is nuclear waste hot?

High-level radioactive waste primarily is uranium fuel that has been used in a nuclear power reactor and is "spent," or no longer efficient in producing electricity. Spent fuel is thermally hot as well as highly radioactive and requires remote handling and shielding.
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How long do uranium rods last?

To make that nuclear reaction that makes that heat, those uranium pellets are the fuel. And just like any fuel, it gets used up eventually. Your 12-foot-long fuel rod full of those uranium pellet, lasts about six years in a reactor, until the fission process uses that uranium fuel up.
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What happens if you swim in Chernobyl?

For decades after the event it was widely reported that the three men swam through radioactive water in near darkness, miraculously located the valves even after their flashlight had died, escaped but were already showing signs of acute radiation syndrome (ARS) and sadly succumbed to radiation poisoning a short while ...
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Is the red forest still radioactive?

Because of the accident of April 1986, greenery growing around Chernobyl nuclear power plant was severely affected. The trees got so much radiation that they burned from inside and turned red. Even today, the area of the red forest remains the most contaminated and radioactive in the whole exclusion zone.
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How long is nuclear waste stored in pools?

After nuclear fuel has been in a reactor for five years, operators remove the bundles of nuclear fuel, called fuel assemblies and begin transitioning them for permanent storage. The fuel assemblies are then transferred to a 40-foot-deep cooling pool, where they will stay for about five years.
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What does Bill Gates say about nuclear energy?

And Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, has been one of America's most high-profile proponents of nuclear power to help the nation reach net-zero emissions by 2050. In his virtual appearance, Gates promoted Natrium as a safer, more flexible and less-expensive reactor than those cooled by water in conventional plants.
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What is 4th generation nuclear power?

What is Generation IV? Fourth generation nuclear power, or Generation IV, implies a system of reactors and nuclear fuel cycle facilities – fuel fabrication plants and reprocessing facilities – that together may manage the weaknesses often associated with nuclear power of today.
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What is the safest nuclear reactor?

Molten-salt reactors are considered to be relatively safe because the fuel is already dissolved in liquid and they operate at lower pressures than do conventional nuclear reactors, which reduces the risk of explosive meltdowns.
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Why can't you look at the elephant's foot?

The Elephant's Foot at Chernobyl. The image appears blurry because of the high radiation. 10 years later, the U.S. The Department of Energy's International Nuclear Safety Project collected hundreds of pictures of Chernobyl, obtained several images of the Elephant's Foot, which was estimated to weigh 2 tons.
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Will the elephant's foot explode?

Born of human error, continually generating copious heat, the Elephant's Foot is still melting into the base of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. If it hits ground water, it could trigger another catastrophic explosion or leach radioactive material into the water nearby residents drink.
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Is Chernobyl reactor 4 still burning?

Chernobyl reactor 4 is no longer burning. The reactor was originally covered after the disaster, but it resulted in a leak of nuclear waste and needed to be replaced.
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What does nuclear waste smell like?

"It smells like rotting corpses, or carcasses. It smells like death." All kinds of waste have been dumped in Georgia, Alabama and other Southern states in recent years, including toxic coal ash from power plants around the nation.
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Did the air glow at Chernobyl?

“With the fuel fully exposed, the air was irradiated, and the typical blue glow was lit.”
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Are radioactive things hot?

Some of it is so radioactive it gets hot. Used nuclear fuel contains lots of different radioactive elements and some of them decay very quickly. When they decay, they give off a lot of energy that can be absorbed by their surroundings, making them warm.
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